Ive just bought a mac pro and want to make it capable of handling 2k red footage. Is my system enough!? Its a 3ghz quad core duo with 4gb memory and a geforce 8800 card. Its also has no raid card. Im confused as to whether you need to use a raid card and drive set up or whether it can work with my existing drives? I have a 320gig internal drive and a 500 gig external Mybook drive. Thanks for any help you can give!
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Is my mac pro up to it?
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Richard Lackey
Well-known member
You need to ask yourself two questions.
1. Do you expect to get one or two streams of uncompressed 2K playback?
If you want to grade with DPX, you will need a RAID setup to get the bandwidth. I don't have a Mac Pro for grading, but I do have a equivalent dual quad core Xeon PC built for Scratch. For this I use a 8 channel 3Ware RAID card with 8 x Hitachi 250GB drives in RAID 5. This doesn't give me two streams of 2K DPX playback, but it does give me one stream. For two you will need more drives by using either a RAID controller with more ports, or port multipliers on each channel.
2. Do you want uncompressed HD-SDI in and out of your system?
If so, I would rather go for a QuadroFX card with HD-SDI, or a QuadroFX + a AJA or Bluefish444 card. I prefer the Bluefish card, but it is more expensive.
A note on the RAID. Apple has a pretty good SAN solution with XSAN, I don't know much about it but it may also be a solution to get the required bandwidth out of your storage and have the advantage of a SAN backbone that other systems can be tied to rather than a dedicated internal RAID.
1. Do you expect to get one or two streams of uncompressed 2K playback?
If you want to grade with DPX, you will need a RAID setup to get the bandwidth. I don't have a Mac Pro for grading, but I do have a equivalent dual quad core Xeon PC built for Scratch. For this I use a 8 channel 3Ware RAID card with 8 x Hitachi 250GB drives in RAID 5. This doesn't give me two streams of 2K DPX playback, but it does give me one stream. For two you will need more drives by using either a RAID controller with more ports, or port multipliers on each channel.
2. Do you want uncompressed HD-SDI in and out of your system?
If so, I would rather go for a QuadroFX card with HD-SDI, or a QuadroFX + a AJA or Bluefish444 card. I prefer the Bluefish card, but it is more expensive.
A note on the RAID. Apple has a pretty good SAN solution with XSAN, I don't know much about it but it may also be a solution to get the required bandwidth out of your storage and have the advantage of a SAN backbone that other systems can be tied to rather than a dedicated internal RAID.
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Thanks for your post... Ill need just one stream of playbck. As for grading, the project I will be doing will be finished elsewhere so I really only need my mac pro to be a good offline suite from which I can take an edl or the equivalent to a place that can handle 4k, for this offline style use is raid a necessity? Thanks again
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Jeff Kilgroe
Well-known member
You will definitely want a faster drive system, no matter what. To do 2K real-time in the form of DPX sequences, you will need a RAID that can sustain 230MB/s or so. That's typically a 3 or 4 drive RAID-0. CalDigit makes some excellent external RAID systems with 4 drives that can do this. You can also go bigger and run RAID-5 for added security.
4K Hub has some good suggestions, but a couple major problems. 3Ware RAID cards and QuadroFX cards with HD-SDI are not supported under OSX. If you go CalDigit, they have their own interface cards, which are usually included with the RAID system. HighPoint probably makes the best OSX RAID cards right now if you need to buy one separately, but that will depend on what you need.
Apple does have a nice SAN system, but you don't need this for a single workstation. A SAN is more appropriate for multiple collaborative workstation environments. You will do just fine with a good eSATA or SAS external RAID. The rest of your system is fine unless you need output to a studio monitor for grading or other purposes. Then you will need to look at one of the various AJA solutions. There's also BlackMagic Design, but IMO AJA has the better product.
4K Hub has some good suggestions, but a couple major problems. 3Ware RAID cards and QuadroFX cards with HD-SDI are not supported under OSX. If you go CalDigit, they have their own interface cards, which are usually included with the RAID system. HighPoint probably makes the best OSX RAID cards right now if you need to buy one separately, but that will depend on what you need.
Apple does have a nice SAN system, but you don't need this for a single workstation. A SAN is more appropriate for multiple collaborative workstation environments. You will do just fine with a good eSATA or SAS external RAID. The rest of your system is fine unless you need output to a studio monitor for grading or other purposes. Then you will need to look at one of the various AJA solutions. There's also BlackMagic Design, but IMO AJA has the better product.
