DRAGON plus RED ROCKET-X equals the DOG's BOLLOCKS ....

[Neil W. Smith]

There's a quaint English phrase "the dog's bollocks" which is used with great affection when talking about something that is truly amazing ... this morning that phrase was heard to be uttered a lot in our lab .... here's the reason why:

1) at 10am, brand spanking new Red Rocket-X card arrives at the LumaForge Labs.
2) at 10:05 old Red Rocket removed from PCIe expansion chassis and new RR-X card inserted ... this is built like a tank and needs a x16 PCIe slot and aux power.
3) at 10:10 new drivers and firmware installed ... Mac pro rebooted.
4) at 10:15 RedCine-X Pro build 20 booted up
5) at 10:16 6K .r3d files from DRAGON loaded into RCX-P

Then the moment of truth ... do I start with 1/2 debayer and make sure everything works OK or should I go straight for FULL debayer? ... fuck it! .... let's go FULL debayer of 6K DRAGON .r3d files ...

6) press the Play button .... Holy Crap! .... realtime 24 fps playback of 6K DRAGON .r3ds off a bog standard Mac Pro ... this is the DOG's BOLLOCKS! I shout ... editor comes running into the room to see if I'm OK ... try to explain the meaning of the phrase ... editor looks at me as if I'm crazy .... show her the screen playing back 6K .r3ds in realtime with FULL debayer ... editor gives me a funny look and runs out of the room shaking her head.

7) load in some 5K EPiC .R3Ds shot at 29.97 at 120fps 6:1 .... FULL debayer ... easy easy!

Wow guys, this new RR-X is a must buy .... if you're thinking of upgrading to DRAGON you should definitely get the RR-X at the same time ... even 5K EPIC is going to benefit from the new power of the RR-X card.

The RED ecoysystem really is coming together quite nicely! ... great new sensor plus RedCine-X Pro for first pass tweaking and debayering with new Red Rocket-X card ... then cut in Apple FCP X and do final color in Blackmagic DaVinci Resolve 10 ... truly amazing level of performance at an incredibly good price.

Couple of pixs attached of the new RR-X compared to old RR and screen grab from Ketch's 'RED DRESS' showing 6K .r3d playing back realtime at FULL debayer ... all we need now is Graeme's new color science and Bob's Your Uncle!

Cheers,
Neil

P.S. I have no idea why those crazy Brits should think that a canine's testicles are the highest compliment you can pay to something very cool ... all explanations will be gratefully received ... my American editor is still giving me strange looks :-(

 

[Ethan Knight]

"it is more likely that the origin lies in a late 20th century reviving of the post WWI period outbreak of exuberant coinages.
At that time many nonsense terms for excellent which involved the animal world were coined - cat's pyjamas, cat's whiskers, bee's knees etc."

Sounds too good to be true, what a great experience, on my wish list

 

[John Marchant]

Fantastic news What shape and size of Macpro, and what kind of drive were the R3D's on?

 

[Will Keir]

Haha, this is me, I can image asking myself the same superstitious and hopeful question.

Is the dream here? It's so close.

Thanks for the post.

Then the moment of truth ... do I start with 1/2 debayer and make sure everything works

 

[Will Keir]

So are RR-X Card shipping now?

 

[Antonio Forjaz]

Can't wait for mine....

 

[Gabriele Turchi]

could please try and see if you get faster than realtime 5K prores transcode for dailies ? (even at half res ? )

i am interested rocket X could crunch 5K at 1/2 res 3times faster than realtime (in theory should (being 5x faster than regular red rocket ) ....


thanks
g

 

[Mikael Lubtchansky]

So are RR-X Card shipping now?

Answer looks like a "yes" : unboxed RR-X

 

[Ketch Rossi]

That is great news indeed!!

Now, if only we had that last week when we edited "the RED dress"...

And this is why I keep saying, that no meter of GPU acceleration... The RRX will be an absolute necessity for those that truly want and need heavy duty FAST FULL REZ workflow like myself...

 

[Neil W. Smith]

Mac Pro with Red Rocket-X FULL debayer

Mac Pro with Red Rocket-X FULL debayer

Fantastic news What shape and size of Macpro, and what kind of drive were the R3D's on?

Good question, John ... square shaped tower (no cylinder yet) with 12 cores and 32GB of RAM ... has a GTX 680 on the inside and TITAN plus RR-X in the expansion chassis.

We use SAS RAIDs from Areca ... very fast and totally reliable .... on this MacPro I have a 96 TB SAS SAN using metaSAN plus 32TB direct attached Areca SAS RAID ... for sure, RED filmmakers are going to have to think about storage requirements (speed and size) to get the most out of 6K DRAGON workflow but everything we test in our Lab is typically off the shelf product (usually in beta mode) but readily available from us or places like B&H (not sure what the equivalent is in UK now).

