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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 Pros... which video card?

Cool, would love to know how fast this machine is. I just can't test while I am rendering out something else and prepping the cams for a shoot tomorrow. Seems like it is faster than out x1900xt machines though.
 
Out of interest Irri, what disks are you outputting too - if the speed increase only affects ProRes renders then maybe you're hitting the write speed limit of your HDDs...

Certainly possible with DPX stacks.
 
Going from a 2 disk mirror to a single disk. SAN is down at the mo.
 
Ah, I think we've got a contender... Bit strange to say it's great news your SAN is down(!), but that is great news in the respect that it means there's every likelihood that the DPX render time has got 3x faster as well (as in the NVidia drivers have finally been fixed, most likely), you're just not seeing the advantage as your HDD transfer is maxed out.

Here's hoping....

Love to hear what the render time difference is once you get your SAN back up (good luck with that, hope it's not too much of a nightmare, by the way), if you get a moment to test it when the dust settles.
 
Hi Dominic,

I think you're right about the disk speed. The ProRes was exactly the same project before and after the gfx update and went from 6 hours to 2.

Yeah, it will be nice to get the SAN up again. Thanks for the well wishes on that. All tests seem to be live at the moment. My frist real chance to play with RedCine was today and it involved exporting the xml from FCP through a droplet to redcine XML, only to find that the offline editor had graded the bloody proxies and that was coming in through the xml into red cine and doing all sorts of strange stuff.

We should get the SAN up this week, but I think there is a driver issue with Leopard which is on the machine with the 8800 :(
 
I'm unfortunately stuffed with work for the night. And tomorrow, too.
First test-possibility is over the weekend... Well... actually that is kinda good. Isn't it? :)

XSAN + Leopard clients is at the moment a big NONONONO!

Sorry!

gunleik
 
I wish I could run Tiger on this new machine. I hate Leopard.
 
Sorry to hear about your troubles Irri - to be honest, I think it's outrageous that Apple have realised an OS that can't support their top-end hardware, and it's especially bad that they've not got it worked out in the (fairly long, by IT terms) amount of time they must have known about it.

Really hope you get it sorted soon, best of luck...
 
We use MetaSAN which seems to have the same issues as the Apple one though we are due a Leopard version in a week or two.
 
Nobody can tell us their experience with the NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT???
 
OK,

I've had my Mac Pro w/8800GT up and running for over 24 hours now. It works. It works great. Had to go with the latest QT 7.4.1 since rolling back to 7.3.1 would crash right and left. But it all works. Only problem is proxies stutter on playback, other than that everything is A-OK. ...Well, except for the odd REDCINE bug, but that happens no matter what hardware you're running on.

It's fast. 4K 2:1 out to DPX or Tiff processes at about 4 frames/second.

I'm still doing some benchmarks and will post more later. I will say that REDCINE could use some optimizations with the multi-threading. It's only pushing each core at about 45-65% when processing. But it saturates a dual-core system like my macbook pro. I haven't got around to it, but I want to see how well REDLINE handles with that. If it's the same, then it would make more sense to run multiple instances of the software (probably not possible with REDCINE due to GPU functions) and assign each instance to only run on a pair of CPU cores rather than scaling to all 8.

Anyway, waiting for the Mac Pro with 8800GT appears to have been a good decision.

System specs:
8 core 3.2GHz
nVidia 8800GT 512MB
16GB RAM
1x1TB HDD as boot/applications
3x1TB HDDs in RAID-0 for workspace
Apple RAID card - not compatible with Windows or bootcamp
I'm driving two Dell 30" displays with this system.
 
Thanks Jeff!!!

It's fast. 4K 2:1 out to DPX or Tiff processes at about 4 frames/second.
Click to expand...

So 1 hour of footage takes 15 minutes to process??? Incredible numbers!!! :blink: :blink:
 
Er, 4 frames of footage/second works out (at 24fps source) to .1667 seconds of footage/second. So an hour of footage takes six hours to process.
 
Hey Jeff, thanks for posting your results. Good to hear the 8800GT's working well, that's the card we wanted to get...

Any chance if you get a moment you fancy testing a ProRes transcode?
 
Jeff Kilgroe said:
OK,

I've had my Mac Pro w/8800GT up and running for over 24 hours now. It works. It works great. Had to go with the latest QT 7.4.1 since rolling back to 7.3.1 would crash right and left. But it all works. Only problem is proxies stutter on playback, other than that everything is A-OK. ...Well, except for the odd REDCINE bug, but that happens no matter what hardware you're running on.

