Dragon 6k R3D RCX Full Rez... What Station you'r doing this with?

[Andrew Benz]

I am actually worried about making this a sticky as there will be commercial ramifications that follow this, but I'll consult with the "real adult" mods.

I will say that myself, Ketch, and two other Redusers I know of have spoken to "certain entities" about building similar systems. You will see a couple of unique products likely in the range of $4-$16k depending on just how beefy your needs are.

I am in the Process of talking to a Major Company as well including a Group Buy... No promises though, but I am also working on a serious solution.

 

[Phil Holland]

Seems there are several of us with the same general goals. I spoke to a few companies over the last couple months. Two of which who want to make a system. I'm not looking to do a group buy in this case. I'm looking to design a system that's ideal for a "certain type of fella or lady". Likely scale-able via configuration and price. I'll push harder next week to find out if we can get this done soon as that somewhat mirrors my desires.

I have no real interest in it rather than making a decent bit of kit for me to buy and use. I did lay out specifications, performance needs, and case designs though. Hopefully this journey benefits others.

If none of this works exactly the way as intended I'm just going to build another custom system and manufacture the case myself.

 

[Zeb B]

http://devilanddemon.com/

 

[Andrew Benz]

Seems there are several of us with the same general goals. I spoke to a few companies over the last couple months. Two of which who want to make a system. I'm not looking to do a group buy in this case. I'm looking to design a system that's ideal for a "certain type of fella or lady". Likely scale-able via configuration and price. I'll push harder next week to find out if we can get this done soon as that somewhat mirrors my desires.

I have no real interest in it rather than making a decent bit of kit for me to buy and use. I did lay out specifications, performance needs, and case designs though. Hopefully this journey benefits others.

If none of this works exactly the way as intended I'm just going to build another custom system and manufacture the case myself.

This is pretty much how I feel Phil... We should compare notes soon.

 

[luigivaltulini]

I will be with hpz 820 and 2 ati 7990 in cyclone and i go in real time with 6k FRagon in Davinci Resolve file without the need for redrocket red-x, and same in Premeire cc.
In fact even I am thinking of selling the REDROCKET-x.

if I had to choose now:

http://www.supermicro.com/products/system/4U/7047/SYS-7047GR-TPRF-FM409.cfm
core with 2x8 or 2x6 core xeon + 128gb all in windows 7 64 .

+ 2 new AMD 295x + or old AMD 7990.
+ 8 internal SAS disk raid or external.


If all goes well the cost of this pc could be somewhere between the 5000 dollar.

 

[Ketch Rossi]

http://devilanddemon.com/

Yeahp, this are the guys I am talking and doing this tests with and setting up different Station configurations in order to come up with the most 4 ideal low end and high end stations trying to fit both ends of production needs.

But yes I agree that this of roost of us are personal decision based on what we need for our personal or private projects and some small to medium size Paid projects.

And as I said for me, what does take priority currently is the Full Rez 6k playback for Still Pulling, with Rendering times passing on to second place... For now... Good thing is that on the larger stations scalability on going faster and faster is possible just by adding additional cards.

 

[Christopher Barrett]

I figured that's what you had in mind when you mentioned the w9100's. Those units look bad ass and they're good-looking too. I was strongly considering them but found their CPU options a little weird. If you want the fastest processors at 16 cores, they only offer AMD... I should have given them a call before deciding.

My ProMax One+ Hero arrives Monday. Can someone send me Dragon footage to test it with???

Configuration:
(2) Intel E5-287W v2 Xeon 3.40GHz (16 cores)
128 GB 1866MHz RAM
(2) GTX 780 Ti
(4) 2.5" Bays for multiple Boot Drives
(8) 3.5" Bays for internal RAID
(4) Dbl Wide PCI 3.0 x16 Slots
(3) Single wide PCI Slots


This was at just under 12 grand... which priced comparable with Maingear and Boxx

I'll be adding my DeckLink Card, Raid Card and OWC Accelsior PCI SSD to this and maybe my Rocket???

 

[Bill Sepaniak]

Yeahp, this are the guys I am talking and doing this tests with and setting up different Station configurations in order to come up with the most 4 ideal low end and high end stations trying to fit both ends of production needs.

But yes I agree that this of roost of us are personal decision based on what we need for our personal or private projects and some small to medium size Paid projects.

And as I said for me, what does take priority currently is the Full Rez 6k playback for Still Pulling, with Rendering times passing on to second place... For now... Good thing is that on the larger stations scalability on going faster and faster is possible just by adding additional cards.

Ted (formerly from RED) and a good friend of mine are both involved with them (Devil and Demon). They have some "pretty heavy-hitters" on their team who have a solid knowledge of the post and VFX industries. While the boys at Cupertino and at HP might not lose to much sleep over them, these folks are pretty dialed-in to our needs. It will be interesting to see how they do.

