Moving to larger PC.. Help and thoughts

[Hans von Sonntag]

you use Resolve on a windows workstation? Please explain.

And thanks for the feedback.

Jay

No, Jay.

But a HP Z800 is the workstation of choice of all the Autodesk Linux systems such as Flame, Smoke or Lustre and is of course very well suited for Resolve on Linux.

Hans

PS: My computer skills are limited. If I would tinker around with computer parts I would probably ending up troubleshooting that box all day and not making one film. IMHO, quality hardware has it's place and is for users like me cheaper.

 

[Elsie N]

I dunno.. At this point, I am considering pulling some things off the "monster PC" and getting a decent mac as well.

One way or the other, I need to upgrade.. I'll keep people informed.

Jay

Jay, first of all, I know nothing of which I am about to speak... But I'm wondering.... can you build a Hackintosh out of rad pc parts? If you can, perhaps you can have your monster machine with pc parts and run the Mac OS on it too?

 

[Jose Lomeña]

Jay, first of all, I know nothing of which I am about to speak... But I'm wondering.... can you build a Hackintosh out of rad pc parts? If you can, perhaps you can have your monster machine with pc parts and run the Mac OS on it too?

I'm a happy hackintosh user. But i don't recomend to anybody. Never!!, why? Because they will call me any time that they have a problem.

Here in europe we have a company that sell a monster hackintosh, www.pearc.de and i think they can give you a osx software upgrade support.

The only problem at this moment is not nvidia470 support, only 285. I'm thinking to overclock my 285 to catch the 470.
You can make dual proccesor system too, but is soo expensive

saludos

Jose

 

[Graham_C]

Jay, first of all, I know nothing of which I am about to speak... But I'm wondering.... can you build a Hackintosh out of rad pc parts? If you can, perhaps you can have your monster machine with pc parts and run the Mac OS on it too?

Elsie,Apparently you can according to the www.PearC.de faq`s from the link above..

"13. Can I install another operating system such as Linux or Windows?
Yes, you can. However it is necessary to install another hard drive and install the other operating system on it. If you decide to install it on the main hard drive (Mac OS X start volume), it can cause several complications and is not supported by us."

Not sure in practicse how this would work though?..Resolve on your hackintosh with all the benefits you wish for from a PC Jay?!

Couls someone who knows what they`re talking set the record straight?

 

[Jeff Kilgroe]

Yeah, building a hackintosh isn't a big deal... Except you are confined to using hardware that will be supported by the software. People complain about the cost of the Mac Pro, but go and price out a similar system with dual Xeon CPUs. Not cheap at all. Apple charges no more for their systems than Dell, for example. Sometimes less, but they're not real good at keeping prices up to date. Especially lately as the Mac Pro is in need of an update or better yet, a full reboot.. Like any other system vendor, they really get you on the price of HDDs and RAM. With a hackintosh, they can be stable, but you're always at the risk of not having a full Apple EFI. But they can be a workable system if you accept the imitations and risks involved -- a 4 or 6 core single-CPU hackintosh can be powerful when overclocked and have a lot of performance benefits in software that relies more on the speed of one or two CPUs rather than scaling to higher numbers of cores. Overclocking the 285 won't get you a 470. It will just get you a 285 that's a bit faster. I just wish nVidia would release some drivers for the 285 that don't completely suck ass. The latest driver release from about 10 days ago fixes the CUDA issue with OSX 10.6.4, but still lacks any real performance enhancements or major bug fixes.

@ Jay,

I assumed before that you wanted the dual Xeon for the number of cores and a few other possibilities it brings to the table. It's a great system if you're going to be doing a lot of rendering. But what Bruce and Steve have pointed out, a single 6-core CPU overclocked is going to give you faster performance within most of your applications and at a cheaper price. Even though the Adobe Mercury Engine is CPU-based and scales across multiple CPUs. The performance benefit from more cores really tapers off past 4 physical cores or about 6 virtual cores. GPU plays a role in the Mercury Engine as well. It handles most of the color transformations and a lot of the FX plugins and transition plugins. CS5 tells you which plugins are GPU accelerated too.

So before buying the dual Xeon over the single i7 workstation, ask yourself this... Do you do a lot of rendering where you would benefit from the additional CPUs in the system? Is that more important to you than the up-front performance of your software that you will be working in every day?

It's possible to overclock the Xeons as well, contrary to popular belief, but it's not easy and you will need access to specific BIOS hacks and other tools to get it right.

 

[Graham_C]

Jeff could you clarify this if possible,i`m getting a bit mixed up on my learning curve,you said above..

