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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 :)

Dream Machine?

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BLUESPIDER

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What mac system would it take to edit RED flawlessly?

The studio I currently work at housed a Mac 8core with 16gigs of ram plus a Kona3 and 1.5 terabytes built in. Would that be good enough? :nuke: I've always been a PC guy and this is going to be my transitioning stage to becoming a Mac user.

Is there anything I'm missing?
 
BLUESPIDER said:
What mac system would it take to edit RED flawlessly?

The studio I currently work at housed a Mac 8core with 16gigs of ram plus a Kona3 and 1.5 terabytes built in. Would that be good enough? :nuke: I've always been a PC guy and this is going to be my transitioning stage to becoming a Mac user.

Is there anything I'm missing?
Click to expand...
Are you kidding.... An 8core Mac with 16 gigs of ram. I think that would do it for sure.
 
I've envisaged the minimal spec being quite a bit beneath that Bluespider. I'm sure that will be great for working RedCode on.
 
From what the RED team has said, we should get by with less, but here's what I think would be ideal:

Mac Pro 8-Core 3GHz, 8GB RAM, 250~500GB system/application drive. Two 500~750GB drives in a RAID-0 for a "scratch" disk, audio storage, etc.. Large external RAID for editing and project storage/workspace -- connected via fiber channel or eSATA. Building a RAID-5 array out of 5x1TB drives would make for something rather nice. I recommend the ATI x1900xt video card too. All around better and more current than the overpriced FX4500. ...At least until Apple comes out with something better. If you plan to do any broadcast work or output to decks (even rentals), consider the AJA ioHD or Kona3 products, but not necessary for RED. Definitely one 30" display from Apple or Dell, two is killer. Or connect the second DVI output to a 1080p projector or DLP or plasma or studio monitor or.... You can also use a Kona or ioHD for monitor output too.

Personally, I'm going to see if my G5 quad will hold out a bit longer, possibly until sometime mid/late next year before I upgrade. But I'll buy just as soon as I really need to, whenever that actually happens.

As far as minimal spec, I wouldn't be ashamed to try working on a Macbook Pro w/2GB, connected to a secondary 24" or 30" display and a decent external FW800 or eSATA RAID. If REDCODE 4K @ 24fps comes in at less than 30MB/s and lets you edit with real-time 1K or 2K proxies (a 2K proxy, who'd a thunk it), then I don't see where it wouldn't work rather well.
 
Kilgroe tout

Kilgroe tout

I share many of Jeff's assumptions about the right system config for working with RedCode. Unless you are very limited in physical work space I want to especially encourage the use of external RAID enclosures rather than packing the tower with big drives.

I would love to know how much RAM Graeme expects us to be able to utilize when decoding at the max rate? (This query assumes at least an r2 version of Leopard as the host OS running a QuickTime build that plays nice with RedCine and/or FCP 6.1 and, if my opinion means anything, I wouldn't bank on that until late 2007)

BTW I have read a couple articles that suggest you can, in fact, have too much RAM; unless of course there IS a true 64bit solution in our near future...

OK, I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one ...(JL)
 
RAM is of little importance in the overal REDCODE scheme. I'm running fine with 1 and 2 GB systems here.

Having modern Intel CPU's (yes, plural) like in a Mac Pro is much more important.
 
Rob, when apple spec performance for their new 422 codec they basically describe a direct relationship between the number of cores and the speed of processing - double the number, half the speed. Are you having a similar experience with REDcode? And can I ask if you think Editing the REDcode directly will be a realistic proposition with a 4 or 8 core Macpro for example?
 
What really plays a big part in a video editing workstation
is HDD speed .
an eSAta external raid is a must.
you can choose between direct connection and port multiplication it depends of your needs.
16GB of RAM is only needed if you use software that renders to Ram like AE or Motion. FCP reders when needed directly to HDD.
 
lo HD

lo HD

Jeff Kilgroe said:
From what the RED team has said, we should get by with less, but here's what I think would be ideal:

Mac Pro 8-Core 3GHz, 8GB RAM, 250~500GB system/application drive. Two 500~750GB drives in a RAID-0 for a "scratch" disk, audio storage, etc.. Large external RAID for editing and project storage/workspace -- connected via fiber channel or eSATA. Building a RAID-5 array out of 5x1TB drives would make for something rather nice. I recommend the ATI x1900xt video card too. All around better and more current than the overpriced FX4500. ...At least until Apple comes out with something better. If you plan to do any broadcast work or output to decks (even rentals), consider the AJA ioHD or Kona3 products, but not necessary for RED. Definitely one 30" display from Apple or Dell, two is killer. Or connect the second DVI output to a 1080p projector or DLP or plasma or studio monitor or.... You can also use a Kona or ioHD for monitor output too.