________________________________
Scarlet X # 1859 “Bettie Page”
“… preparing to ‘whip’ the competition …”

Leitaxed Zeiss Lenses:

CY 21/2.8
ZF 28/2.0
CY 35-70/3.4
CY 50/1.4
ZF100/2.0
CY135/2.8

Nikon Lenses:
G 14-24/2.8
G 24-70/2.8
D 80-200/2.8

Tokina Lenses:

11-16/2.8

 

[Ketch Rossi]

...


This guys surely do have some stupidly FAST systems in there!!

This is what we used:

Demon DMPi
3.4GHz Processor
16Total Cores (32HT)
64GB 1866 RAM Liquid Cooled
FirePro w8000 GPU
Dual 240GB SSD RAID 0

Customized wit Dual AMD FirePro w9100 Cards

 

[Jeff Kilgroe]

Suggest we keep this exercise aimed at solutions that do not use an RR-X card.

Once video out is enabled and the firmware is more mature, RR-X should support real time playback of any R3D file you throw at it, on any decent host. Power, cooling, a late model mobo, fast storage, etc but nothing exotic.

I agree with that. The RR-X changes the dynamic a lot and is still an unknown in many ways. Best to know what you have and then if you add a RR-X, it frees up all your CPUs/GPUs to not deal with R3D decoding.

If Jeff or any of the other hard cores jump in on this, I'd love a primer on the impact of single precision vs double precision architecture for motion imaging applications. Had some interesting discussions at NAB with some vendors noting that gaming GPUs were a false economy and that "proper" graphics boards were worth the substantially higher prices. BS?

This is a difficult one to tackle and it really comes down to software support. If we look at DaVinci Resolve, it only uses single-precision calculations, so we're not gaining anything by moving to the more expensive Quadro or specialty cards that offer multi-point precision. OTOH, if you do run any apps that utilize higher precision -- you see this a lot more with CAD/CASE tools, VFX software, etc.. -- then you will definitely want to step up. Around here, the big ones are Adobe CC, Resolve, FCPX, Scratch, etc.. Of those, I believe Scratch is the only one supporting beyond single precision although, I'm not sure on that, I haven't looked into Scratch in a while. I would want a Quadro for doing particles and fluids, precision modeling and other design tasks of that nature.


As for the subject at hand, I'll have some input regarding systems here shortly. I'm awaiting my Dragon-upgraded EPIC-M and should have it sometime this week. I don't have much of a selection of Dragon clips until it arrives and most of what I do have were test shots that came with the old OLPF and older firmware from back in December. What I can report on those is that an 8-core new Mac Pro with D700 GPUs will play back 6KFF 15:1 compressed file to a 4K monitor no problem. The catch is, you have to let it spool-up a bit and pre-cache to RAM. Selecting or de-selecting the second GPU seems to make no difference to performance in RC-X, so I have to believe that RED still has not enabled multi-GPU processing. Same on my other systems with more than one GPU, PC or Mac. RC-X is still not really multi-threaded, my dual Xeon workstations don't fare any better than the new trashcan Mac on this test. And I think we're going to see a lot of that until better software optimization and expansion to take advantage of multiple GPUs kicks in.

As of right now, my best-performing system in RC-X is a 6-core i7 3960X over clocked to 4.5GHz with 64GB 2400MHz OC'd RAM and a GTX Titan SuperClocked GPU. Best system in Premiere is my 16-core HP Z820, also with Titan SC GPU. Best system in Resolve is my 20-core Xeon build with dual Titan GPUs. Of the systems mentioned here, the 20-core is the weakest performer in RC-X.

So that's a real consideration there for you guys. If you primarily care about RC-X performance, don't waste your time with multiple GPUs. Either jump on the RR-X bandwagon or get a solid GPU like an upcoming Titan Z or FirePro W9100 and then worry about having the fastest CPU and RAM you can get your hands on. If you care more about Resolve, then you want lots of cores that run reasonably fast -- 3GHz+. Then 2 or 3 good GPUs. Premiere, 1 or 2 solid GPUs and and a balance of cores and speed -- Premiere still seems to top out around 16-20 threads or so and then your additional cores/ threads are just not getting the love they deserve. Especially because you probably paid big money for them.


And no, I wouldn't make this thread a sticky. This sort of info is outdated in months, sometimes weeks.

 

[Ketch Rossi]

Thanks as always for the great input Jeff!!

And yes I agree, can't sticky something like this, it will be irrelevant pretty fast!!


I believe that the absolute best solution for RCX in order to play 6K R3D 4:1 compression as I shot it, at Full Rez is indeed the W9100... It smokes all else, at list in my tests, and in that done on the Demon system it did as well, working well with DaVinci Resolve as well, was not tested on Premiere, but I am sure it will do just fine.

