DRAGON 12 Core Mac Pro Transcode speed test vs MBP Retina.

[Bruce Allen]

Or you could do what I'm doing:

Don't drop vast sums of money on a system until the software you use has been fixed to run fast enough on it to make it worthwhile for your use-case.

For many people, that use-case where it makes sense may intersect with the time that Apple starts offering refurbs at a discount

Unless of course, you want to pay to be a beta tester. I actually beta-test lots of software, but that's mainly because it allows me to communicate with the developers. Since Apple doesn't really listen, that is less appealing to me.

Bruce Allen
www.boacinema.com

 

[Bob Gundu]

Unless you use FCPX Bruce. Its a great combo.

 

[Mark Toia]

My Machine: 8 Core, 64GB Ram, Dual D700

All test were done on RCX Build 22.3.31869, Mac 10.9.1

1 minute 6KHD footage at 9:1 compression transcoded to 1080 at full debayer quality took 1:42.
1 minute 6KHD footage at 9:1 compression transcoded to 1080 at 1/2 Premium quality took 1:43.
1 minute 6KHD footage at 9:1 compression transcoded to 1080 at 1/2 Good quality took 1:09.
1 minute 6KHD footage at 9:1 compression transcoded to 1080 at 1/4 quality took 35 sec. (from 6K this looks impressive. More than enough for dailies)

EDIT: I had to update these numbers a little. My timeline had a couple of clips that were 12:1 compression.All the clips in the figures above are now with 9:1 compression.

Ooooh Man... you guys are killing me... Such vastly different numbers to Big LU? .

Hi Mark. It seems you should't be too quick to cancel your order. I think more time is needed for everyone to sort all this out and optimize things. I somehow doubt Apple would bet the farm on a new radical design if it somehow ended up worse than their previous generation machines.

Fair call...

 

[Bob Gundu]

Ooooh Man... you guys are killing me... Such vastly different numbers to Big LU? .
.

Big Lu was using Beta build 23 which has OpenCL disabled.

 

[Jeff Kilgroe]

Makes a HUGE difference having that GPU acceleration! Stick with Build 22.1 or whatever precedes Build 23 for now. Build 23 isn't good for nVidia/CUDA at the moment because it's very much alpha-level debug code support for CUDA and is just all around slow. Jarred pointed that out too, we should start seeing improvements soon and we should see RED merging CUDA and OpenCL support into the same package.

My 8-core plays back 6K at 1/2 res in real-time, no problems. Transcodes almost that fast, the bottleneck seems to be the codec we're writing into, most of those codec plugins or support modules are not multithreaded and bog down a bit. This is the case on pretty much every other software as well. The choice of external storage can play a role too in how fast everything runs. Some of those USB3 drives out there are not that fast. Same with Thunderbolt drives that only have a drive or two inside of them. I keep my performance workloads reading and writing to the faster RAIDs like the Pegasus.

My numbers seem to reflect Bob's fairly well. I don't have a lot of Dragon clips to play with though. Just a handful I shot about a month back when I got to play with Dragon for a day. And then a few odd clips that others have given me. Hoping to get my cameras Dranonized soon plus the new OLPF.

A friend of mine just got his 12-core new Mac Pro today. Will try to do some comparative benchmarks once he gets it all set up. I'm seeing some other Red Users are getting 12-core systems and are starting to play with them. Maybe they can chime in too.

 

[BigLu]

Its very possible that I used a version thats not giving me fast transcodes
my first transcodes were done on an older version of RCX my guess is in the 21 build area and my new slower transcodes were in ver 23 latests beta

Thats my bad and im sorry guys I did all that work for nada.
But hey now we know to watch what versions we use.
Its also possible i didn't optimize the preferences to take advantage of using the Mac Pro tower.
I was un aware that you can make optimization changes in the preferences
that was pointed out to me by a friend tonight.

I no longer have the MacPro tower to do any more tests.

I apologize for not giving more useful results
Im sure you guys shall figure out much better tests in your results.

Luis

 

[Nils Ruinet]

Thanks for the tests, but they seem to be misleading as you used a beta build that is not compatible with OpenCL... Would you please try again in the previous build ? The difference should be huge !

 

[Nils Ruinet]

My Machine: 8 Core, 64GB Ram, Dual D700

All test were done on RCX Build 22.3.31869, Mac 10.9.1

1 minute 6KHD footage at 9:1 compression transcoded to 1080 at full debayer quality took 1:42.
1 minute 6KHD footage at 9:1 compression transcoded to 1080 at 1/2 Premium quality took 1:43.
1 minute 6KHD footage at 9:1 compression transcoded to 1080 at 1/2 Good quality took 1:09.
1 minute 6KHD footage at 9:1 compression transcoded to 1080 at 1/4 quality took 35 sec. (from 6K this looks impressive. More than enough for dailies)

EDIT: I had to update these numbers a little. My timeline had a couple of clips that were 12:1 compression.All the clips in the figures above are now with 9:1 compression.

Interesting to see that full and half premium take the same time to transcode... So I guess things should get even better in the future.