It's fast. 4K 2:1 out to DPX or Tiff processes at about 4 frames/second.

I'm still doing some benchmarks and will post more later. I will say that REDCINE could use some optimizations with the multi-threading. It's only pushing each core at about 45-65% when processing. But it saturates a dual-core system like my macbook pro. I haven't got around to it, but I want to see how well REDLINE handles with that. If it's the same, then it would make more sense to run multiple instances of the software (probably not possible with REDCINE due to GPU functions) and assign each instance to only run on a pair of CPU cores rather than scaling to all 8.

Anyway, waiting for the Mac Pro with 8800GT appears to have been a good decision.

System specs:
8 core 3.2GHz
nVidia 8800GT 512MB
16GB RAM
1x1TB HDD as boot/applications
3x1TB HDDs in RAID-0 for workspace
Apple RAID card - not compatible with Windows or bootcamp
I'm driving two Dell 30" displays with this system.
Click to expand...
Did you go with apple's original ram and hard drives?

Esmilis
 
esmilis said:
Did you go with apple's original ram and hard drives?
Click to expand...

No. Too expensive. Apple currently is using Hynix RAM for all their 800MHz FB-DIMMs. I can buy Hynix from another supplier with Apple spec heatsinks for about $125 per 2GB module. I went with OWC's RAM as they actually have a better warranty and always answer the phone every time I've called them. I didn't pop one of the heatsinks off to see who manufactures it, but I'm going to say there's a good chance it's Hynix (modules look the same outside of the heatsinks from what is exposed) or it could be PNY, Samsung or Corsair. I paid $850 for 8 x 2GB modules from them.

Apple is currently shipping Seagate Barracuda 7200.x drives for their SATA offerings as well as the Seagate 15K.5 Cheetah 300GB for their SAS offering. Why pay Apple prices when I can buy them anywhere for a lot less? Apple wants $750 or whatever for a 300GB SAS drive when I can find them all day long for less than $520?

I went with 4 x 1TB Hitachi 7200rpm drives w/32MB cache. Slightly better performance than the Seagate Barracudas and quiet too. Newegg had them for $267.50 last week and they have a $30 mail in rebate good for up to 5 drives per customer. So I should get $120 back in about a month or two.

BTW: If anyone wants to buy my 2 x 1GB Apple Hynix RAM modules and Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 320GB SATA drive that shipped with the system, PM me. Otherwise I'm putting them on ebay...

Sorry for the long-winded rant, but Apple needs to re-think their component pricing strategy.
 
AKABAKA said:
Er, 4 frames of footage/second works out (at 24fps source) to .1667 seconds of footage/second. So an hour of footage takes six hours to process.
Click to expand...

Yeah, that's about right... It's fast compared to processing on most any other system. It's just that REDCODE is slow right now. In REDCINE, I can almost playback half-res high in real-time. Actually I can play a bit and then jump back and start again with what's in cache and get real-time for a few seconds. Heh. It's so close... Like 21fps. But I guess that's why Offhollywood and Assimilate have SCRATCH doing half res high in realtime on that Boxx system. Similar system architecture, but overclocked to ~4GHz, just enough to push the performance up.

People whine about REDCODE taking too long to process. While I agree, it's also not that bad considering what we're getting -- RAW color workflow, 4K resolution! When I first made my initial venture into HD, it took 8 to 10 hours to process an hour of 1080i60 (1440x1080i that is). Heard many of the same speed complaints back then too.

I can still shoot RED and process footage out to DPX sequence faster than I can shoot film, develop and scan to DPX sequence, so there. :bleh: Oh and a heck of a lot cheaper too.
 
Videoteque73 said:
So 1 hour of footage takes 15 minutes to process??? Incredible numbers!!! :blink: :blink:
Click to expand...

No, you're looking at the numbers backwards... I process 4fps. If you're looking at 24fps footage, that's 1/6th of real-time.

1 hour of 24fps footage is taking approximately 6 hours to process. Although, I've made some tweaks and found a few ways to affect REDCINE performance (both good and bad). I'll post more later.

If you want to process R3D data in real-time or faster, prepare to build yourself a small render farm of 6 to 10 systems.
 
A render farm for Redcine is not a crazy idea.

1 machine 6 hours per 1 hour of footage.
2 machines, maybe not 3 per 1 hour but 3.5 hours
3 machines, 2 hours maybe 2.5

3 machines maybe 15k...the price of a DVC pro HD deck, used of course.

just a thought.
 
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