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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 :)

Does the Red Rocket Card speed up playback in Premiere Pro?

Will Keir

Will Keir

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Wondering if the purchase of a rocket is going to speed anything up in Ppro. I'm editing native 5k ws footage, looking to get at least 1/2 playback completely smooth. Hoping for Full.

Does a RR help with CC applications? Speed grade? Resolve?

Thanks for taking the time guys.
 
I used to get 1/4 res playback on a decked MBP and iMac without the RR. Using the Sonnet TB RR Enclosure, I get smooth at half, then it starts to become a little choppy (depending on format), at full.

RED CINE X screams at full with TB RR.

Davinci - I get 12-15 FPS render with sophisticated grades to full 5K export.

It's definitely worth the investment! Try and pick one up used!
 
Premiere Pro does use the RR card to decode/debayer clips in the timeline. The performance will depend on the exact resolution/aspect/frame rate used. I don't have the specs here in front of me, but I believe that for 5k WS footage, you can get 1/2 res playback with a single card.

Using a RR card also means that the CPU isn't used for the decode/debayer, meaning that there's more power for transitions, effects, etc. You can open up the task manager or activity monitor and see the processors running at 5% while 5k is playing back. :yesnod:

A little-known feature in Premiere Pro is that it'll actually take advantage of MULTIPLE RR cards if the motherboard can support it. So while a single RR card can't decode/debayer 5k at full res, 2 cards would be enough to do it. Expensive, I know, but it's there if you need it.
 
Karl Soule said:
I believe that for 5k WS footage, you can get 1/2 res playback with a single card.
Click to expand...

I'm already getting 1/2 res playback with my 8 Core Mac Pro. Only getting 1/8th without buffering in RCX. I might need to change my workflow. I'm looking to do a first light and full or 1/2 res, make the CCs, then edit.
 
Damn. Guess I can get close to 1/2 in Premiere, why get a RR then? I don't need fast trans-coding.

Steve Marshall said:
RR was built for 4k, it struggles with 5k.

1/2 is no problem though
Click to expand...
 
Will, the difference will be in freeing up your 8 cores to do other things, like non-accelerated effects. If you look at Activity monitor while decoding 1/2 res, I'm betting that all 8 cores are probably working pretty hard. With the RR, that drops to next-to-nothing. While a RR is not required, it generally helps the overall "feel" of the system. Does that make sense?
 
Hi, I stumbled on your post. I'm having some weird issues relating to the RR and Mercury playback. For some reason, i'm getting much better playback performance on 5K footage off CPU than Red Rocket.

I understand that the Red Rocket is programmed to only do a full demosaic, so I am not expecting good RT performance off 5K, perhaps 24fps is possible. But what I am seeing is that when the GPU kicks in together with the RR, PPro drops frames. The GPUs and the RR are running off a Cubix, so initially we thought it was a bus overload, so we ran it on a Resolve and added a bunch of nodes- some 8 CC nodes and a bit of blur- which should be GPU based processes. But surprisingly, performance did not dip as expected.

So if anyone has the RR and a CUDA accelerated card, or just about any card that supports Mercury, try this:

1) Drop RED footage (preferably 4 or 5K) into the timeline and play it back. (make sure "show dropped frame indicator" is on in the program monitor)

2) Add a cross dissolve, and play it back from just before the cross dissolve. And see if the machine drops frames upon hitting the cross dissolve (which should set off the GPU).


I'm trying to figure how this RR works in PPro. I may use it when doing the final rendering, since RR can get almost real time performance on 5K debayer, but first I want to make sure the GPU does not get in the way.
 
I can't wait to skip a couple of years of CPU upgrades when this talk of Red Rockets and 1/2 playback is a thing of the past.
I hate a jittery time line when editing.. so annoying when your trying to edit, grade effects all at once. Thats were good old PRORES saves the day.

5k full-res with effects and real time rendering (out of laptop) can't come quick enough for me.

Till then, 4k and 2k REDLOGFILM PRORES Im sticking with till that glorious day comes.

OOOh... and yes. RR speeds up PP... but you don't get full res playback.
 
I like PPro's performance on the whole without a RR. It's very cool to be able to do stuff without transcoding. Of course, if time permits, being able to transcode would be better, as PPro has some inconsistencies when trying to cut processor intensive formats- eg. No playback of R3D in source monitor when editing R3D native, only in program monitor off a 1080 timeline, lag on trimming operations with the 2 up trim overlay GUI because that window seems to ignore debayer/resolution settings.

But I'm hoping someone can shed some light on PPro's performance with RR and CUDA as I'm thinking of using it to speed up renders, and hopefully someday use it to do editing with a half debayer.
 
Gerard Tay said:
Hi, I stumbled on your post. I'm having some weird issues relating to the RR and Mercury playback. For some reason, i'm getting much better playback performance on 5K footage off CPU than Red Rocket.
Click to expand...


