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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

Because of the GPU acceleration it's no longer 1 component. This is a Pipeline now. In the past the CPU was the most important. Now you want the right CPU with enough ram with the best video card that system can really push. Right now many of the video cards can exceed what a system configuration can provide in data to push the card beyond a certain percentage of processing available. Some codecs require more processing than others so those will require more CPU processing to get the data required for GPU processing down to the GPU fast enough to really use the power in the GPU.
 
Eric, thanks for explanation.
I currently have PC with i7-4770 3.5 GHZ, 32GB ram and GeForce GTX 660. I am satisfied with performance. I would just like to have some faster exporting in Premiere.

Now I am looking for some similar performance with Mac Pro, because I have to work with export of Apple Prores mov files.
 
Very video nice evaluation from MyTherapy Post in the UK and Jigsaw24 on how the new Mac Pro works with Resolve using different kinds of footage -- Red, Alexa, F65, 4K, HD, ProRes, etc.:


And thanks to Margus Voll on the LiftGammaGain website for the tip. I'm surprised that F55 footage could be debayered in real time with no problem, along with several nodes, but the Epic footage stumbled.
 
Frank Glencairn said:
4-5 FPS? Really?
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Yeah. I've seen several different tests with 6, 8 & 12 core Mac Pro's and the Dragon footage always brings things to a standstill. I'm sure things will improve, especially if red were to open things up to 3rd parties, but as of now a Dragon camera means getting a new RRX card to play ball.
 
Paul Schneider said:
Yeah. I've seen several different tests with 6, 8 & 12 core Mac Pro's and the Dragon footage always brings things to a standstill. I'm sure things will improve, especially if red were to open things up to 3rd parties, but as of now a Dragon camera means getting a new RRX card to play ball.
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So it won't play silky and smooth in better performance mode 6k in a 2k or 4k timeline ? .. That really sucks. My laptop can do it for about 10 minute before the CPU starts to cook.
You'd think a 12 core would do it all day every day.
I know it won't play 6k full res , but half res you'd think it would.
 
Good review but I would have liked to see Epic 4K footage in there as well, if nothing else to compare the speed with to the highest res of the other cameras.

Doesn't surprise me, full res 6k is still pretty way out there. The fact that you can do it at 1/4 res (still more than 1080) is pretty damn good me thinks!
 
Mark Toia said:
So it won't play silky and smooth in better performance mode 6k in a 2k or 4k timeline ? .. That really sucks. My laptop can do it for about 10 minute before the CPU starts to cook.
You'd think a 12 core would do it all day every day.
I know it won't play 6k full res , but half res you'd think it would.
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Eh...it's early. From what I've heard the performance in RedCine using the GPU is much better.
 
Performance on Dragon clips in FCPX means nothing at the moment. They're using old SDK, very preliminary support, when it comes to Dragon. It just doesn't work well at all. Even the latest REDCINE-X without CUDA/OpenCL enabled and barely scaling to a couple threads handles Dragon a lot better.

My 8-core Mac Pro can play back Dragon 6KF at half res just fine, very smooth. Editing is yet another matter, but then again so is optimization and currently REDCINE-X is not keen on either of those things.
 
I've been asked by a local college to design a class in 4K production, as they are budgeting to buy a Scarlet and some new Mac Pros. I just got for myself a nMP 12 core fully configured to the max, but I know their budget is going to have to be a lot more modest. Does anyone have an opinion as to what the minimum configuration of a nMP should be to be able to have a REASONABLE (not the BEST) workflow working with Scarlet media in FCPX? Would a BASE configuration of the Quad-Core be sufficient for students to learn on?
 
Paul does it have to be FCPX native 4k in full res? i think teaching them how to offline and reconform is just as important as maybe showing them how to cut scarlet at low res playback. the reality is even on a dated machine if one is willing to go for reduced playback you don't need super high end horse power. in redcine for instance i playback 4k full res scarlet at lowest compression redcode on a 4 year old cheapo core 2 duo. granted at 1/16 the image is no where near 4k, but i can still do playback this way, and grade at say 1/2 res or so and know that even if i can't playback near full res it still looks fine, and do my coloring on stills. i really doubt students need 4k real time full res editing/grading/any of that...teaching them how to offline is a very valid thing, a redcine to fcpx workflow...how to import into fcpx and make proxies, and then maybe native playback only at reduced quality and boom they can get by on much cheaper systems
 
I would recommend iMacs or HP Z1 systems with a combination of fast localized storage. Maybe a SAN as well if there are enough systems to justify. I don't know what heir overall budget is or how many systems, but Scarlet 4K footage is easily do-able on these all-in-one systems. Maybe get one new Mac Pro and a few iMacs.

