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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 :)

Red Pocket Rocket

T

Thom Steinhoff

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Any plans or is it even possible to do a portable, Macbook pro version of the Red Rocket?

I'd love to have something like this on the road!

Since I'm not in the "I'm not sure if I should buy two or three" category of users but in the "which one should I buy" group--I'd hold out for a portable one if there was one on the horizon.
 
In the Red Rocket update thread, I believe it was Deanan who said that Red would test a mobile solution (perhaps something like the Magma one linked above). There's about 1/8th of the bandwidth on an ExpressCard interface to PCIe extender when compared to a PCIe x8 slot. It's essentially a single lane plus overhead. So that could prove problematic for the Rocket on a mobile platform.

One way to look at the Rocket's bandwidth is this...

A 4096x2304 frame @ 10bits (30bits / per RGB pixel) equates to 33.75MB. So 24 of these is 810MB. 30 of them is 1012.5MB.

A 2048x1152 frame @ 10bits (30bits / per RGB pixel) equates to 8.44MB. So 24 of these is 202.56MB. 30 of them is 253.2MB.

Given that an ExpressCard slot is ~ 298MB/s theoretical maximum and most external PCIe extenders provide a single-lane slot (x1 @ 250MB/s), you should be able to use the Red Rocket externally to work process R3Ds into high quality 2K. That could be a very usable solution for many; Real-time 2K from a notebook.

Also given the above, I can see a strong argument for only needing a PCIe x4 slot for the Red Rocket for those who don't need faster than 4K @ 24fps in real-time or for those who will be spending most of their time working with Scarlet 3K footage.
 
Love the name...

hahahahahha
 
Jeff Kilgroe said:
One way to look at the Rocket's bandwidth is this...

A 4096x2304 frame @ 10bits (30bits / per RGB pixel) equates to 33.75MB. So 24 of these is 810MB. 30 of them is 1012.5MB.

A 2048x1152 frame @ 10bits (30bits / per RGB pixel) equates to 8.44MB. So 24 of these is 202.56MB. 30 of them is 253.2MB.

Given that an ExpressCard slot is ~ 298MB/s theoretical maximum and most external PCIe extenders provide a single-lane slot (x1 @ 250MB/s), you should be able to use the Red Rocket externally to work process R3Ds into high quality 2K. That could be a very usable solution for many; Real-time 2K from a notebook.
Click to expand...

Yikes! Not looking good for the Portable solution.

Also, I wish Red would consider a lower cost solution that converted whatever you have and outputted only to 1080p or even 2K. 4K for $4K and 2K for $2k. That would be plenty for a lot of us, hey even most TV shows I would think would be happy with 1080p.
 
Interesting thread. I love the fact that every time I get on reduser I learn something really useful.

:thumb_postwhore:
 
Given that they just dropped the ExpressCard off *all* of the MBPs, this is now a moot point, yes?
 
Steven Caesare said:
Googling that suggested product name will be problematic...
Click to expand...

In all fairness, I can't read Red Rocket without thinking of the South Park episode entitled "Proper Condom Use." If you haven't seen it and aren't offended by South Park, a Google search for red rocket South Park will turn up a clip so you can be suitably horrified.
 
Working off 2k on a laptop is fantastic! But not if I can't work at 2k off 4k footage. Would there be a way to have that be a possibility? I suppose not since the path would have to be something similar to External HDD > Laptop > Pocket Rocket > Monitor. So I assume the laptop would have to feed the full 4k frames to the Pocket Rocket. Maybe if there were a way to make reference files to work off within the NLE and have Pocket Rocker get only commands from the laptop while pulling the r3d's in through some sort of external drive input??
 
Jeff Kilgroe said:
In the Red Rocket update thread, I believe it was Deanan who said that Red would test a mobile solution (perhaps something like the Magma one linked above). There's about 1/8th of the bandwidth on an ExpressCard interface to PCIe extender when compared to a PCIe x8 slot. It's essentially a single lane plus overhead. So that could prove problematic for the Rocket on a mobile platform.

One way to look at the Rocket's bandwidth is this...

A 4096x2304 frame @ 10bits (30bits / per RGB pixel) equates to 33.75MB. So 24 of these is 810MB. 30 of them is 1012.5MB.

A 2048x1152 frame @ 10bits (30bits / per RGB pixel) equates to 8.44MB. So 24 of these is 202.56MB. 30 of them is 253.2MB.

Given that an ExpressCard slot is ~ 298MB/s theoretical maximum and most external PCIe extenders provide a single-lane slot (x1 @ 250MB/s), you should be able to use the Red Rocket externally to work process R3Ds into high quality 2K. That could be a very usable solution for many; Real-time 2K from a notebook.

Also given the above, I can see a strong argument for only needing a PCIe x4 slot for the Red Rocket for those who don't need faster than 4K @ 24fps in real-time or for those who will be spending most of their time working with Scarlet 3K footage.
Click to expand...
What about FW 800 with 786.432 Mbit/s that the Macbooks have now...
Or Gigabit Ethernet?
 
FW800 is about ~ 786Mbit/s as you point out. But that is Megabits and above the numbers I was using are MegaBytes. So that 786Mbit/s is actually 93.75MB/s. And real-world numbers are typically 10% or more slower than that. So it has less than 30% of the bandwidth offered by the ExpressCard. Actually the theoretical maximum for FW800 is 800Mbit/s or 95MB/s, but I've never seen that actually happen.

Gigabit Ethernet is about 25% faster than FW800 on data transfer as it is 1000Mbit/s, but with much higher latency. It wouldn't even be suitable for such applications. Gig-E in most cases when used for NAS or SAN applications (network storage) will give 75~90MB/s with the best equipment and only in the most ideal situations.
 
FW3200 is coming out and the spec has just been approved. 4 times faster, so is USB3 at 4800

so thats either 320MB or 480MB minus the usual overhead of 10 to 15%, course no laptops carry this yet. might take a year or so

Express Card 2.0 is out also , that doubles express cards present rate. anyone who thinks computers are fast enough never had to do video on them. a machine 10 times faster than what I have now still wouldn't be enough for me. 8core chips should be standard by end of year so we might see a 16core mac pro out by then
 
everyone is playing catchup , I think in a years time realtime 4k will be no big deal. I'd like to see a shift in realtime to x3 real time for exporting. those are the kind of things that'll do wonders for this business and all of us
 
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