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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 :)

Custom Old Mac Pro Build vs New 2013+ Mac Pro

Scot Yount said:
Like I said, my machine doesn't struggle at all. Not a blip. Lots of talk here by people who don't own one. It cost a lot. Yes it did. But so does a RED Dragon. I would like to see some metrics on Cinema 4D renders. Nothing in my workflow, Premier, AE, FCPX, RCX or Resolve comes close to requiring the horsepower of C4D. But that's just me. Adobe of course is in bed with Nvidia and that means my D700s get ignored by AE.
Click to expand...

Well, good for you...
i'm happy that you're one of the few, that haven't encountered problems rendering from Resolve...
Regardless, i prefer to occasionally spend a few hundred dollars upgrading my GPU or CPUs, instead of needing to keep buying an overpriced, underpowered and outdated trashcan computers.
 
jake blackstone said:
Well, good for you.. instead of needing to keep buying an overpriced, underpowered and outdated trashcan computers.
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I really don't understand the ire. Why do you have to insult my machine? You do great work, as I have told you. Really. My machine works for me in my workflow, especially with C4D and I like it. Why does that necessitate you calling it names? It is hardly underpowered.
 
Scot Yount said:
I really don't understand the ire. Why do you have to insult my machine? You do great work, as I have told you. Really. My machine works for me in my workflow, especially with C4D and I like it. Why does that necessitate you calling it names? It is hardly underpowered.
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Well, I though I heard everything, but insulting a computer is a new one for me:)
People are keep asking about choosing a proper Mac to be used in a production settings and you keep talking about your computer with C4D. I made my choice two years ago and I'm still happy with my choice (http://www.reduser.net/forum/showth...-Mac-Pro-with-12-processors-for-less-than-800) while you made yours. That's it...
Going forward with 4k and HDR on a horizon, i may need to jump to Windows (no Prores render), Linux (no panel for less, than $30K) or Hackintosh (more pain). Regardless, it will not be a trashcan...
 
jake blackstone said:
Well, I though I heard everything, but insulting a computer is a new one for me:)
People are keep asking about choosing a proper Mac to be used in a production settings and you keep talking about your computer with C4D. I made my choice two years ago and I'm still happy with my choice (http://www.reduser.net/forum/showth...-Mac-Pro-with-12-processors-for-less-than-800) while you made yours. That's it...
Going forward with 4k and HDR on a horizon, i may need to jump to Windows (no Prores render), Linux (no panel for less, than $30K) or Hackintosh (more pain). Regardless, it will not be a trashcan...
Click to expand...


Jake, I am not sure how you think your comments could be taken as anything but insulting. Whether to a computer or a person who chose that piece of equipment. "overpriced, underpowered and outdated trashcan computers" pretty much speaks for itself. That's cool. You win.
 
Blair S. Paulsen said:
AFAIK, the issue is driving a display from a GPU connected via ThunderBolt. External GPU compute power can be accessed, though the bomber cards (Titans, etc) may be bottlenecked by the I/O.

Cheers - #19
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Def news to me but then its been a two years since I last checked.

We pretty well put our ROCKET cards in the dust bin since the nMPs arrived.

For reasons due to incompatibility and the fact that it wasn't helping during playback.

We have a slew of old Mac Pro's with ROCKETs that do the grunt exports.
 
jake blackstone said:
Well, I though I heard everything, but insulting a computer is a new one for me:)
People are keep asking about choosing a proper Mac to be used in a production settings and you keep talking about your computer with C4D. I made my choice two years ago and I'm still happy with my choice (http://www.reduser.net/forum/showth...-Mac-Pro-with-12-processors-for-less-than-800) while you made yours. That's it...
Going forward with 4k and HDR on a horizon, i may need to jump to Windows (no Prores render), Linux (no panel for less, than $30K) or Hackintosh (more pain). Regardless, it will not be a trashcan...
Click to expand...

Actually there are 3rd Party applications for Pro Res rendering/encoding on Windows.
 
With the old MacPros, isn't the bottleneck that you're stuck with usb2.0 and generally slow connectors? (even if you have a 12-core system) The motherboard is too old?
 
Jeffery Anderson said:
With the old MacPros, isn't the bottleneck that you're stuck with usb2.0 and generally slow connectors? (even if you have a 12-core system) The motherboard is too old?
Click to expand...
Get yourself a USB 3 card or whatever else you want- Fiber, SATA, SAS, whatever. Very inexpensive PCI cards and plentiful of choices. Problem solved.
With Trashcan on the other hand, more external devices mean more tax on the same TB bus, need for expensive TB enclosures and yes, more rat nest mess. And with that solution there goes your portability and compactness...
 
Jeffery Anderson said:
With the old MacPros, isn't the bottleneck that you're stuck with usb2.0 and generally slow connectors? (even if you have a 12-core system) The motherboard is too old?
Click to expand...

