Red Rocket - Is it worth it?

[Joe Medlock]

So I've recelty got into the RED ownership (Red One MX) and have been toying with the idea of picking up a Red Rocket card (1st Gen)

I'll be focus pulling my first feature film in a few months and will come into a bit of money that I'd like to put into the RED

I'm curently working on a 2011 21.5" iMac (2.8GHz i7, 12GB RAM) that curently has a 512mb graphics card.

Would you reccomend a Red Rocket or investing in a whole new high spec iMac?

Thanks for the advice,
Joe

 

[Joel Voelker]

You can find some amazing deals on the original red rocket that will give you very fast transcodes. Decide for yourself if worthwhile but I would say yes.

 

[Stacey Spears]

Joe, you should try and work with some 4K Red footage and see how your machine handles it. It is possible that the GPU debayer might be as fast, or faster than the Rocket. Back in the day, I loved my Red Rocket, but I don't use one anymore, even for 6K footage. It is easy to edit lower resolution from the R3D and then go to bed and let it render.

Best bet is to test with your current system and maybe go to the Apple store with some footage and see if they will let you test on a system in the store. If they want to sell you a new machine, seems like a reasonable request. Or find some fellow Reduser's in the UK and see if they will let you test on a new machine or even a Rocket if they have one.

 

[Blair S. Paulsen]

If you happen to prefer OS X, then an old school tower (c)MP might be had on the cheap and the 5,1s have 16x & 8x PCIe2 slots that should get the full performance out of the OG RedRocket. If you're cool with Windows, there's tons of options.

An external ThunderBolt chassis as the RR host for iMac/MBP/TB2 equipped laptop of choice is totally viable. Advise shopping around/buying a used expander unless you have other agenda/future use plans. TB3 enclosures with dedicated chipsets and more functionality (eGPU applications) are the future, but AFAIK they are not yet widely available - and, as usual, the first ones to market will be premium priced.

If you don't have portability requirements, the old cheese graters are pretty compelling at prices similar to a TB2 expansion box with the Westmere CPUs as a virtual freebie. Just avoid the internal SATAII drive bays if you want fast I/O - eSATA and/or USB3.1 SS HBAs or RAID controllers can move as much as 20gb/s via a PCIe2 x4 slot vs the 3gb/s of SATAII. My trick is to use a MAXX Digital RAID that can I/O 5gb/s over USB3.1 SS (w/UASP) and also has a TB port so I can access the same files with nMPs, iMacs, MBPs, etc at 10gb/s. I call it my old school/new school bridge since the cMPs don't support TB.

Cheers - #19

 

[dino g]

Careful buying the older rr without making sure it works 100%. That's all I'm saying...they were very very very temperamental.

 

[Joe Medlock]

Thanks a lot for all the input guys. Has given me a lot to think about with this project

 

[Brian Timmons]

Hey Joe,

I just recently received a new RED ROCKET I bought off ebay and am using it as I type.
It is a very big time saver particularly for clients that want to work with PRORES as opposed to R3Ds.
If you plan on keeping your 2011 iMac for longer I would say that the ROCKET would be well worth it for the price.

As Dino mentioned (a person that has probably handled the most R3D files next to RED) the card can be very temperamental.
The card I just bought is a replacement for my original ROCKET that stopped working when I carefully moved it from a tower to a Thunderbolt chassis.
I had the card for 5 years before that with no problem.

There have also been many reports of cards malfunctioning after firmware updates.

As mentioned earlier, you can get the cards for cheap on ebay.


Hey Egon,

I agree with most of what you wrote but-

one minor point to mention .. red rocket doesn't support DRX (dynamic range extension) due to its complexity, but is supported in software (and possibly GPU decoding)

that said .. ive never needed DRX ..and i'm not convinced the DRX slider does anything .. that I can see anyway (i try not to clip highlights as a general rule ..even at the expense of a little noise)

If you're RED ROCKET is updated to the latest firmware and driver builds, it will now support DRX. DRX helps align all of the brightly exposed channels evenly
and helps correct magenta highlights. Ever have a bright sky in RED footage that leaned purple? DRX will help fix that.


Good luck to all.

Brian Timmons
BRITIM/MEDIA