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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 :)

mLOGICs mLINK R thunderbolt expansion chassis for Red Rocket

Interesting. Has anyone done this without worrying about shorting out the board?

Tehben Dean said:
The sonnet has only 2 slots BUT the RR sdi is only a cable so theoretically you could cut a hole in the enclosure or just leave the top off and run the cable out the top or side so as not to wast the extra slot...
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Paul Ellington said:
My Sonnett is working great, easy install and fast speeds.
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Hi Paul,

I just got my Sonnett but is running on only 4 lane and is very slow even with the Red Rocket card .

Can you tell how you managed to get it running with the rocket with fast speed ?

Cheers
Bert Tan
 
bert tan said:
Hi Paul,

I just got my Sonnett but is running on only 4 lane and is very slow even with the Red Rocket card .

Can you tell how you managed to get it running with the rocket with fast speed ?

Cheers
Bert Tan
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The Sonnet is only 4 lanes (due thunderbolt limitations, as far as I know).

What to you mean by "very slow" ?
I have the Sonnet with a Red Rocket on a 2011 17" Macbook Pro, and the speed is pretty decent in my opinion. Around 1.2x slower than real time for transcodes (meaning 1 hour of footage takes 1 hour and 20 minutes to process), reading and writing to the same FW800 drive, from 4K HD 8:1 at 25 fps to Avid DNxHD 185 10 bit. That's not exactly what I would call "very slow"...
I haven't tried with faster drives so I don't know if the bottleneck in this situation is the Sonnet or the disk speed. Anyway, it's nice to be finally able to work comfortably with R3D on a laptop. ;)
 
Agreed on how nice it is, I'd say your results are probably held up by reading and writing to the same firewire drive, puts a lot of stress on that thing.

Running off of a Pegasus 6 RAID on one card I got faster than real time transcodes for ProRes HQ. With two cards daisy chained (but using local storage) I got 2X transcode speeds to 1920 x 1080 Prores (HQ). Having an external Thunderbolt HD in the chain with the 2 cards definitely muddied things up and slowed everything down. Seems that managing throughput will be the difference going forward, and it's awesome to know that even though Sonnet is limited with its 4x limitation we can still maximize Rockets on laptops.

Glad I got Sonnet but am interested to see how the Magma and mLink stack up against it.
 
Nils Ruinet said:
The Sonnet is only 4 lanes (due thunderbolt limitations, as far as I know).

What to you mean by "very slow" ?
I have the Sonnet with a Red Rocket on a 2011 17" Macbook Pro, and the speed is pretty decent in my opinion. Around 1.2x slower than real time for transcodes (meaning 1 hour of footage takes 1 hour and 20 minutes to process), reading and writing to the same FW800 drive, from 4K HD 8:1 at 25 fps to Avid DNxHD 185 10 bit. That's not exactly what I would call "very slow"...
I haven't tried with faster drives so I don't know if the bottleneck in this situation is the Sonnet or the disk speed. Anyway, it's nice to be finally able to work comfortably with R3D on a laptop. ;)
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We tried the Sonnet Echo Express Pro with a 2011 17" Macbook Pro 2.3GHz Processor, 8GB RAM to do transcoding on a 1 minute clip that was in the laptop itself, not running off any external hard drive. The speed was not real time. We then transcoded the same clip without the Sonnet this time. It took the same amount of time to transcode the same clip with or without the Sonnet. Anyone knows how to do a proper test or how to configure a laptop setup with the Sonnet to work at its fastest speed despite the 4x lane limitation? Thanks!
 
Anderson Boyd said:
Agreed on how nice it is, I'd say your results are probably held up by reading and writing to the same firewire drive, puts a lot of stress on that thing.

Running off of a Pegasus 6 RAID on one card I got faster than real time transcodes for ProRes HQ. With two cards daisy chained (but using local storage) I got 2X transcode speeds to 1920 x 1080 Prores (HQ). Having an external Thunderbolt HD in the chain with the 2 cards definitely muddied things up and slowed everything down. Seems that managing throughput will be the difference going forward, and it's awesome to know that even though Sonnet is limited with its 4x limitation we can still maximize Rockets on laptops.

