Is the RED Rocket truly necessary for Dragon Footage?

[Micah O'Keiley]

Deciding on a new post rig as my [older] PC is no longer cutting it (no pun intended).
Either I can go with a 6core mac pro tower or invest the same price (around $4000) into another PC.
Which I'm already torn on which would be better....

But my real question is:
Either way, is the RED Rocket-x REALLY worth it? Can I get by without it for 6k footage or will the lack of having it really bog me down?

I've never used it before, so I don't really know "what I'm missing".

I'd hate to have to drop another 5k on the RED Rocket if I don't really have to do it.
Thoughts?

Thanks!

 

[Gunleik Groven]

Mind you, you need rock-X for Dragon...

http://www.red.com/store/red-rocket

Which is 6750

Rocket is practically for Epic/R1/Scarlet


With high volume shootingdays: yes, if you deliver offlines/previewfiles.

For "your own productions"... well it depends what they are, would you not say?

GPU acceleration is definitely developing.

 

[Micah O'Keiley]

Mind you, you need rock-X for Dragon...

http://www.red.com/store/red-rocket

Which is 6750

Rocket is practically for Epic/R1/Scarlet

oops, that's what I meant. It's late, haha

So then it isn't "necessary" to have one to get the job done?

 

[Gunleik Groven]

As I said: Depends on the job...

You will rarely regret having one.

Neither will you regret having multiple similar powerful Open CL (or CUDA) GPUs

 

[BigLu]

Micha
No it is not necessary to have a RRX to get the job done.
You can get threw projects if you have the time.

If you can allow files to transcode over night and or over several nights on say a feature length movie, you can totally do it.
But if you have a deadline and if you have multiple projects happening at the same time and you have to push full debayer files threw and if you have a paying gig that you have to deliver in a timely fashion then another one and another one?
Then a RRX will save your ass.

Hope that helps

 

[Nick Fury]

Micha
No it is not necessary to have a RRX to get the job done.
You can get threw projects if you have the time.

If you can allow files to transcode over night and or over several nights on say a feature length movie, you can totally do it.
But if you have a deadline and if you have multiple projects happening at the same time and you have to push full debayer files threw and if you have a paying gig that you have to deliver in a timely fashion then another one and another one?
Then a RRX will save your ass.

Hope that helps

Copy that!

Thank you very much

Fury

 

[Clark Dunbar]

with a bare bones - MacPro 6 core and a Thunderbolt-2 raid (no Rocket-X) in REDCine-x (current build) - I can review/playback Dragon 6K material in realtime at 1/4 debayer on screen.. if I let the file preload a bit - then 1/2 res - easy. The output to full debayer - will take longer. So for review/and editing a timeline - no Rocket-X needed... but, would recommend having one though for a full production out.

 

[Neil W. Smith]

RR-X versus AMD W9100 ...

RR-X versus AMD W9100 ...

Deciding on a new post rig as my [older] PC is no longer cutting it (no pun intended).
Either I can go with a 6core mac pro tower or invest the same price (around $4000) into another PC.
Which I'm already torn on which would be better....

But my real question is:
Either way, is the RED Rocket-x REALLY worth it? Can I get by without it for 6k footage or will the lack of having it really bog me down?

I've never used it before, so I don't really know "what I'm missing".

I'd hate to have to drop another 5k on the RED Rocket if I don't really have to do it.
Thoughts?

Thanks!

Very interesting question, Micah and one that's not straight forward to answer ... here's some things to take into account in your deliberations:

1) we have a RR-X card (one of the first to get one last year) and we rent it out all the time primarily to DITs on DRAGON shows ... for DRAGON jobs in a hurry it's an absolute must!

2) the RR-X card works great in the second slot of the old Mac Pro Tower but you won't be able to use it in a Thunderbolt expansion chassis attached to the new Mac Pro cylinder ... it's a true x 16 lane PCIe cards and Tbolt 2 doesn't have that kind of bandwidth.

3) it runs great in a PCI Gen 3 PC with a fast GPU and fast storage for sure.

