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  • Hey all, just changed over the backend after 15 years I figured time to give it a bit of an update, its probably gonna be a bit weird for most of you and i am sure there is a few bugs to work out but it should kinda work the same as before... hopefully :)

Apple Post production environment for Red

J

Jack Wester

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What would be the best Apple only configuration for my Red camera and Final Cut Pro?

Quad core?
What disk solution?
Xserve?
What Raid solution?
Raid 0, 3, 5, 30 or 50?

How many Raid systems. One or two? How many monitors? Which monitors?

Thanks
Jack
 
This really depends on the size and scope of your projects, the amount of footage you plan on shooting per project, etc.

If all you do is short, 30 second spots, you could get away with something very small, like a RAID 1 for backup, and an internal 3 disk RAID 0 in a mac pro for editing. Bigger projects need bigger solutions, just like before.
 
flameop said:
To wide a question.. can you be more specific on what you want to achieve?

S
Click to expand...
Amateur moviemaking in 4K+ for hours and hours and with little patience for having to wait for a computer or to worry about disk space. As I'm an amateur and want to learn by experimenting. I would of course love to have things render in realtime, but as I have no prior experience I don't know if that is realistic. As I understand it, REDCODE consumes around 27 MB per second and should be able to work in the REDCODE codec till I'm done editing? Or would I have to work in a lower res to get good performance and then render things when I'm done using FCP offline editing feature?
 
Jay A. Kelley said:
you're NOT going to edit in 4k for hours and hours dude...
Click to expand...
Well "dude", I would sure like to. My first computer had 2K of total memory (RAM) and a tape recorder to save those 2K with. Thats 0.002 MB or 0.000002 GB. To save those 2K took a minute. Roughly that was 3 million times slower than what I could do today.

So, unless I lose interest or die within the next few years, I will be editing 4K for hours and hours. My (humble) question was, what to I need to do it today. And if I can't, or if I can but it would be to slow, I would like to know what to expect today. The workflow I have understud from reading this forum would be to capture REDCODE on the cameras storage. Load it to a Raid system. Process it with REDCINE if needed and outputting to REDCODE or keeping the original REDCODE to edit the footage in FCP.

I'm thinking of getting a Mac Pro with two quad core processors and a Raid 5 system of 7 or 10 TB. Would this be enough to work with 4K or would it be painfulll?
 
Jack Wester said:
I'm thinking of getting a Mac Pro with two quad core processors and a Raid 5 system of 7 or 10 TB. Would this be enough to work with 4K or would it be painfulll?
Click to expand...

Not trying to be pedantic here, but define "work with 4K."

Are you talking strictly about the REDCODE files, or are you talking about 4K resolution with true RGB?

Remember that when working with FCP and native REDCODE, you are working with the 4K original files, but are only extracting the 1K from the Wavelet. So yes, you ARE editing 4K, but viewing at 1K.

If you want to work with 4K at 4K and viewing at 4K and want realtime, that's a COMPLETELY different animal.

Lucas
-----
ASSIMILATE, Inc.
LA, CA, USA
 
luki said:
Not trying to be pedantic here, but define "work with 4K."

Are you talking strictly about the REDCODE files, or are you talking about 4K resolution with true RGB?

Remember that when working with FCP and native REDCODE, you are working with the 4K original files, but are only extracting the 1K from the Wavelet. So yes, you ARE editing 4K, but viewing at 1K.

If you want to work with 4K at 4K and viewing at 4K and want realtime, that's a COMPLETELY different animal.

Lucas
-----
ASSIMILATE, Inc.
LA, CA, USA
Click to expand...
I would not mind viewing at 1K. If REDCODE and FCP can let me work with the material and cheat by extracting 1K from the same source in order to give me immediate feedback and if it can transparently hide or pospone the generation of 4K as a batch operation without me having to worry about it thats fine. What I don't want is to have my work go slower than it would if I was working in a very low resolution at low compression. But for realtime viewing while editing, I guess that 1K would be more than acceptable.
 
luki said:
If you want to work with 4K at 4K and viewing at 4K and want realtime, that's a COMPLETELY different animal.

Lucas
Click to expand...

A very expensive, wild and unpredictable animal.
 
Jack Wester said:
I would not mind viewing at 1K. If REDCODE and FCP can let me work with the material and cheat by extracting 1K from the same source in order to give me immediate feedback and if it can transparently hide or pospone the generation of 4K as a batch operation without me having to worry about it thats fine. What I don't want is to have my work go slower than it would if I was working in a very low resolution at low compression. But for realtime viewing while editing, I guess that 1K would be more than acceptable.
Click to expand...
So what I mean with working with 4K would be the illusion of working with 4K. That means capturing 4K. Keeping track of a single set of files and outputting 4K. If FCP or REDCODE "cheats" while I'm working and serving my monitor 1K it's okay as long as the rendering will be done without me putting a lot of work into it when I'm done.

Does my question make more sense? If it's stupid, you'll have to excuse me, I have a lot of catching up to do.
 
1k REDCode RAW will be fed at a datarate of about 6MBs. So... one hard drive is sufficient, Three in a RAID 5 is splendid and Five is plenty.

An internal hardware SATA RAID card would be fine (A few $100).

I would pick up 3 750GB 7200k RPM drives which can be had for about $200 each.

That'll give you 1.5 TB of redundant storage and would be approximately 15 hours of footage.

Unless you're working in a collaborative studio environment or need uncompressed 4k RGB plates Xserve is going to be overkill.