There are some bottlenecks in the cMP towers for sure, SATA2 on the internal drive bays and slow RAM clocks for example, but decent HBAs (Host Bus Adapters) can support very fast I/O. Biggest drawbacks to me are the lack of ThunderBolt connectivity and size/power requirements/heat. Really looking forward to the second gen trashcan, could be the droid I'm looking for...

Cheers - #19
 
Eric Bowen said:
So you export the media out of Resolve in another lossless form and encode over to Pro Res. How is that abnormal?
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It doesn't work with the roundtrip. Besides, when you have a job with hundreds of cuts, who wants to spend hours dealing with the transcoding?
And the final point, all these 3rd party solutions use ffmpg for prores encoding, which creates prores, that will not pass a proper QC. Non Apple Prores is very easy to see upon closer file inspection.
 
Anybody get 10 bit color working with latest Mac OS?
Is it supported on trashcan? Can anyone verify? With external display port monitor?
Would be great if OSX finally supports 10 bit color!!!
 
Jeffery Anderson said:
With the old MacPros, isn't the bottleneck that you're stuck with usb2.0 and generally slow connectors? (even if you have a 12-core system) The motherboard is too old?
Click to expand...

You can easily add USB3 and ESATA cards. Not an issue!
 
jake blackstone said:
It doesn't work with the roundtrip. Besides, when you have a job with hundreds of cuts, who wants to spend hours dealing with the transcoding?
And the final point, all these 3rd party solutions use ffmpg for prores encoding, which creates prores, that will not pass a proper QC. Non Apple Prores is very easy to see upon closer file inspection.
Click to expand...

It does work as a round trip. Pro Res and DNxHR/DNxHD are DCT codecs ie the same family with similar compression. FFMPG has nothing to do with Quality. The compression ratio's ie algorithms decide quality. You can export DNxHR and convert to Pro Res without changing the quality at all and the bit rate/compression level of the FFMPG decides the quality. The FFMPG has nothing to do with it. Exporting out a timeline from Davinci doesn't require converting the clips individually. You can convert the entire timeline and bring back in to another editor as needed. If Quality is the goal then you are not editing in the Pro Res anyway. That would be the deliverable which means converting is once again a non issue since that has to be done at the final master anyway.
 
Eric Bowen said:
It does work as a round trip. Pro Res and DNxHR/DNxHD are DCT codecs ie the same family with similar compression. FFMPG has nothing to do with Quality. The compression ratio's ie algorithms decide quality. You can export DNxHR and convert to Pro Res without changing the quality at all and the bit rate/compression level of the FFMPG decides the quality. The FFMPG has nothing to do with it. Exporting out a timeline from Davinci doesn't require converting the clips individually. You can convert the entire timeline and bring back in to another editor as needed. If Quality is the goal then you are not editing in the Pro Res anyway. That would be the deliverable which means converting is once again a non issue since that has to be done at the final master anyway.
Click to expand...

You go do that...
On the other hand, I prefer to use proper tools, maintaining the highest quality and without resorting to time consuming Rube Goldberg contraptions, that eventually will get rejected by the QC...
 
Urban myth? or Wicked gotcha?

Urban myth? or Wicked gotcha?

What shows up in a difference matte? Are there perhaps higher quality variants specified in the proprietary encoder, that are not part of the standard "published" spec that FFMPEG is based on? How specific are the QC fail reports folks have seen? Perhaps the ProRes scheme takes advantage of proprietary filters/scalers/graphics libraries/whatever that exist in OS X or, maybe the Mac version of some QuickTime components, that aren't available as system resources on the Windows side???

Cheers - #19
 
Many network shows QC will reject non-Apple Prores files outright. Apple owns the Prores IP and they are not too crazy about someone reverse engineering it. Remember Mirazon? For some reason they ended up being closed down. Hm...
FilmLight learned the pitfalls of trying to work around Apple too. First they had to construct an elaborate network with MacPro used for Prores render on Baselight Linux. It was called a Kompressor. It is actually still available, but you need to use a network and a second computer. Then they adapted ffmpg and when that didn't quite worked out, they finally got an officially approved Apple Prores.
And the funny thing is, now ALL color grading software- Lustre- Baselight, Nucoda, Scratch, Pablo, Mistika can all write an official Apple Prores an all platforms including Windows. All, but one:)
 
FFMPEG does as good a job at encoding ProRes as anyone else. The IP is available and it's not a big deal to implement ProRes in various types of encoder or recording products. Relatively easy and inexpensive to license for that use. However, when it comes to use as a software codec on Windows or dedicated within PC applications, the licensing isn't as easy to get. For some time it wasn't available, however now it is. ...And yet BMD and Adobe seem to be pretending that a huge portion of the industry doesn't want this.

Outputting in DNx and then converting to ProRes is a problem. It still is a transcoding process and while loss is minimal, we still incur further loss and artifacting.
 
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