4) however, in a studio environment there's an alternative solution to consider if you're not scared of PCs ... at NAB we were on the AMD booth demoing their new FirePro W9100 GPUs running Resolve and Adobe Creative Cloud and the new OpenCL version of RedCineX-Pro ... we're were doing FULL RES PREMIUM debyters and 4K playback using AMD GPUs alone .. no RR-X card installed.

5) RR-X card does one thing and one thing supremely well ... un-encrpyt and debayer .r3ds files without having to use any CPU power ... however, it won't help you with general purpose computing and color grading tasks using OpenCL apps like Resolve 11, Adobe Creative Cloud and the soon to be ported NUKE Studio ... plus you're still going to need a beefy GPU to do your non .r3d work.

6) a RR-X card will cost you between $6K and $8k depending on how you purchase it ... an AMD W9100 costs $4k and has 16 GBs of VRAM and 2800 stream processors ... stick two of those into Gen 3 Supermicro chassis and Bob's Your Uncle! ... runs OpenCL apps like greased lightning!

Here's a link to a video interview we did at NAB for NonLinear Post ... explains the W9100s processing 6K DRAGON files in real time ... and though I have four W9100s in the demo PC you can get by with two (it was NAB and we like to do to things to extremes) ... Rob Lohman came over from the RED booth and we showed him the performance we were getting with the latest version of OpenCL RCX-Pro running DRAGON files on a 4K monitor and he was pretty amazed.

Her's some pixs of the AMD booth with Resolve and RCX-Pro debayering 6K DRAGON files at full res premium real-time playback .. if you're going for a PCIe Gen 3 based PC for your studio you might want to consider the AMD OpenCL GPU solution ... we have a RR-X card you can rent ($99 per day) along with AMD W1900s ($49 per day) if you want to try them out before you make your final purchasing decision.

Hope this helps.
Neil

 

[Jason Osterday]

Neil - what kind of performance can we expect from a single W9100 in comparison to a RR-X? You mention "get by" with two, so I wasn't sure if that meant two minimum for RT 6KFF or just that 2 feels comparable to a RR-X at full speed. It would seem one W9100 and one lesser Open CL card in one machine could do the trip for less than a single RR-X (even at the Dragon upgrade cost and certainly vs retail).

 

[BigLu]

Very interesting question, Micah and one that's not straight forward to answer ... here's some things to take into account in your deliberations:


2) the RR-X card works great in the second slot of the old Mac Pro Tower but you won't be able to use it in a Thunderbolt expansion chassis attached to the new Mac Pro cylinder ... it's a true x 16 lane PCIe cards and Tbolt 2 doesn't have that kind of bandwidth.

Hope this helps.
Neil

Hello Neil
I dont understand your #2.
Why can't you use a Thunderbolt Expansion Chassis on a new MAC PRO cylinder? I assume the kind of MAC Pros they call the trashcan.
I get nearly 50fps of transcoders in this configuration thanks to Nick Furys RRX set up into my DIT system.
do you mean at all? or for its potential?

Thank you
Luis

 

[Zeb B]

Here's a quick vid showing the time wait for Full DeBayer 6K footage on a nMP 12 core in RCX with NO RRX card.

NSFW - boobs

https://vimeo.com/92588030

Password: red14
​

 

[Gunleik Groven]

Yup, and the bufering is not totally up to speed. Looks good, though.

As 6k 1/2 is pretty close to UHD in resolution, and unless you have at least a 4k display, I dunno if I see 1/2 rez realtime as any real constriction for editing, if you edit from raw.

The issue is rendering speeds.

But as the GPU/open CL bubble is opened, my bet is on GPU for the future, UNLESS you are delivering dailies on feature/TV-series types of shoots.
THEN the rocket can indeed be a very handy tool.

I guess there will be some differences between GPU and RR decode, even with the new card, and that the preferences will be divided as they used to be with the old.

 

[Robert Bluemke]

If the build quality of the RRX is anything like the original Rocket, I'd say spend your money elsewhere. I'm looking at a tricked out trashcan myself, but if you're already set up in a PC environment you have a ton of great options. My Rocket went to the great pile of SCSI cables in the sky after a little over a years worth of use, not exactly the ROI I was hoping for.