The point I'm really making is that there are some very expensive heavy iron "secret sauce" solutions out there which I'm sure get the 6K job done ... but now, with a RR-X card, a decent Mac Pro (and that will only get better once the new Cylinders ship) with RCX-P plus FCP X and Resolve 10, the next generation of DRAGON filmmakers have a very affordable end-to-end pipeline for shooting and finishing 6K DRAGON projects ... it really is a terrific example of Moore's law in action.

At our DaVinci Resolve workflow workshop we're running with Peter Chamberlain at the end of October, I'm going to throw some 6K DRAGON footage into the mix ... our tag line for these training events used to be '4K MADE EASY' ... now I'm going to have to change it to '6K MADE VERY EASY' .... as soon as we can we'll test the DRAGON with RESOLVE LIVE and on-set look management ... combine that with Digital Dailies from within Resolve or RCX-P and you have a very cost-effective soluton to debayerng and rendering out whatever offline editorial files you need .... cutting on your NLE of choice and then conforming back into DaVinci Resolve for final color of 6K RAW files .... the whole workflow really is the dog's bollocks!

Attached below is a screen grab of Mac Pro details with EPIC 5K FULL debayer going on in the background.

Neil

 

[John Marchant]

Thanks Neil. Itching to squeeze one of these into a Mac to supercharge our Dragon footage

 

[Mikael Lubtchansky]

RR-X looks sleek

Still, I hope when RED genius elves have some spare time they still work on the Dragon support for old Rocket cards (not realtime) as hinted last winter :
Double Dragon

 

[Patrick Grossien]

Cool stuff!

Neil, what expansion chassis are you using for it?

 

[Zakaree Sandberg]

like many.. i just had my redrocket die..

well.. i know the problem.. a small capacitor (im assuming) came loose.. the high temp of the board over time wore the solder out and low and behold it broke.. unfortunately Red wont fix this 1$ part, and instead you have to buy a 3000.00 replacement.

Luckily I found a company that will fix this,
ill try them after I first try and order this part and do it myself..

7500 dollar board? NO THANKS
not after being burned on a 5000.00 card that lasted me all but 2 years

I can name 10 other camera systems that dont require me purchasing a proprietary card in order to transcode in a timely manor.

rant off

 

[Vadim Bobkovsky]

I can name 10 other camera systems that dont require me purchasing a proprietary card in order to transcode in a timely manor.

Any of them do raw 4k?

 

[Zakaree Sandberg]

Any of them do raw 4k?

dont care about raw 4k if you have to buy a 5000.00 video card every year

 

[Neil W. Smith]

The affordable RED ecosystem ...

The affordable RED ecosystem ...

Cool stuff!

Neil, what expansion chassis are you using for it?

We use a mixture of MAGMA PCIe expansion boxes plus their Thunderbolt 1T and 3T chassis as well as the Cyclone 2707s ... all great products, solid and reliable.

If you're going to be at the SMPTE Conference in Hollywood at the end of this month we'll be demoing our 4K (now 6K) pipeline which leverages the MAGMA boxes and RCX-P with RR-X plus FCP X and Resolve 10 .... we'll have a six or so UHDTVs around the place showing the Del Mar footage (shot on 5K EPIC, F55, C500 and 1DC) playing back 3840x2160 footage.

Kinda thinking that "6K is the new 4K" ... start off with the incredibly detailed and clean imagery coming off the DRAGON sensor and then cut and dice it in RCX-P/FCP X/Resolve 10 to give you the final finished product that you can then render out to whatever format you want - 4K DCI, UHDTV 2160p, 2K DCP, HD and BluRay.

Innovations like the Red Rocket-X card make it a totally viable proposition to go from 6K RAW DRAGON to whatever outputs you want whenever you want them ... and all at a very affordable price compared to the heavy iron alternatives you need with other camera ecosystems.

Neil

 

[mikeburton]

Ummmm...Not to piss on your parade here Neil because you seem very excited by all this, but I'm not sure I understand your level of excitement. So, there's this REALLY expensive x16 hardware excellerator card that can play back ONLY dragon footage in full res realtime with absolutely ZERO need to play back 6K of Resolution when the highest you'll ever monitor currently is 4K. Isn't your DCI projector 2K? Besides the point, I could see f you were excited about rendering 150fps from this card, now that would be something to potentially pay for if you were invested in the RED workflow/pipeline. But correct me if I'm wrong but simply playing back the media is what the card is supposed to do at a hearty premium I might add again. So, your excited the card works as it should? I'd throw the damn thing in the river and drown it if it didn't for that price. Sorry, hard to get excited as you about this when it requires Power, X16 slot, and a crap ton of coin. Consider me not impressed with this review especially since there are no valuable transcode speeds attached.
This is the hype machine at work folks.

 

[Shiblon Wixom]

I think what others might be inquiring about is aprox transcode speeds at PCI-e x16 and x8 and x4 lane speeds, particularly over thunderbolt, and at what point does your system become the bottleneck.

 

[Gabriele Turchi]

as mike said if R-X can process MX or Dragon (even if at 1/2 res) at very high speed (like 3 times faster than realtime , that would be a very good plus


thanks
g