R3D Transcoding, Rendering, and Exporting (with a smidge of playback)

[Phil Holland]

Here's a copy of what I blasted on Facebook last night in regards to the latest and greatest hardware versus camera solutions today with some notes about some incoming codecs and such. Definitely a stream of conscious post, but perhaps useful for those with older or not-so-older hardware.

Apologies for being a little off the air as of late when it comes to discussing cameras and the computers we use to do things. I have been busy filming, then post, then repeat for a hot minute and often in the middle of nowhere (which is often also a pretty cool somewhere).

I might make a detailed write up about all this as I've done in the past, but across PC/Windows and Apple/MacOS systems in the 22/23 era the efficiency jump as of late is between 20-50% faster if you have all categories tended to to get the most out of your modern generation CPU and GPU. I also deal with tasks that are severely heavier when it comes to image processing and rendering and that's also been a big one. This also benefits other camera codecs, but there's variance on how systems and software interact with things due to a variety of factors. I'd say on the low increase side maybe 10-15% faster in some categories. But an increase in performance is exactly that.

Realtime Playback of native REDCODE RAW in 8K has been possible for a while, but I am doing specific tests under "certain conditions" this week. Those are more common grading scenarios or weirder things. This gets more interesting if you work in time bases that are a bit off the beaten path of 24, 25, and 30 like 48, 60, and spooky town 120 fps. Getting uncompressed 16-bit 8K 60fps was a goal years back for absolute insanity. That's also doable for a bit with the right hardware, but I'll say it comically that a wee bit of pain. However in typical delivery codecs like H.265 or mezzanine ProRes, very doable in 10 and 12-bit. Some televisions way back in 2019 were able to handle a decent H.265 encoded stream for 8K 120 internally, which was some of movement on this front. GPUs are crazy now. HDMI 2.1 actually exists on creation and exhibition hardware. Lovely. New DP standards and the utterly exciting potential of Thunderbolt 4 has been great to explore early on. It's going to go hard once in full swing.

I primarily deal with mastering in 8K and 4K for a long while now. With higher resolution specialty projects. Some of these considerations are pertaining to just what it takes to fully explore daily through final workflows for these projects which span between faster than realtime exporting through 1-9 hours per minute for real heavy work. You can see clearly where any speed increase is welcome. Storage for a while now has really unlocked some freedom when it comes to speed and latency, but suffers when it comes to capacity and that's where the pain point has been for a while between solid state and spinning disk. But some interesting spinning disk tech is coming that will really shakeup larger storage volumes fairly soon.

Also testing some not-available hardware when I have the time as well as exploring new codecs like H.266 and some backend stuff that's never seen. Much like the early days of VP9, Av1, and H.265, it all hurts until hardware and software support matures. VVC was locked in 2020 and last update was last year, so I would expect support incoming shortly on the hardware side. Maybe 2-3 years. Other interesting stuff going on in the world of color, but that is a whole other bag of worms I'll save for later fishing trip.
And here's one of my V-Raptors out in the wild. Literally. Reptilian kiss. Smooch and hiss.

 

[M Harvey]

Thanks for cross-posting to RU!

 

[Phil Holland]

I want to add another layer to this as many might not have gone through the ebbs and flows of new hardware, operating systems, and generally technology advancements that hit our profession.

When new things come out, especially in our modern media landscape, many are quick to do reviews. Now that some of that has been rolling in and more or less confirming what I posted above, I'd like to highlight one thing that is being missed.

Optimization.

When new hardware comes out often we don't get to see the best of what it has to offer until there are software updates for the various programs we use that include optimizations or driver updates. Things are moving fast now and what is true today on the newest hardware might not be true tomorrow (shockingly sometimes in either direction).

Hopefully this is helpful as I have been seeing people strolling around with 10 year old hardware and somehow thinking 2-3 camera generations went by and they aren't getting state of the art performance. And though some new tech might be small incremental speed increases, in a couple months you might see much more significant performance boosts. It just takes time to implement with all of the coding, debugging, and creating that needs to go down to make that level of heat accessible to us.

Relating squarely to the modern RED workflow. We have significantly faster media now with DSMC3 that can be offloaded very quickly if you have the hardware to support it. Similarly with a quick transcode you can be faster than realtime or a few times that depending on what your needs are. And yes, editing in an 8K timeline is doable with native REDCODE RAW if you got the hardware to drive that. Even for large projects. But you can also make your life easier by exploring Debayer qualities during edit or of course proxy workflow if you want to be much more nimble on the disk space.

This is actually a fairly exciting time in modern motion picture camera tech as well as the post side. It's moving fast now. The real next gen stuff that's coming is going to change a lot of things industry-wide. And what's here today already has had that potentialy over the last several years of intermediate steps.

Though I don't know if everybody should do it, but if you are upgrading to the newest camera tech, consider stowing some budget for new computer things whatever platform you're on.

And I should also mention there's a bevy of decent affordable monitors out there that are pretty color accurate. There's also a lot of frustratingly almost great landing on good or likely maybe only good for gaming. Tread cautiously there.