A second W9100 card was added to see improvements outside RCX and mostly this will be only a need for rendering or other heavy lifting and multitasking, still only good for those apps that can make use of it.

But as I said, to each its own, for me is primarily to be eval dot play Dragon R3D 4:1 @ Full Rez so to make my life LOT easier when pulling Still Frames... Anything else is icing on the cake...

So far Mac Pro's have been disappointingly slow... And yes when you go spend close to 9k+ then you'll finally see some improvements, but still need to let each reel load almost at 3/4 before hitting Play, or you'll end up stop n' go... Which I hate, especially for that kind of money, and this is the reason of my research for that perfect machine... At list for now, but also with an eye on what is to come, in order to be bale to give it more power via additional Cards or different more powerful card!

Btw, while we did not used the RRX card, obviously it is supported as well, and can be added in one of the empty slots at any given time while still allowing for multiple W9100's which that would be an insane amount of power!!

But anyways, the search goes on, as it needs to be a great system, but the cost also can't be proibitive.

 

[Mark L. Pederson]

I believe that the absolute best solution for RCX in order to play 6K R3D 4:1 compression as I shot it, at Full Rez is indeed the W9100... It smokes all else, at list in my tests, and in that done on the Demon system it did as well, working well with DaVinci Resolve as well, was not tested on Premiere, but I am sure it will do just fine.

Ketch - did you test K6000 vs W9100? I have to re-test everything next week when I'm back - since lots of new GPU software builds just got released in alpha / beta from the usual suspects while I'm here in Qatar for a Dragon project prep - but ... last I checked ... I was seeing the K6000 eat everyone's lunch w/CUDA.

I'm looking forward to re-testing and hope to report back asap - but I'd be shocked if you are seeing better benchmarks on the W9100 vs K6000.

 

[Ketch Rossi]

Ketch - did you test K6000 vs W9100? I have to re-test everything next week when I'm back - since lots of new GPU software builds just got released in alpha / beta from the usual suspects while I'm here in Qatar for a Dragon project prep - but ... last I checked ... I was seeing the K6000 eat everyone's lunch w/CUDA.

I'm looking forward to re-testing and hope to report back asap - but I'd be shocked if you are seeing better benchmarks on the W9100 vs K6000.

Hey Mark,

the Nvidia K600 Quadro sure is a very Bad Ass card, but it has not proven better then the newer latest AMD FirePro W9100.

But I would still be interested in your test results, as you might do something I didn't.

What I look for is the following in to a ideal system:


Dragon R3D 4:1 24p Full Rez Play Back with RCX-Pro

Adobe Premiere Pro & DaVinci Resolve optimized Workflow.

Adequate Rendering times, but currently not in desperate need of real time rendering... Which this will save a series amount of cash now, but ideally would look in to been able to add additional Cards to drastically speed up rendering times when in need.

But then again, Rendering out could also end up been done on a completely separate system, and ideally that might be the final solution... Yet still not discarding a possible upgrade on same station.

 

[Jeff Kilgroe]

K6000 is the way to go if you need all the bells and whistles, best memory bandwidth and CUDA support. The W9100 is technically a more powerful GPU, on paper, AMD/ATI's track record for utilizing their GPU power is pretty sketchy. You also give up CUDA support by not going nVidia. And while OpenCL is the ultimate future, it's not the present. nVidia is launching the Titan Z in the next few weeks -- equivalent of two Titans on one card. There is a Quadro K6000z in testing, which is the Quadro implementation of the TitanZ and it should mop the floor with the W9100, but I don't expect it to launch for a few more months, probably debut at Siggraph.

If you don't need the ECC memory support, 12GB RAM capacity or higher precision, then a GTX Titan or 780 are killer options on a budget and they both can over clock a bit, especially the 780. The real down side to the gamer or non-pro cards is they have less onboard RAM and their memory interface is not as robust. Don't concern yourself with 10bit monitoring and such from your GPUs. You're going to get that elsewhere, BMD/ AJA/ MATROX card. …Unfortunately, that doesn't help us with RC-X at the moment, though.

 

[Ketch Rossi]

Thanks again Jeff!!

Yeah those were some of the discussed points as well, but unfortunately we need a Station now, and the reason to go NON mac station is do to the possibilities NOW and those coming, were all is really needed is the swap of a CARD, not an entire system...

I actually can't even believe it that I am doing this, but simply got really tired of how lame MAC has been and after a FOREVER been a MAC only user I see no choice but to move to PC... Just hope I a doing the right thing...

 

[Derek Morrison]

Ketch,

I'm in the same boat right now. Just repaired/updated my old Windows machine that has been sitting for a while. Bought a 290x, and about to get the 295x to add in there. I'm also tired of waiting on the Mac when I can put twice as much "horsepower" in my PC for the same or sometimes less than the cost of the nMP.

