RED Rocket and Adobe Premiere CC

[Dennis S.]

Hey guys,

i was wondering, what benefits do i get from using the RED Rocket inside Adobe Premiere CC exactly?
I did a few tests on my own to figure this out and i may jump to an early conclusion here, but it seems to me there is no great benefit at all. (when playing back at least)
I played a sequence of 24.000 Frames of RED Epic 4K/5K footage (Full, 1/2) inside Premiere CC 2014 (from in to out) several times, with the RED rocket enabled/disabled and the result is that
the amount of reported dropped frames from Premiere CC after playing the sequence is all the same, whether the red rocket is enabled or disabled.

With 5K i get almost a full load on the Xeon W3680, even when i decrease the playback resolution from full to 1/2 the cpu load stays around 85-90% (while 10-15% are consumed by other processes)
Please correct me if i am wrong and i remember that i ve read something about this already but just to be sure, can i assume the red rocket doesn`t accelerate R3D playback in Adobe CC as much as it does in REDCINE-X Pro?
Clearly the CPU is a bottleneck too when handling RED 5K material but now that i did a few tests with premiere and the rocket it leads me to the question:
What can the rocket do for me inside Premiere CC and did i expect to much thinking, that i would get the same Debayering/Decoding acceleration in Premiere like REDCINE-X gives me?

Thanks for helping me out.

 

[Dennis S.]

I did a little few more tests to get a better idea of whats going on.
Here is what i find out so far:

- If the MercuryPlaybackEngine in the Project settings of Premiere CC is enabled (CUDA based with a GTX570 in our case) it seems there is not much benefit from the rocket at all, at least not when it comes to playing back the files in the timeline.
- I get the same amount of dropped frames with 4K/5K material frames regardless if the rocket is enabled or disabled in the source material settings.
- The CPU load while playing back RED 4K full is almost 100% with a W3680 6-Core Xeon. I thought the Rocket would be able to do the "heavy lifting" so the permanent high load on my cpu seems odd. (when changing playback resolution to 1/2 the load drops to 40-50%)
- As soon as i disable the gpu accelerated MercuryPlaybackEngine (software only) the red rocket finally makes a difference that means all of a sudden there is a huge difference between the amount of framedrops i get when playing back 4K full software only with the rr enabled or disabled. (which makes sense)

This is just me guessing here but i think when MPE is enabled the task of decoding/debayering RED material will be taken care of by the GPU for the most part, this is the only explanation i got for myself why
the rocket doesn`t seem to do anything for playback acceleration. Maybe you guys can shed some light on this.

Thank you

Dennis