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Thanks Jeff, As I'm using my mac to offline edit, would I be best advised to edit at 1k and not splash out on much faster drives? At 1k do you still need this kind of power from your drives? And what's the image quality like at that resolution on a 23" cinema display? Sorry for the abundance of questions!!!
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If you edit offline, then edit with Apple prores HQ codec in 2k, I can do that on my 24" Imac with 2 streams.
Emmanuel
Emmanuel
Steve Sherrick
Well-known member
For offline, you won't need the bandwith. As has been mentioned, stick with a format that works well with your current configuration. However, if you want the ability to work in uncompressed or DPX, you will need to follow Jeff's recommendations.
jimhare
Well-known member
Exactly, if you aren't doing much grading, the internal software RAID that a Mac Pro can do out of the box will be fine. You can put up to 4 drives in there!
Editing proxies will be painful, and it's not really about drive speed, but trying to process 4k files in realtime (even at 1k or 2k you are still pulling from 4k files.) It will work, but you will constantly be getting stutters and pauses.
Transcoding to an editing CODEC for offline is really the way to go.
With this, you have everything you need right now, and will be much happier for it! :biggrin:
Jim
Editing proxies will be painful, and it's not really about drive speed, but trying to process 4k files in realtime (even at 1k or 2k you are still pulling from 4k files.) It will work, but you will constantly be getting stutters and pauses.
Transcoding to an editing CODEC for offline is really the way to go.
With this, you have everything you need right now, and will be much happier for it! :biggrin:
Jim
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Jeff Kilgroe
Well-known member
When you work from the proxy files, it doesn't matter if you use .5K, 1K or 2K... They all are pointers to the R3D file and the same data is read from the disk no matter what. So you don't save yourself any disk bandwidth by working from a lower res proxy. You will however save yourself on CPU resources as the lower resolution takes less processing power to generate.
Editing off of your 320GB system drive isn't ideal, but would probably work OK if you're editing offline. I can edit 1K proxies just fine on my Macbook Pro off its internal drive and that drive / system are a lot slower than the Mac Pro. Your 500GB external MyBook drive may or may not be OK. If it's eSATA or Firewire 800, then you're fine. If it's Firewire400, you may run into some issues.
Quality from the proxy files is somewhat subjective. It's pretty good (IMO) in most situations and is great for going out to SD or HD delivery if you don't need to do much color correction or tweaking. And it's often the most practical solution due to render times and other workflow concerns that many people have. But the proxies are inferior to a full-quality debayer output.
If you want to conform to an edit and generate ProRes, H.264, or DPX / TIFF sequences, you will want a faster storage option. I have found that slower drives and single drives can be a real bottleneck for RED Alert and REDCINE when generating output files.
But I think more important to this discussion is to say that your current system will work just fine. You can get up and running with what you have and as you decide how you like to work with RED footage, you can decide where to upgrade. You will definitely need more storage very quickly if you're working with RED footage... Hard drives are cheap and easy to add... You can add more drives inside your Mac Pro and put them in a RAID-0 with no other additional hardware or software. For less than $500, you can install 3 x 750GB HDDs.
Anyway, I'm essentially repeating what Steve and Jim just said.
Editing off of your 320GB system drive isn't ideal, but would probably work OK if you're editing offline. I can edit 1K proxies just fine on my Macbook Pro off its internal drive and that drive / system are a lot slower than the Mac Pro. Your 500GB external MyBook drive may or may not be OK. If it's eSATA or Firewire 800, then you're fine. If it's Firewire400, you may run into some issues.
Quality from the proxy files is somewhat subjective. It's pretty good (IMO) in most situations and is great for going out to SD or HD delivery if you don't need to do much color correction or tweaking. And it's often the most practical solution due to render times and other workflow concerns that many people have. But the proxies are inferior to a full-quality debayer output.
If you want to conform to an edit and generate ProRes, H.264, or DPX / TIFF sequences, you will want a faster storage option. I have found that slower drives and single drives can be a real bottleneck for RED Alert and REDCINE when generating output files.
But I think more important to this discussion is to say that your current system will work just fine. You can get up and running with what you have and as you decide how you like to work with RED footage, you can decide where to upgrade. You will definitely need more storage very quickly if you're working with RED footage... Hard drives are cheap and easy to add... You can add more drives inside your Mac Pro and put them in a RAID-0 with no other additional hardware or software. For less than $500, you can install 3 x 750GB HDDs.
Anyway, I'm essentially repeating what Steve and Jim just said.
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