Quad core should be fine. If you want more debayering power then a better use of your resources would be a render farm of old windows boxes.
 
Jack Wester said:
So what I mean with working with 4K would be the illusion of working with 4K. That means capturing 4K. Keeping track of a single set of files and outputting 4K. If FCP or REDCODE "cheats" while I'm working and serving my monitor 1K it's okay as long as the rendering will be done without me putting a lot of work into it when I'm done.

Does my question make more sense? If it's stupid, you'll have to excuse me, I have a lot of catching up to do.
Click to expand...

Your question makes perfect sense. But let's eliminate the word "cheating." FCP (and REDCINE and SCRATCH) are doing some incredible stuff based on the REDCODE technology. Think about it.. debayer, demosaic and wavelet extraction from 4K to 1K... in realtime. Pretty cool stuff. I understand you weren't making a serious point.:tongue: But I think that what REDCODE is doing is far from cheating... it is enabling.

However, if you want to render true 4K, that's going to have to be a system other than FCP. FCP will do 1K and 2K, but not 4K.

And as far as what system you should get - I don't know. I'm sure the RED team will have specifics on that. But a pretty good rule with computers is - more processors, more RAM, faster storage = better. :)

Lucas
-----
ASSIMILATE, Inc.
LA, CA, USA.
 
For amateur filmmaking, I wouldn't worry about 4K especially when you'd have no way of showing it. It's theoretically possible with digital projection but there's no affordable method for creating a 4K DCI-compliant package. I'd stick to 1920x1080 HD resolution... it's practical and you can deliver in that format. Going with a higher resolution means longer renders, which means you get less time spent polishing your work (and hence a lower-quality product).
 
I thought wavelets had header data to distinguish the multiple 'layers' and avoid having to cache the entire frame to local memory.

That's unfortunate to hear that's not the case.
 
Is this a joke?

RED has created a monster.

"I bought a Red and I want to edit and grade hours of 4K+ on my home PC... where's my firewire cable?"

im.thatoneguy said:
A very expensive, wild and unpredictable animal.
Click to expand...

Yeah, we're busy doing just that. $1.5 million U.S. and counting.
 
4K Hub said:
Is this a joke?

RED has created a monster.

"I bought a Red and I want to edit and grade hours of 4K+ on my home PC... where's my firewire cable?"



Yeah, we're busy doing just that. $1.5 million U.S. and counting.
Click to expand...
In 1970 a GB of RAM was $1600 000. Processing power was counted in fractions of megaherthz, not gigahertz. Maybe not this year, but I promise you, we noobs will be editing 4K. At that point, the professional crowd will probably be editing 8K in 3D stereo.

But when it comes to resolution, film is going the same direction as music. Once you've reached a certain bitrate, there is not much point going forward. This is my we dont care about music at 27 MB/sec. It doesn't sound much better than 0.2 MB/sec.

This is not to say that there won't be a big difference between noob stuff and professional stuff. There's ofcourse the obvious difference with talent, headcount, experience etc. But there's also the special effects stuff such as 3D toolkits, rendering etc. That stuff is always going to be an order of magnitude better if you can afford the high end tools.

Ericsson (a Swedish manufacturer of mobile phones) bought there first email system (for internal use) in the seventees for around $15 MUSD. They wouldn't believe that it would be an everymans tool for less than a few dollars.

Pure resolution for everybody is around the corner.
 
It would be stupid to argue with you because you're right. That is the way of technology, it's just not quite there today.

But, who knows where things will be in two years time. We could see 1400MB/sec (what you'll need for one stream of real time uncompressed 4K) coming out of a single 5TB 2.5" HDD in a laptop with a 4K display. Or more likely, we'll see something like Redcode at 27MB/sec on storage that is decompressed on the fly for grading and playback from the timeline and recompressed on the fly at the output back to disk.

The high price premium comes with buying into being able to offer such services before it is in the mainstream domain, and what you buy is the ability to make money by doing it now, and not in a few years time.

But, this very point will make it difficult for home Red users to really have an affordable (and usable) 4K post pipeline at home now. I know that there is another thread about a poor mans 4K conform, and sure it can be done on anyone's home PC at far less than real-time with the right software and storage capacity regardless of bandwidth, but is that really useable in the end?

I wouldn't trust only being able to view a 1K proxy (not even a uncompressed 1K proxy), and then conform to 4K totally blind, only being able to view the odd single frames and deliver a few TB of DPX files to a post facility for printing. It's not worth the cost of the printing to find there's something wrong that could only have been picked up with a real time uncompressed workflow at least being able to playback at 2K, and for that, you're talking about a system that's gonna cost a fair chunk. Baselight's aren't cheap and although Scratch represents far more value for money, the required storage subsytem even for real time uncompressed 2K playback is what's going to kill a home user's budget, not to mention monitoring. For 2K we're going for Christie's CP2000X digital cinema projector, and that'll set you back $85,000.

So, I agree with you Jack, but I have doubts as to the practicality of it as a viable solution.

I don't know, maybe I am wrong.
 
I am working - today - at a prospect site on an evaluation of a high-resolution stereo system that is pushing about 1.4GB/s sustained read.

Not counting the SCRATCH license - this is with about US$100K list/retail worth of kit.

Two years ago, getting this throughput would have been about US$500K.

Moore is your friend.

Lucas
------
ASSIMILATE, Inc.
LA, CA, USA
 
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