Personally, I'm going to see if my G5 quad will hold out a bit longer, possibly until sometime mid/late next year before I upgrade. But I'll buy just as soon as I really need to, whenever that actually happens.

As far as minimal spec, I wouldn't be ashamed to try working on a Macbook Pro w/2GB, connected to a secondary 24" or 30" display and a decent external FW800 or eSATA RAID. If REDCODE 4K @ 24fps comes in at less than 30MB/s and lets you edit with real-time 1K or 2K proxies (a 2K proxy, who'd a thunk it), then I don't see where it wouldn't work rather well.
Click to expand...

Hi Jeff,

I have a MacBook Pro 17" Core 2 Duo 2.33 GHz Model. I was looking into
a Video IN/OUT Card, but I can't really afford a Mac Pro at the moment.
Could I do everything that I could do with Kona 3, if I had a Mac Pro, with
lo HD? I went to AJA site, but I couldn't really find an answer to my
question. Thanks in advance.
 
janghos said:
Could I do everything that I could do with Kona 3, if I had a Mac Pro, withlo HD?
Click to expand...

Simple answer – No! The Io HD only works with ProRes material in HD, although it does uncompressed in SD. This means that everything you monitor via the Io, or record to tape using it has been via the ProRes 4:2:2 codec. This may well be fine, depending what you intend to use it for, but you should be aware of the limitation.
 
Rob Lohman said:
RAM is of little importance in the overal REDCODE scheme. I'm running fine with 1 and 2 GB systems here.

Having modern Intel CPU's (yes, plural) like in a Mac Pro is much more important.
Click to expand...

Hi Rob,

sorry if this has been answered before, but does Red Cine profit from 8 cores ?

Cheers,
Damien
 
earthling said:
sorry if this has been answered before, but does Red Cine profit from 8 cores ?
Click to expand...

Yes, not only REDCINE but also the QuickTime codec. It will try to use however many processors are in the system (see below for a footnote on that). It is being tested on 8-core Mac Pro's all the way down to dual-core laptops etc.

fergus said:
Rob, when apple spec performance for their new 422 codec they basically describe a direct relationship between the number of cores and the speed of processing - double the number, half the speed. Are you having a similar experience with REDcode? And can I ask if you think Editing the REDcode directly will be a realistic proposition with a 4 or 8 core Macpro for example?
Click to expand...

Performance never scales linearly when adding CPU's. There's always overhead, memory access synchronization, cache conflicts / stalls etc. In other words, don't expect a doubling in processors to mean a doubling in performance.

Of course, we daily work on profiling, optimizing etc.

Crossing the Line was cut on a 4-core Mac Pro (if I'm not mistaken) using FCP 5 with the QuickTime codec. Obviously this was not in 4K.

So the question is what quality, resolution & framerate can I sustain on a specific machine. It's nice that Apple gives such an overview, but there are other things to take into account for us. PowerPC versus Intel, Windows versus OS X, different memory speeds (even on the Mac platform, but especially on Windows). And as indicated you can pick a lower decode resolution and/or quality to speed things up.

The cool thing is that you should be able to find a resolution / quality setting that allows you to cut real-time in an offline manner. Then conform that to an online in whatever resolution.

Or you could transcode to say ProRes (HD or 2K), edit that and then output for TV or HD-DVD / Blu-Ray or DVD for example.
 
Will Redcine or the QT codec use GPU acceleration?
 
REDCINE is a GPU based application. Will not function without one.

The QT codec is CPU only.
 
May I ask why everyone here automatically assumes that you need a Mac to use Red? Do mac's have something specific that Windows PC's don't have?
 
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