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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 :)

Building System For REDCine. Need advice

galexander said:
3. i would say do NOT buy at the last moment but to get your system about two months before you get a red. build-it or have it built, debug all of the software drivers, video codecs, whatever is needed. go shoot something and start editing, something anything and get going on the learning curve.

IMHO it is far easier to edit some footage of people standing around eating White Castle or Ted Drewes for free than wasting people's time and your money on a production, then start uploading, get feedback. you want to focus on the issues of the Red and not others.

i would suggest that when you get the Red you want to hit the ground running, so all you need do is unpack and shoot. to me, that is one very, expensive piece of gear to not have filming or being rented, whatever your business plan is.
Click to expand...

Jay this is a really important point. I didn't know your camera was coming in 3-4 weeks-ish - so, yeah, time to get movin ....

PS - galexander rocks!
 
Get a beer and talk GRAPHICS CARDS

Get a beer and talk GRAPHICS CARDS

Re-reading Jeff's posts on Graphics cards... Thinking the Nvidia 8800 model is the way to go.. But I need some education here.. Let me sit at my desk while you brainiacs go to the black board and explain this:

There was talk that the 8800 no longer supports OVERLAYS. Jeff says "GOOD!" and a lot of Cineform users said BUMMER GIVE ME BACK MY OLD CARD.

Help me understand "Overlays" By this do they mean that one video port on the older cards would drive a computer monitor, and turn the 2nd video port into some sort of live video out type situation?

If I am right, and that's what they mean, Would I still see Premiere's "preview monitor" on my computer screen? If the answer is YES to this question, then would I not prefer any type of "output video" out to be to an actual broadcast monitor or even an LCD powered by my CAPTURE card? (Currently leaning towards BlackMagic Designs Multi-Link Pro).

If I am in fact understanding this, then it is NOT important there is no overlay on the 8800.. If I have completely missed the boat here, then tell me what I did wrong before sending me to the corner.

Also, Jeff said the 8800 is the best for porn... That should make this a no-brainer right there.... :)

Jay

Ok, he didn't say that.. But I bet he thought it.
 
Mark, you are fast with the replies.. You must be sitting there reading these things like I am.. We seriously need to get a life dude..

Just kidding.. We're am having fun.. I love learning

Jay
 
Actually,

According to Jeff, REDCine does not make much use of the RAM onboard the Graphics Card.. That's more 3d application type stuff. So I am not going with the Ultra.

(For the first time I get to say this.. Hope I'm right)

"I" would recommend you reconsider the ultra as you are only paying for that additional RAM. The speed of the card GPU seems to be the same. Since you are building RENDER machines, you can save the additional $300 for something else (like a nice birthday present for me!!).

Check this out.. An 8800GTS that's OVERCLOCKED.. So there's more speed where you need it.. RAM is 512mb so that should be enough to drive the monitors just fine. Warning, they say you need a HONKING power supply for this puppy. Price is in the 350 range

http://www.beachaudio.com/Msi/Nx880...ogle&GTKW=nx8800gts-t2d512eoc&GCID=C12585x003

Jay
 
A less than 4% frequency increase shouldnt give that much more performance :-(
 
Jay A. Kelley said:
Check this out.. An 8800GTS that's OVERCLOCKED.. So there's more speed where you need it.. RAM is 512mb so that should be enough to drive the monitors just fine. Warning, they say you need a HONKING power supply for this puppy.
Jay
Click to expand...

Jay, last Monday I built a new PC from parts from Mwave.com for $900 US.

2.4gig quadcore, 4 gigs of ram, 500 gig system drive, Sony dual layer burner, case, etc. everything minus XP OS in that cost. My video card is an 8600 GT....

I'll do specific REDCINE tests this weekend and report back after I throw a couple 500 gig drives together as a RAID 0 data drive set for it. My gut feeling is that the 8600 will be as fast as anything else in the system test thread that Rob set up.

It's sure a nice render box and runs all my 3D and 2D apps very nicely.

Regards,
 
I gotta tell ya, I am having more fun with this thread than any other!! Jim I would love to see those results since you are somewhat close to what I am working on.

It's going to be in the $2,000 range, but if you look at it, it's an amazing piece of equipment that, if works, will scream.

Let me know.

Jay

Cooler Master CM Stacker 830 ATX Full-Tower Aluminum Case with Vented Side and 1000-Watt Power Supply

Intel Core 2 Quad Q6700 Kentsfield 2.66GHz 2 x 4MB L2 Cache LGA 775 95W Quad-Core Processor (Only 1)

GIGABYTE GA-X38-DQ6 intel x38 chipset ATX form factor

Kingston HyperX 2GB DDR2 SDRAM Memory Module -x2

Western Digital Caviar SE16 WD2500KS 250GB 7200 RPM 16MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive - OEM

Bfg Bfge88512gtse Geforce 8800 Gts OverClocked 512mb

So there you have it.. There will be a few more little things, but this is the main gist of it.

