building an on set mobile dailies station using beta redcine and no rockets

[Brian Merlen]

Dear Jeff, and other helpful posters, how viable is it for us to now use GPUs (and no rockets) for doing first lights on set and encoding out dailies and such in the kinds of time frames to still cycle cards while doing encodes? I was looking at what Rob posted regarding Dragon and the Titan GPU (with the new beta redcine) and for my needs I was thinking maybe I could kit something out without a rocket (rocket x is out of my budgetary needs)


Was looking at this

http://dragon-fire-systems.com


So far I have steered clear of building my own cart, until now potentially. I have been fortunate enough to work at places that provide me said carts. However, things are slow and being that my core 2 duo is effectively useless for turning cards around, much less encodes, I think it may be time for me to jump in. Especially now that operating without a Rocket seems to be more potentially viable via GPU encoding in the new beta of Redcine.:w00t:

So currently I am OSX based but considering switching to the above wintel system. Long term I'd love to see if they can put a color accurate monitor into my case instead of the viewsonic say a cheapo flanders or sony model. but financially again not something i can do at this time, just a long term desire.

So my basic point is, with a titan (or cheaper gpu) and relatively cheap i7 motherboard with ssd for os/apps and an internal raid of optical hdds for media, can I really get fairly good performance relative to using a laptop solution (still no rocket)? Cuz I could stay OSX and buy a Retina or a Mac Pro, but being that PCs have a gpu/expandability option I can leverage with the new Redcine I just wonder if its financially and performance wise a good time to consider making the switch. Not trying to turn this into a PC vs Mac debate, I am just wondering workflow options and purchases based around our new GPU feature and how it can maybe get me into a kit I can afford to finally own...

 

[Shiblon Wixom]

I'm finishing a portable compact (7" x 15" x 18") rack-mount case, dual boot Z87 4770K (3.9 GHz) quad-core system with a GTX 770. Transcoding 5kHD with only the GPU runs around 12-13 fps at full debayer. The system CPU's are the limitation on transcoding, the GTX 770 still has some headroom left. If you want to transcode faster then you'll need more CPU's and a GTX 780 or Titan. With the red rocket installed, transcode speeds are around 25-28 fps. For a single camera shoot, 12-13 fps is sufficient. Even my macbook pro retina will transcode 5kHD at 5-6 fps with the new GPU support.

If you're going with a quad-core, stick with the GTX 760 or 770. If you're going with a six or eight core then go with the GTX 780 or Titan.

As far as doing an offline 1lite, any monitor with an accurate sRGB mode will be sufficient, such as the PB or PA Asus monitors or something equivalent.

As far as backing up Red media while transcoding, you need an HBA raid controller and preferably SAS drive raid, or you need to make sure the transcodes and backups occur on different drives, to avoid I/O bottlenecks.

There are also Z87 motherboards available with thunderbolt now, and available with thunderbolt 2 shortly. Price will be your limiting factor, put together a budget and pick components accordingly.

I use a Red Rocket for faster than real time transcodes to ProRes 4444 1080p (RedLogFilm), I primarily built this system for Resolve work, so a 9-10 node color correction to ProRes 4444 or 422HQ renders around 40-50 fps, which is about twice the speed my macbook pro retina can handle.

 

[Steve Sherrick]

In my opinion, if you are offering transcode services on set or even near set (production office) you need to do it real time or better. Therefore, you need to match the hardware that can perform at that level. For projects that don't have the time pressure, then a CPU/GPU based system may be fine if it's working less than real time. As with everything, there will be exceptions but I've had most success when working on systems that spit out transcodes quickly.

 

[Marc Wielage]

Another possible option are the ones from DIT Station:

http://www.ditstation.com/rogue4/


Light Iron also has their Lily and Outpost stations, which are very classy:

http://www.lightiron.com/products