I'm also with Brian on the offline and reconfirm approach. Not saying that should be the primary focus, but it should be taught along with using native clips in a direct-to-edit workflow. Both approaches are equally used these days, often can be used interchangeably on the same productions.
 
Thanks for the input guys...great points! Probably one Mac Pro and as many iMacs as the budget allows would be better than a limited number of new Mac Pros. Variety of workflows is important to learn. Even so, has anybody done any tests with FCPX running on a stock 4-core nMP? Jeff, thanks again for your very informative posts. I've learned a lot from them.
 
I did a (very subjective) quick test in the local applestore using my own scarlet R3D's into FCPX. It was the quad core nMP - base configuration. I couldn't get ok playback in FCPX and REDCINE was only ok at 1/4 res I think. I only had two clips - a 2k 50fps R3D and 4KHD, 25 fps at 3:1. Not sure if this helps but for me it showed that a 6 core with D700's might be a better mix if wanting some smoother playback at decent resolution on a 'budget'.


Paul Kalbach said:
Thanks for the input guys...great points! Probably one Mac Pro and as many iMacs as the budget allows would be better than a limited number of new Mac Pros. Variety of workflows is important to learn. Even so, has anybody done any tests with FCPX running on a stock 4-core nMP? Jeff, thanks again for your very informative posts. I've learned a lot from them.
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The stock D300 GPUs are pretty weak. Fine for those who don't need much or any GPU acceleration, but then comes the question of why do they need to have two of them? Would much rather see a base Mac Pro config with single D500.

Once again not sure on budget for the school, but they need to get the D700's with their Mac Pro. And at least the 6-core. Better to go 8-core. 12-core can be beneficial if they run the right software -- see the choosing number of cores thread in this forum.

REDCINE-X doesn't scale well to more than a couple threads and the quad-core CPU is pretty snappy. Not having good playback that Daniel mentioned comes back to two possibilities. One, the D300 GPUs really are not doing anything here. Although, it seems totally off based on his clip specs. 2K clips should play at full resolution without breaking a sweat. So that means I'm questioning where the clips were hosted from. The results seem to suggest that he was loading/ playing them from a USB flash drive or something. I also did some in-store tests on a Mac Pro, stock 6-core, and it handled 4K EPIC clips pretty easily, 1/2 res playback was no sweat in RCX and multiple 4K and 5K clips were good in FCPX in a 1080p playback window. I don't recall if the timeline/ project was 1080p or 3840x2160. I only put on 4 clips, 2 @ 4K and 2 @ 5K, but copied to the internal PCIe storage, actually just ran from a folder on the desktop.

My 8-core handles even better.
 
Hi Jeff - I was surprised too - the files were copied to the desktop so should have been accessed fine. I also can't recall the timeline setup though - it was all done in a bit of hurry. I did wonder if the applestore disk image had something to do with it though? tThere was an odd moment when the files copied over from the USB (a Patriot XT USB3) - the first time the files copied to the desktop in about a minute ~18gb. After restarting the machine we copied them again and it was very slow - more like 7 minutes or something. After cancelling the copy, ejecting the disk and reinserting, they copied over again in just on a minute or so. Like I said though, all rather subjective and done on the fly. We had compared the same machine to a spec'd up iMac at the same store and the iMac beat the nMP in an export to Pro res of the same FCPX project (from the apple disk image). I figured this would be iMac's intel hardware acceleration playing a part too?

Jeff Kilgroe said:
The stock D300 GPUs are pretty weak. Fine for those who don't need much or any GPU acceleration, but then comes the question of why do they need to have two of them? Would much rather see a base Mac Pro config with single D500.

Once again not sure on budget for the school, but they need to get the D700's with their Mac Pro. And at least the 6-core. Better to go 8-core. 12-core can be beneficial if they run the right software -- see the choosing number of cores thread in this forum.

REDCINE-X doesn't scale well to more than a couple threads and the quad-core CPU is pretty snappy. Not having good playback that Daniel mentioned comes back to two possibilities. One, the D300 GPUs really are not doing anything here. Although, it seems totally off based on his clip specs. 2K clips should play at full resolution without breaking a sweat. So that means I'm questioning where the clips were hosted from. The results seem to suggest that he was loading/ playing them from a USB flash drive or something. I also did some in-store tests on a Mac Pro, stock 6-core, and it handled 4K EPIC clips pretty easily, 1/2 res playback was no sweat in RCX and multiple 4K and 5K clips were good in FCPX in a 1080p playback window. I don't recall if the timeline/ project was 1080p or 3840x2160. I only put on 4 clips, 2 @ 4K and 2 @ 5K, but copied to the internal PCIe storage, actually just ran from a folder on the desktop.

My 8-core handles even better.
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