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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 Quad Core iMac

Here's another question for ya... is 8 gb of ddr3 memory and a 512 mb video card good enough to edit 4k footage? What are the recommended system specs for editing 4k? Can someone shed some light on this issue. Can someone tell me?
 
Jake Houser said:
Here's another question for ya... is 8 gb of ddr3 memory and a 512 mb video card good enough to edit 4k footage? What are the recommended system specs for editing 4k? Can someone shed some light on this issue. Can someone tell me?
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8GB would be ideal, but you could probably scrape by with 4GB too.
 
Now what about color grading Red footage? What kind of machines are needed to properly color and do this DI stuff... editing is one thing... but altering the image is another... what sort of specs can people scape by with if they hope to be color processing the footage themselves?
 
I know it's a basic question but I want to be self-sufficient on a tricked out new imac. I want to be able to edit and color grade everything myself with a 2.8 core i7 and say 12 gigs of ram and my basic 512 mb video card... can it be done is the question? The Color correction bit as well?
 
Jake Houser said:
Now what about color grading Red footage? What kind of machines are needed to properly color and do this DI stuff... editing is one thing... but altering the image is another... what sort of specs can people scape by with if they hope to be color processing the footage themselves?
Click to expand...

Well, I haven't had much experience grading RED footage but I have played around with some 2K and 4K clips in Color using the native REDCODE settings. This was on a previous generation iMac - dual core, probably two or four GB of ram - so nothing special. But it seemed to handle it alright - it was a long time ago but from memory it was perfectly usable. I did only have about 60 seconds on the timeline though, so it could get a little more resource hungry with longer sequences (or maybe not). Render times were fairly bad though - I think it took somewhere between 20 - 45 minutes to render it out to 2K (or maybe 1080p - it was a long time ago).

I'm fairly sure that you'd be fine with a Quad i7.
 
Long thread, sorry if I am lazy but maybe someone can help me out with a quick answer. Has anyone figured out a way around the external storage issue? Is FW800 and USB all there is to work with? It would be a freaggin shame. Guess there is no point anyway.

And what about the RED Rocket? No go there either right?

It would be a freaggin shame.
 
ISCSI might be a good choice here. Check out a Drobo http://www.drobo.com/
They Drobo Pro has ISCSI, there are other systems out there but just what I'm looking at.

Also ISCSI should be able to handle up to about 100MB/s consistently. I will take up your lan however to do this.

I'd say a REDRocket would not work, or at least I have not found a way to make it work yet.
 
Jake Houser said:
I know it's a basic question but I want to be self-sufficient on a tricked out new imac. I want to be able to edit and color grade everything myself with a 2.8 core i7 and say 12 gigs of ram and my basic 512 mb video card... can it be done is the question? The Color correction bit as well?
Click to expand...

It will work, but it will be slow when it comes to transcoding, color grading, etc.. And it's not the system or video card that will be the bottleneck, but the storage system. There is just no good way to get performance storage bandwidth on the iMac systems. None.

Also, you have to match all your SO-DIMM slots to maintain the full memory performance. Going to 12GB would mean installing 2x4GB and 2x2GB modules, which would disallow the two banks to operate together, effectively cutting your memory bandwidth in half. So it's either 8GB or 16GB that makes sense. Too bad those 4GB SO-DIMMs are so expensive right now. Kinda makes the Mac Pro look a lot more attractive... Especially for the uses being discussed in this thread.

Darren Orange said:
Also ISCSI should be able to handle up to about 100MB/s consistently. I will take up your lan however to do this.
Click to expand...

Yes, iSCSI has been mentioned as an option. And probably the only realistic option if one needs to work with external storage and RED media at the same time. iSCSI real-world performance tops out around 85MB/s or so, about the same as FW800. Actual maximum in a perfect, 100% efficiency model would be 95MB/s with Gig-E being 1Gbits with a 8 bits per 10 bits transmittal factor.

The only other possibility is to swap out the optical drive for other storage like a faster (but small) SSD or route that SATA connection to the outside and connect a SATA storage system of some sort. However, it's just a single 3Gbps SATA connection. Easily maxed out these days with just 2 or 3 HDDs.

I'd say a REDRocket would not work, or at least I have not found a way to make it work yet.
Click to expand...

Not going to work. No access to the PCIe bus. I suppose one could always make an external box (read stand-alone system) to host the RED Rocket and then let it and the computer communicate via FW or Gig-E, but that's somewhat of a dumb solution. But that's not going to give real-time playback on the iMac or efficient bandwidth to bring transcoded files back to the iMac. May as well just plug your monitor and keyboard into that external box to run the Rocket.
 
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Was playing with one of these today and was seriously considering buying one for playing with Scarlet footage at home...but found out the ethernet isn't Jumbo Frame Enabled. Sly bastards...or is it a snow leopard issue?

EDIT: How crippling (bottleneck) is it gonna be to edit and mess with 2K Scarlet footage on an internal 2TB HDD if I back up footage onto external drives to protect them. This would only be for personal work not for clients. I could build a PC for the price of an iMac its just the 27" display that is so pleasing for the price of unit. I could downgrade to the Dual Core iMac and have a NAS hooked up to that. But how would the dualcore likely perform?
 
I have one and it is great for fcp with no problems editing prores downconverts, the glossy screen is a major drawback but in a dark room is ok. But it is no replacement for my mac pro with rocket. 2.93ghz dual xeons with RR is insanely fast. It is nice to have a cheap powerfull all in one for assistants to do basic fcp and after effetcs work on at 1/5th the cost of a top end pro.
 
I have i7 iMac connected to GraniteSTOR via dedicated 1Gb ethernet and easily edit proxies on FCP (1/4). Also, Matrox MXO now works with i7 iMac and I can output video and the audio through HDSDI or DVI and RCA analog audio stereo out. Also, MXO outputs Clipfinder's Edit look window with 709 standard so your one light grading will be accurate.
So i7 iMac is very valuable as proxy editing, metadata adjustment and ProRes 422HQ editing.
 
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