"Even though the Adobe Mercury Engine is CPU-based and scales across multiple CPUs"

So the Mercury engine is specific cutting edge software that helps leverage multi core cpu`s for rendering?..so where then do the multi core GPU`s come into play within CS5? It`s the CPU/GPU tasking that i can`t get clear on

 

[Jeff Kilgroe]

Premiere Pro has the Mercury Engine for playback. It leverages multiple CPUs to distribute processing for multiple streams of video. For example, all R3D processing and debayer is done on the CPUs. It has to be done via RED's SDK, which currently has no GPU acceleration for debayering. However, the Mercury engine also makes use of CUDA (nVidia's GPU acceleration interface) and it uses it for color, transitions, layering and FX.

If you have a crappy GPU in your system, even if the system is a hot-rod 12-core PC, you may find that the CPUs plow right through decoding of the R3D streams, but completely chokes at transitions such as dissolves and wipes between them. If you want to see the CPU activity with the Mercury Playback Engine, load up a CPU monitor (Task Manager on Windows or Activity Monitor on Mac) and you can see graphs for the loads on each of your CPU cores. Watch what they do when something like the Mercury Engine runs.

The Mercury Engine is probably the best example of using multiprocessing combined with GPU acceleration in any current mainstream software. By Adobe using CUDA, that should theoretically be able to scale in ability too with more powerful GPUs and eventually more physical GPUs via SLI. The drawback to CUDA is it's nVidia's own proprietary interface. OpenCL should eventually be a better and completely open choice, but it's not quite up to standards yet.

I said above that the Mercury Engine doesn't scale well past a certain number of CPUs, which is still up for debate at this point. Because most systems with several CPU cores are typically being bottlenecked by the GPU doing much of the on-screen pixel-pushing within CS5's Mercury.

But the thing to keep in mind here is the CPUs and GPUs work in tandem within CS5. You can see the effect easily in Windows by assigning CS5 to only run on a couple CPUs.

 

[Graham_C]

Many thanks for that clarification Jeff,much appreciated.

 

[Mohammed El Sharqawy]

It has to be done via RED's SDK, which currently has no GPU acceleration for debayering.

why not? I'm thinking.. why wouldn't RED upgrade their SDK to benefit from CUDA? will this affect the sales of RED Rocket? CUDA is real amazing technology.. and the theory behind it is mind blowing clever and effective.. well, IMHO, I see all the future of processing is to be CUDA powered.. its a great alternative to the lame CPU technology from intel.. which does not require changing the whole platform to benefit from it..

 

[Kenneth Elkington]

why not? I'm thinking.. why wouldn't RED upgrade their SDK to benefit from CUDA? will this affect the sales of RED Rocket? CUDA is real amazing technology.. and the theory behind it is mind blowing clever and effective.. well, IMHO, I see all the future of processing is to be CUDA powered.. its a great alternative to the lame CPU technology from intel.. which does not require changing the whole platform to benefit from it..

1) it requires a ground up rewrite of the debayering code.
2) It's been said that CUDA isn't particularly good at decoding wavelet-based images.

 

[Mohammed El Sharqawy]

I think de-bayering is a different process than decode.. and I also think that de-bayering eats most of math..
I don't know how much improvement you get in quality when you use CUDA.. I think there is gains, but, simply decode on CPU and send the RAW image to the GPU and watch the magic on OpenGL algorithms..
I've seen many apps that was ground up rewritten many times and also ported.. you just re-write the code that translate the algorithms you already made.. not re-inventing new ones..
the world should always move forward..

 

[Danno Anderson]

Jay, if you haven't seen this from Nvidia, I thought it would be of interest.

" Compared to the latest quad-core CPUs, Tesla C2050 and C2070 Computing Processors deliver equivalent supercomputing performance at 1/10th the cost and 1/20th the power consumption. "

" Tesla C2070 will be available in Q3 2010 "at
http://www.nvidia.com/object/product_tesla_C2050_C2070_us.htmlnal discount on

 

[Mohammed El Sharqawy]

Jay, if you haven't seen this from Nvidia, I thought it would be of interest.

" Compared to the latest quad-core CPUs, Tesla C2050 and C2070 Computing Processors deliver equivalent supercomputing performance at 1/10th the cost and 1/20th the power consumption. "

" Tesla C2070 will be available in Q3 2010 "at
http://www.nvidia.com/object/product_tesla_C2050_C2070_us.htmlnal discount on

I wish to know if this thing works with CS5 mercury? and how much it can give to the workflow?