Have you tried the 295x at all yet?

 

[luigivaltulini]

I wait to try the 295X2 ...
Maybe Jeff can give us information about on this card.
I'm not sure that the w9100 is faster on Davinci or REDCINE-x.
If the W9100 is really faster, than might be much?

ati 295X2:
11.5 TFLOPS
5632 stream processors
8GB memory
512-bit memory interface x 2
500 watts
Cost: $ 1,500.

ati W9100:
5:24 TFLOPS
2,816 stream processors
16GB GDDR5 memory
512-bit memory interface
270 watts
Cost: $ 4,000

 

[paul schefz]

As for the subject at hand, I'll have some input regarding systems here shortly. I'm awaiting my Dragon-upgraded EPIC-M and should have it sometime this week. I don't have much of a selection of Dragon clips until it arrives and most of what I do have were test shots that came with the old OLPF and older firmware from back in December. What I can report on those is that an 8-core new Mac Pro with D700 GPUs will play back 6KFF 15:1 compressed file to a 4K monitor no problem. The catch is, you have to let it spool-up a bit and pre-cache to RAM. Selecting or de-selecting the second GPU seems to make no difference to performance in RC-X, so I have to believe that RED still has not enabled multi-GPU processing. Same on my other systems with more than one GPU, PC or Mac. RC-X is still not really multi-threaded, my dual Xeon workstations don't fare any better than the new trashcan Mac on this test. And I think we're going to see a lot of that until better software optimization and expansion to take advantage of multiple GPUs kicks in.

i just got my 8 core nmp and found the same performance in RCX with 5k files is about the same as with a rocket via TB2 with a very slight wait for buffer....the second gpu can be clicked on but makes no difference.....
FCPX is crazyfast....i guess part of the magic is apple's better performance/quailty setting which seems to switch resolution when you stop the image? on a 4k monitor i don't really see a difference between the 2 settings when pulling stills which is great....everything just flies...
haven't tried resolve yet....
i am really positively surprised by the nmp, performance is pretty great and in reality it might just be just as mobile as a retina with rocket in a box because of the size and the super low power draw....and it is so nice to not have a helicopter on the desk....

would love to get some links for latest dragon footage in this thread to play with....

 

[Ketch Rossi]

Ketch,

I'm in the same boat right now. Just repaired/updated my old Windows machine that has been sitting for a while. Bought a 290x, and about to get the 295x to add in there. I'm also tired of waiting on the Mac when I can put twice as much "horsepower" in my PC for the same or sometimes less than the cost of the nMP.

Have you tried the 295x at all yet?

I wait to try the 295X2 ...
Maybe Jeff can give us information about on this card.
I'm not sure that the w9100 is faster on Davinci or REDCINE-x.
If the W9100 is really faster, than might be much?

ati 295X2:
11.5 TFLOPS
5632 stream processors
8GB memory
512-bit memory interface x 2
500 watts
Cost: $ 1,500.

ati W9100:
5:24 TFLOPS
2,816 stream processors
16GB GDDR5 memory
512-bit memory interface
270 watts
Cost: $ 4,000

Have not tested the 295x, so that would be an interesting result to see, as the savings are BIG vs. the w9100.

We'll see if we can pop one in next week and report...


Again, the key here is to see the most "economical" yet stable System/Graphic Card combination that handles RCX 6k R3D @ Full Rez, while also doing a great job with PP & DaVinci.

Rendering times not a concerne... We know we'll need more power for that, and if the system can be upscaled as we go with more Graphic Cards the better.

 

[Jeff Kilgroe]

The R9 295 X2 is actually two 4GB R9 290 GPUs on one PCIe card. The system sees it as such and your apps/games have to support multiple GPUs in order to fully utilize it.

As far as OpenCL compute goes, a W9100 is just an R9 290X card, but with more RAM and few other OpenGL and graphics features. Essentially the FirePro cards are the same to the Radeon cards as the nVidia Quadro are to the GeForce cards. So as of right now, a single over-clocked R9 290X card would be faster for RC-X. At least until RED enables multiple GPU support. The 295 X2 card is going to be better in Premiere and Resolve as it is two GPUs instead of just one. And handy because it's placed into a single slot.

The 295X2 uses evaporative cooling and has a separate heat-exchanger with fan, so you need a place to mount it. Not a very elegant solution, IMO, unless you're building a system from the ground up to support such things.

As a comparison, the D700 GPUs in the new mac Pro are R9 280X cards with 6GB each. However, they are restricted as to how much power they can use. They don't have the big fan and heat-pipe assembly on them like the PCIe card versions do and that helps conserve a good chunk of the power that they would normally draw.