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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 :)

New Mac Pro + Red Rocket X - need?

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Adrien oneiga

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I'm running a new Mac Pro (8 core) D700's.. I don't currently have a lot of Dragon footage on hand, but Red Cine X seems to be running well with the footage i have. granted, i haven't edited a whole bunch with Dragon footage, but is the Rocket card mainly of benefit to Laptop users or would i see substantial benefits?
 
It depends very much on your demand and workflow needs.

I use a X in my mac pro tower, and there is a significant performance boost. When transcoding with cine-x up to 3 times faster than real time.
And you see performance enhancement using some apps other than Cine X, like Premier and Resolve when working with RED files.
Perhaps Final Cut X, I just can't vouch for that, as I stopped using FCP since 7.xx

If time is not an issue, and you work mostly indie or personal projects, its probably not worth the big price tag.
But if you have to deliver graded files in pro res or any other codec in 24hours or less after a shoot on a regular,
nothing beats that card for both Dragon and MX footage.
 
I have an 8 core trashcan with D700's and I decided not to purchase a rocket-x when I got my dragon. My reasoning was that I wanted a completely raw workflow from start to finish and the rocket-x is mainly about transcoding. So, instead of buying the rocket-x, I invested money into several TB2 SSD drives. I can get RT 1/4 playback out of 6k footage (sometime better depending on aspect ratio and redcode) and 1/2 or full RT playback out of 5k footage. Plus, I also invested in 1TB of SSD in my mac as well. This way, I can usually fit whole sequences to my onboard SSD and edit straight from there if I need even better performance.

As far as transcode speeds go, if you are doing proxies its not amazing but its really not that bad. Not quite real time, but not significantly slower than real time. The only time I've run into issues was when trying to transcode to 4k DCI Proress 4444. I think it was roughly 10 hours for an hour of raw footage. But thankfully I don't have to ever do that transcode in my workflow, because my trashcan can work with the raw files in real time.

Although, even though I skipped the Rocket-x for now, I may get one if I upgrade to 8k Weapon.
 
Cool, thanks for the input! @ James Falco that's good feedback, i think it wouldn't be an issue to pick up a RR-X if i'm doing dailies.
@marcus that's really good to hear! I like the thought of investing into more SSD's, i have a few TB's already and a 1TB SSD on the tower, but i feel like investing into an SSD is a good all around investment. are you using a TB RAID such as RAID 0 / 5 etc? or just TB enclosed SSD?

do you find that transcoding to even lower bitrate proxy formats is time consuming? for example, i don't know whether you would use something like prores LT, but sometimes i like to work with this and then conform during grading + compositing.. just curious.






Marcus Friedlander said:
I have an 8 core trashcan with D700's and I decided not to purchase a rocket-x when I got my dragon. My reasoning was that I wanted a completely raw workflow from start to finish and the rocket-x is mainly about transcoding. So, instead of buying the rocket-x, I invested money into several TB2 SSD drives. I can get RT 1/4 playback out of 6k footage (sometime better depending on aspect ratio and redcode) and 1/2 or full RT playback out of 5k footage. Plus, I also invested in 1TB of SSD in my mac as well. This way, I can usually fit whole sequences to my onboard SSD and edit straight from there if I need even better performance.

As far as transcode speeds go, if you are doing proxies its not amazing but its really not that bad. Not quite real time, but not significantly slower than real time. The only time I've run into issues was when trying to transcode to 4k DCI Proress 4444. I think it was roughly 10 hours for an hour of raw footage. But thankfully I don't have to ever do that transcode in my workflow, because my trashcan can work with the raw files in real time.

Although, even though I skipped the Rocket-x for now, I may get one if I upgrade to 8k Weapon.
Click to expand...
 
I'm not sure you can use the Rocket card in your TB expansion case. At least i had read this some time ago....Perhaps that has changed? So you might want to check on that before buying a redrocketx card and TB expansion chassis.I actually think what i heard was that Graphics cards don't work in the TB Chassis. But i'd double check to see if a Rocket X card can work.
 
Johnny,

Rocket and Rocket-X certainly do work in Thunderbolt expansion chassis. The only caveat is with the original Rocket in that it's not hot-pluggable. You need to plug/unplug it with the computer shut down.

And you are correct that graphics cards don't work in TB chassis.
 
GPU cards will work in a TB chassis, but only in Windows or Linux, it's prohibited with Mac OSX.
 
In my personal experience my red rocket x blazes at 100$ when installed in the 16lane PCI slot on my Mac Pro Tower. Ever since I started putting it in a Sonnet PCI box that runs straight to a new Mac Pro over Thunderbolt2 - then the debarring tine has going up about 4 times... Mean the redrocket card runs only at about 25% over thunderbolt2 and 100% when simply plugged strait into a Mac Pro Tower. My mac Pro tower is actual for sale with a redrocketc-x and it has 12 cores running a 3.46MHZ - so it can still talk on anything Apple can throw it it : )
 
Comes down to full vs quarter or half debayerings and exports aren't just for offline edits plus some of your editing choices can kill your usability if the machine is bogged down already handling wavelets
 
The new version of Final Cut X seems to not really need the RRX card anymore. I ditched mine and have been super solid in 6k with no dodgy playback.

Running 12 Core Trashcan 64GB RAM 1TB SSD Dual D700 using Promise Pegasus 2 over Thunderbolt 2 RAID 0 (8TB)
Super solid.

New Adobe CC out yesterday so i will be testing since that was the sore thumb in my life. I had to dump Adobe a year ago for FCPX because of incessant crashing and apparent incompatibility with anything non-cuda. Supposedly that has changed.
we shall see...

to be continued
 
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