Glad I got Sonnet but am interested to see how the Magma and mLink stack up against it.
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You're probably right, in my case the disk speed was probably limiting. Also, I used alchemy, which might slow things down a little bit.
 
bert tan said:
We tried the Sonnet Echo Express Pro with a 2011 17" Macbook Pro 2.3GHz Processor, 8GB RAM to do transcoding on a 1 minute clip that was in the laptop itself, not running off any external hard drive. The speed was not real time. We then transcoded the same clip without the Sonnet this time. It took the same amount of time to transcode the same clip with or without the Sonnet. Anyone knows how to do a proper test or how to configure a laptop setup with the Sonnet to work at its fastest speed despite the 4x lane limitation? Thanks!
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That's a configuration similar to mine, so you should be able to get similar results. Real time, or pretty close in 4K.
Did you install all the drivers from Red's website ? Is the card recognized ? Is the Rocket button in RCX activated ? Normally you should get a message at startup that the card is only running on 4 lines, but that's not an issue. And RCX should automatically start with a 1/2 res playback, instead of the usual 1/8th.

Last thing I can think of : did you restart your computer after connecting the card through thunderbolt ? It is NOT hot plug, so you need to do that in order for it to be recognized and to work.
 
the latter. thunderbolt protocol is built the same across the board. so when you plug it in and boot up the system will automatically see it, and just treat it like how a computer tower see's pci cards on its motherboards. it's up to the card company to have drivers that fit into that protocol. but a lot of stuff just works right off the bat. i don't think RED did anything special with their drivers, it just automatically recognized the pci card, and the drivers did the rest. but i think some cards require something extra in the drivers if their drivers don't fit within the thunderbolt realm for whatever reason.
 
bert tan said:
We tried the Sonnet Echo Express Pro with a 2011 17" Macbook Pro 2.3GHz Processor, 8GB RAM to do transcoding on a 1 minute clip that was in the laptop itself, not running off any external hard drive. The speed was not real time. We then transcoded the same clip without the Sonnet this time. It took the same amount of time to transcode the same clip with or without the Sonnet. Anyone knows how to do a proper test or how to configure a laptop setup with the Sonnet to work at its fastest speed despite the 4x lane limitation? Thanks!
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Bert,

Check out this post by Jeff Kilgroe: http://www.reduser.net/forum/showth...-Express-Pro&p=1034465&viewfull=1#post1034465

Jeff Kilgroe said:
Without going into all the details, the Thunderbolt port isn't fast enough to satisfy a PCIe 2.0 X4 slot, or a PCIe 1.x X8 slot... What you do gain with the X8 slot in the Magma is better distribution of bandwidth since the Rocket card is a v1.x 8 lane card. Theoretically, you stand to gain up to 250MB/s of throughput by moving the Rocket card from the Sonnet enclosure to the Magma 3T. In terms of real-world gains, I'm not so sure... I think it's one of those cases where you would have to compare benchmarks and see if the transition was really worth it.

I wouldn't stress over the little extra bandwidth afforded to the Rocket by going to the Magma box, unless you are primarily concerned only with the Rocket itself. I would go with whatever expander fits your overall needs the best. The Magma 3T looks like a compelling solution.

Personally, I think both of these companies dropped the ball on their slot capabilities. Sonnet did well by making their slots X16 in a mechanical sense and able to take a larger, beefier card. However, the support for PCIe v1.x cards is crippled by restricting the slots to 4 lanes. For PCIe v2.x cards it's just fine... Although, when I look through the arsenal of cards out there that I might install in one of these, the only v1.x card that enters the equation is the RED Rocket. So maybe these guys really aren't off their rockers. The Sonnet is a great solution so far, but for Rocket-oriented use, it seems the Magma 3T and the upcoming mLink enclosure are better suited.
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Hope this helps.
 
looks like September according to email I just got from mlogic.
 
I got my email from them on 8/5 saying I had a week to accept the order slot and make payment. I wasn't in a position to do it at the time, but yes, they are taking orders and I think things are moving along as planned.
 
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