Let me know

Jay

Unless someone freaks out about something on this list, I will most likely start building this system later this week
 
Jay, if the motherboard you've chosen has one of those old PCI-X slots, you may want to consider one of these http://www.siliconimage.com/products/product.aspx?id=27 for about a hundred bucks. Pretty good throughput if you setup as a RAID 0 and its a way to utilize the parallel channel for SOMETHING.
 
Dell 30"?

Dell 30"?

Jay A. Kelley said:
Mark,

I am seriously looking at the DELL 30" monitor. stuff deleted...
Click to expand...

now my turn to ask questions :)

did you do a comparison with others? i was sort of looking at that samsung 305T. why did you pick the dell?
 
number6 said:
Jay, if the motherboard you've chosen has one of those old PCI-X slots, you may want to consider one of these http://www.siliconimage.com/products/product.aspx?id=27 for about a hundred bucks. Pretty good throughput if you setup as a RAID 0 and its a way to utilize the parallel channel for SOMETHING.
Click to expand...

the adaptec firewire isn't because of the PCI-X directly. the chipset on the board is stable and supports massive jumbo type frames. mine is set at 3.Gb/s with 1Gb buffer, and semi-jumbo frames of 4096 (your normal MTU/MTR of ADSL is 1400/1492)

so i push huge AV files to/from Lacie 2TB as fast as possible ~80Mb/s+ continously. i'm basically limited by the chipset that Lacie is using. the PCI-X built hardware is meant to be driven at 133Mhz bus, usual el-cheapo PCI hardware is built towards 66MHz bus.
 
galexander said:
now my turn to ask questions :)

did you do a comparison with others? i was sort of looking at that samsung 305T. why did you pick the dell?
Click to expand...

we use Dell and Apple.

the Dell is priced nice - it is VERY bright IMO. which is good and bad - depending on what you are trying to do with it.

I have not yet tested the Samsung - but I hear only good things - there are a few web comparisons out there like this one - which is HP/DELL/APPLE

http://www.techified.com/30-lcd-shootout-dell-vs-apple-vs-hp-part-1.htm
 
Jay A. Kelley said:
I gotta tell ya, I am having more fun with this thread than any other!! Jim I would love to see those results since you are somewhat close to what I am working on.

It's going to be in the $2,000 range, but if you look at it, it's an amazing piece of equipment that, if works, will scream.

Let me know.

Jay

Cooler Master CM Stacker 830 ATX Full-Tower Aluminum Case with Vented Side and 1000-Watt Power Supply

Intel Core 2 Quad Q6700 Kentsfield 2.66GHz 2 x 4MB L2 Cache LGA 775 95W Quad-Core Processor (Only 1)

GIGABYTE GA-X38-DQ6 intel x38 chipset ATX form factor

Kingston HyperX 2GB DDR2 SDRAM Memory Module -x2

Western Digital Caviar SE16 WD2500KS 250GB 7200 RPM 16MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive - OEM

Bfg Bfge88512gtse Geforce 8800 Gts OverClocked 512mb

So there you have it.. There will be a few more little things, but this is the main gist of it.

Let me know

Jay

Unless someone freaks out about something on this list, I will most likely start building this system later this week
Click to expand...

looks sweet, i would suggest one ever slight tweak, get a small, fast 7200rpm, sata, cheap hard drive for the OS and apps, and have your big, fast drive, raid or single, exclusively for capture and grinding data.

did you find a good deal on the video card? newegg had them backordered for ages. you might be able to save a few $$. i will probably getting something similar but the basic 512MB model and then tweak clocks, OC again :) why the BFG? and not XFX? or EVGA? price? available? specs?

what does your process flow look like now?
 
Jim Arthurs said:
stuff deleted...

I'll do specific REDCINE tests this weekend and report back after I throw a couple 500 gig drives together as a RAID 0 data drive set for it. My gut feeling is that the 8600 will be as fast as anything else in the system test thread that Rob set up.
stuff deleted...
Regards,
Click to expand...

can you benchmark your system with IOmeter?

http://www.iometer.org/doc/downloads.html

i'd like to see what kind of horsepower you have... heh heh heh..

post your settings and then i'll run on my system, no raid, just a 150Gb raptor... simulate as close as possible the filesize and chunksize that Red will use to be realistic. we're not trying to simulate a database.
 