 

[Uli Plank]

I'm sure Adobe will look into supporting new cards pretty soon, but it this point in time it's not officially supported.

 

[Peter Chamberlain]

Surely its not just a computer performance issue, it's an overall facility productivity issue. As was mentioned in an earlier post, if you can afford it, you can be more productive having a dedicated Resolve system and a separate editor, VFX, 3D etc. Each has their own sweet spot for configuration and each can be updated as it produces revenue.

From the DaVinci Resolve perspective, we offer Mac OS and Linux (Supermicro) solutions and both have specific off-the-shelf hardware requirements to get the real time performance everyone loves on Resolve.

Resolve reads r3d's on the timeline, decoding on the fly, mixed with other formats and resolutions. Import your Avid or FCP or CS5 EDL and we re-conform the clips, read the camera metadata and vary the REDraw decoder parameters for every clip. Renders with source TC so you can re-conform back in the editor are a simple checkbox. All this on both Mac and Linux OS with DAS or on a SAN. Given the amount of ProRes used in the industry the Mac Resolve running CUDA with the FX4800 or GTX285 stands up pretty well and compared to the $250,000 systems of a year ago the MacPro hardware cost of today is a fraction for the overall benefit to your facility.

Peter

 

[Graham_C]

Peter,is there any likelyhood whatsoever that Resolve may one day work in PC?
Apologies if this is slightly off topic..

 

[Peter Chamberlain]

While I would never say never, we like Linux due to the control, power and expandability it provides, and MacOS has many similar attributes. Adding a Windows OS would be significantly more work than our port to Mac OS and I think there are plenty of other things for us to do before we even look at Windows so I would not expect it any time soon.

 

[Bruce Allen]

While I would never say never, we like Linux due to the control, power and expandability it provides, and MacOS has many similar attributes. Adding a Windows OS would be significantly more work than our port to Mac OS and I think there are plenty of other things for us to do before we even look at Windows so I would not expect it any time soon.

Wow - you DaVinci guys have really picked up on one of the best things of RED - letting us know what's in the works so that we can plan accordingly. Even if the answer to our question is "very likely not" - super useful for us contemplating buying a system! Thank you, Peter.

Leave it to Bruce to fuck with my world....

Sorry! Will buy you beer when you are in LA.

He brings up a good point in regards to compatibility. When I shoot for clients, a lot of them use FCP. I do NOT use any MAC stuff in my closed loop productions, but that does not mean I don't use MAC.. Clients want stuff all the time from there.

Yes - it's difficult explaining that you CANNOT render them a ProRes. Also, Mac-using clients generally treat you with more suspicion if you're on a PC - even to the point of blaming Apple's stupid Quicktime gamma issues on you when they bring your stuff into FCP! And if you can't run FCP on your end, you can't step through the problem with them, etc...

As for Davinci, sigh... That's a painful issue.. I REALLY want Davinci, but I am still trying to figure out the damn workflow here.

Aww, and now they're even posting in your thread - how can you spurn them now ?!

Personally I'm using a new i7 iMac now to finish a FCP-originated project for a client, with two OWC RAID5 8TB arrays. The FW800 bus is killing me though. As is my workflow with Premiere, Color and After Effects. The moment the next big Mac Pro update happens, (sandy bridge, new gfx cards and more PCIe lanes - I can only hope I am getting that and Resolve.

If another feature color correction job comes through soon though I will jump on the cheapest thing which can run Resolve - a used current-gen Mac Pro.

The only other affordable software I can see on the horizon that might be able to process R3D files as well as Resolve for my needs is The Foundry's Storm - but it looks to be twice the price of Resolve, without the name recognition, a version 1 product with nowhere near the full featureset needed for finishing - and I don't think it's aimed at that market. RedCine-X with magic bullet colorista plugin might get close but again... I don't imagine it'll be as good for color correction as a DaVinci.

Bruce Allen
www.boacinema.com

 

[Mohammed El Sharqawy]

the Mac Resolve running CUDA with the FX4800 or GTX285 stands up pretty well.

Peter

no support for CUDA on linux?

 

[Jose Lomeña]

While I would never say never, we like Linux due to the control, power and expandability it provides, and MacOS has many similar attributes. Adding a Windows OS would be significantly more work than our port to Mac OS and I think there are plenty of other things for us to do before we even look at Windows so I would not expect it any time soon.

Peter, why not a resolve 3d for macos?. The linux version is sooo expensive, i think it can be a revolution. Do you have any plan on it?.