Same here
 
I am having a similar observation.

A gtx 570 2gb in the Mac Pro and patched premiere and after effects to support the card.
The overall experience with scaling and playback is amazing. 2k timeline from 5k original plays at full - equivalent to 5k half.
With the rr in the system however, it feels slower than without.

Transcoding in Rcx into prores 4444 2k/4k red log is still very accelerated, and the "toia" log workflow is very convenient for delivery, once one "pre-grades" the footage in Rcx to setup parameters like white balance and tint to maximise the information of the r3d.

Grading on davinci without rr, on 5k 3:1 is impossible, as davinci does not seem to be ble to use the cores efficiently, which makes me admire the mercury engine design.
 
Mark Toia said:
I can't wait to skip a couple of years of CPU upgrades when this talk of Red Rockets and 1/2 playback is a thing of the past.
I hate a jittery time line when editing.. so annoying when your trying to edit, grade effects all at once. Thats were good old PRORES saves the day.

5k full-res with effects and real time rendering (out of laptop) can't come quick enough for me.

Till then, 4k and 2k REDLOGFILM PRORES Im sticking with till that glorious day comes.

OOOh... and yes. RR speeds up PP... but you don't get full res playback.
Click to expand...

I think if you skip a few years forward the 15k source thats probably in use then will not play smoothly with the CPU's thats then available. Capture will from red one and forward be done in grater resolutions than editing I think. And edits seems to get more and more advanced so I do not really understand the stive for a raw offline edit workflow... As it does not work so well when having a 15 layer timeline with efx on each layer and such. I find it much better to do offline in proress LT most of times. "Grading" in premiere is just a disturbance of the actual editing. Think it's much better to focus on the edit, then do a r3d trim for grading, then forward the r3d's and graded dpx files for online / VFX's. Then we (the VFX guys can have the best of both worlds, graded source and matching raw files available preferably one folder for each clip holding r3d and DPX.... and a little XML that goes with it.

It's nuts, the above is so simple still I got clients that kind of fucks it all up on each and every project. getting the timecodes wrong, clips missing etc.
 
You got full resolution playback in a 2K timeline? That's pretty cool. I got half rez in a 1080 timeline (monitoring via sdi). And it was breathtaking to watch PPro play over dissolves and blurs.

Thing about the RR is that it always does a full debayer, and it struggles to do 5K, which is why performance on half debayer off CPU is noticeably better.

But did you try turning off the GPU with an RR? Eg. Drop it in a native resolution timeline and play it back? For some weird reason, the Performance here seems to tank when the GPU is activated. I'm wondering if PPro is able to work with 4K footage if simultaneous usage of both RR and GPU seems to impede performance.

I may use the RR for renders if it improves rendering speed in PPro.
 
Gerard Tay said:
Thing about the RR is that it always does a full debayer
Click to expand...

Have you got any documentation for this Gerard, as just don't understand how this can be the case when looking at it from a purely hardware perspective? I was under the impression that the RR would accelerate any Red debayer operation regardless of the size of the frame. Hence why a half res preview in RedCine-X is still accelerated with the Rocket - unless I am mistaken on this?

EDIT: Looks like I am mistaken on this!
 
Last edited:
I cant find the documentation for this, perhaps someone from RED can chime in. From my tests here, half is just as accelerated as full, and as quarter. They are all accelerated because a full debayer is done, then it scales the image down (either in the RR or GPU), so there is scaleable difference when doing a lower debayer. Not sure why RC-X seems to do 5K playback better than the other softwares. Voodoo?
 
Mark Toia said:
I can't wait to skip a couple of years of CPU upgrades when this talk of Red Rockets and 1/2 playback is a thing of the past.
I hate a jittery time line when editing.. so annoying when your trying to edit, grade effects all at once. Thats were good old PRORES saves the day.

5k full-res with effects and real time rendering (out of laptop) can't come quick enough for me.

Till then, 4k and 2k REDLOGFILM PRORES Im sticking with till that glorious day comes.

OOOh... and yes. RR speeds up PP... but you don't get full res playback.
Click to expand...


I cant wait until there are 5 or 6K RR cards and they work on almost anything and are about half the size.
 
Well, I am looking forward to the Intel PHI Cards, which said to be more than 60 core 1G Xeon CPU's power at least, which means you can almost double 2*2690's performance, and it do not need much programing work to be used, it is almost the same as using CPU's power. And more important, it is said to be under 2K$, and you can add as many as you wish when you still have 16X PCI3.0 slot (most main board has three after the display card).

What I am curious about is AMD's 7970 has very powerful Double Float capability, much much more than any Quadros, which is the key for R3D decompression, why no software use that?
 
Same question as Timur above... Mr Toia, what's your workflow as that sounds the way to go until I can improve my system?

SK
 
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