There is a new Dell 30 inch display that has a lot more connectivity options than the one before also has the new DisplayPort

Dell 3008WFP UltraSharp
"The screen packs a 2560 x 1600 resolution, 370 nits of brightness, 8ms response times, a 3000:1 contrast ratio, and DVI-D (with HDCP), HDMI, S-Video, component and composite plugs"

Talking about graphic cards how would a FireGL v8600 work with apps like redcine and scratch or whatever being a high end card with a very powerful GPU, openGL 2.1, Direct x10, Shader model 4 stuff, im saying all this because there A FireGl v8600 is really a Ati 2900xt and there are modified drivers that turn it into such, similar to what the where doing in the 7 series Geforce> Quadro.
i would for sure be interested in trying this out.

http://ati.amd.com/products/fireglv8600/index.html

BTW: Ati 2900xt 1 GB 450€, Ati FireGL v8600 1900€
 
video card?

video card?

has anyone done the math with the video processing?

what processing to the codecs support? in-line/vector?

do the codecs and graphics drivers support DMA?

what is the relationship between how much work the GPU is doing to the CPU for the codecs?
 
apples and oranges

apples and oranges

this little equation might help

performance

for that dual quad Dell specs

(0.85*2)*4*(667/1333)*(1.6/3.2)*(0.95)*(16/64)*(256/512)*(4/4)=~0.2

for the dual quad Macs

(0.85*2)*4*(667/1333)*(3/3.2)*(0.95)*(32/64)*(512/512)*(4/4)=~1.5

for the Jay set up

(1)*4*(1300/1333)*(3/3.2)*(1)*(64/64)*(512/512)*(2/4)= ~1.8

my current system
(1)*4*(1300/1333)*(2.95/3.2)*(1)*(16/64)*(256/512)*4/4 = ~0.45 (the video card is the choke point)

mine with new video card
(1)*4*(1300/1333)*(2.95/3.2)*(1)*(64/64)*512/512*4/4 =~3.6

larger numbers are better, Jay setup should be equivalent to the mac, (i guessed at the mac video setup) and 9X faster than the Dell.

explanation of equation
(efficiency of shared memory*No of CPUs)*(No of Cores)
*(Slowest Clock/ Maximum Bus Reference)
*(CPU Clock/ CPU Clock Maximum Reference)
*Efficiency Factor of Ram
*(Video GPU Crunching/ Video Maximum Crunching Reference)
*(Video Ram/Video Ram Max)
*(System ram/System Ram Max)

Efficiency factor of ram is ECC vs. Non-ECC, it really depends of quality and is subjective but quality Non-ECC will ALWAYS be faster than ECC at the same frequency.

these don't include any codec issues and just 'ballpark' number to compare systems. the mac OS will have an edge with 64-bit and better memory management.

you could also multiply by a factor for the storage if you wanted to compare a raid versus non-raid.

cost

dell $2k
mac ~$5 ??
Jay build ~$2k
my build ~$1.2k +video($300)( i have previous parts from a ML150G3 i pillaged)

so now the finale, CVP, :) cost vs. performance

dell = $10k/Processing Unit
mac= $3.3k/Processing unit
Jay= $1.1k/Processing Unit
me(current)=$2.67k/Processing Unit
me(+video)=$0.42k/Processing Unit

now you know why Dell makes a shitload of money, as does Mac and why the people build their own.... :) and it's always good to reuse parts from previous rigs.
 
galexander said:
post your settings and then i'll run on my system, no raid, just a 150Gb raptor... simulate as close as possible the filesize and chunksize that Red will use to be realistic. we're not trying to simulate a database.
Click to expand...

I Downloaded Iometer and see that there's a lot of complexity in the choices and I have no reason to learn up on it all. Feel free to feed me a set of parameters that make sense from your end and I'll run them.

I use a nice utility I learned about from Axel years ago made by Matrox called filexfer. It can test your drives using very realistic video editing settings for file I/O, and can even read/write multiple streams at once.

For instance, the raw WD 500 gig SATA's I have on hand will do approx 84 MB/sec read/writes when empty when tested on a single video stream. Run two streams and the performance degrades down to the lower 30's. In comparison, my 4 WD 250 gig RAID 0 will still read/write over 200 MB/sec with only 9 gigs free space!

I've been doing some tests with REDCINE and my system. Using JJ's 4K 235 frame funny car clip for testing and reading from one nearly empty SATA and saving to another. My project settings are 1080p, the shot is scaled to fit height and an s-curve applied for grading. Processing output is set to "standard" and scaling is cubic, and the results when saving to a DPX stream is 2.4 frames/sec. Increasing the processing to "full", which then scales from the full 4K information, the result is 2.46 seconds per frame.

Yikes! I'm pretty sure I've got all REDCINE settings optimized, the window is the lowest quality setting and I'm careful not to rescale in output.
 
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