RED-ROCKET old 3Ghz mac pro

[Marcus Vasques Osorio]

Hi,

I was wondering if there are any issues with rendering to QT, DNX-HD etc on an old mac-pro 3Ghz 8 core 8GB, It is running 10.5.8.

Bought circa late 2006...

I will be using the machine only for rendering of QT and DNX-HD clips...

This is not a speed question, just want to know stability

regards

Marcus

 

[Matthew Riggieri]

Marcus

I have installed the Red Rocket in a 1st Gen Mac Pro. This is the same as yours except you have new processors. It works great. You have to make sure to put it in the lot closest to the video card. Works great but I only see around 18-19fps on that machine. Have not found the limitation. It may be the interlink between PCI-e connectors as i am going to a RAID which is on a 4x slot and can only get 150mb/s sec to it.

Cheers
Matt

 

[Jeff Kilgroe]

1st-gen Mac Pros allow you to assign PCI-E lane configurations. So you can give yourself an X16 for your video card and an X8 for the RED Rocket™.

The speed of your storage can most definitely be a factor. You have to be able to write ~220MB/s or better sustained to transcode in real time to 2K DPX, for example. Less bandwidth is needed to encode to ProRes, but that takes more CPU resources and it's hard to get real-time performance out of a ProRes transcode, even on the latest 8-core nehalem Mac Pros... At least until the ProRes encoding tools go multi-threaded to scale across more CPUs.

 

[Matthew Riggieri]

Jeff

I can sustain around 300mb/s on a 4 drive Raid 5 that is internally in the tower. The raid card is placed in the 4x slot 3. I have to decrease the speed of the Video card to 8x in order to have the RAID run at 4x and the Red Rocket run at 8x. But this still proves to max out at around 150MB/s, which is about 1x speed.

The same problem is run into on our 2009 Mac Pro. The Raid card needs a 8x slot for 800MB/sec so i would need to put the RedRocket in a 4X slot. Is there a problem running the Red Rocket in a 4x Slot?

Cheers
Matt

 

[Deanan]

Jeff

I can sustain around 300mb/s on a 4 drive Raid 5 that is internally in the tower. The raid card is placed in the 4x slot 3. I have to decrease the speed of the Video card to 8x in order to have the RAID run at 4x and the RED Rocket™ run at 8x. But this still proves to max out at around 150MB/s, which is about 1x speed.

The same problem is run into on our 2009 Mac Pro. The Raid card needs a 8x slot for 800MB/sec so i would need to put the RedRocket in a 4X slot. Is there a problem running the RED Rocket™ in a 4x Slot?

Cheers
Matt

No problems but the throughput back from the card become a limiting factor for transcoding/playback. For 2k output, it should be fine though.
I've seen some speed issues with raids that have inconsistent speeds but decent throughput.

What speeds do you get on your 2009 macpro?

 

[Matthew Riggieri]

So here are the tests i have run so far.

2006 Mac Pro running OS X 10.5.8
RedRocket in a 8x slot, raid card in 4x slot, graphics card downrated to 8x.
DPX - 19fps
QT ProRes 18fps

2009 Mac Pro running OS X 10.6.2
RedRocket in a 4x slot, raid card in 8x slot
DPX - 31fps (holy shit, loved when i saw that)
QT - 19.1fps (wow the QT overhead really does take up a lot of the CPU cycles.)

2007 Macbook Pro 2.4
Quicktime - 14fps


All in all, i mean it is way better than the .7 i was getting doing full debayer (6 instances) transcodes and the 7.5fps (4 i was getting doing half high on the 2009 Mac Pro.

I am going to figure out why i can't hit max speed on the DPX transcode on the 2006 machine. Deanan, on the release notes, it says there were fixes for the 1st gen and 2nd gen mac pros. Can you elaborate?

Cheers
Matt

 

[Marcus Vasques Osorio]

gen1 gen2

gen1 gen2

I understand that there was some issue with a green (or corrupt) frame randomely in exported quicktimes, this is what my question waas based on in the first place:

On another note, I understand that embedded sound in HD-SDI is not active yet? So if I want to do dailies played out to DVD I would have to fix another solution until then or can you export to m2v directly

regards

Marcus

 

[Deanan]

I understand that there was some issue with a green (or corrupt) frame randomely in exported quicktimes, this is what my question waas based on in the first place:

On another note, I understand that embedded sound in HD-SDI is not active yet? So if I want to do dailies played out to DVD I would have to fix another solution until then or can you export to m2v directly

regards

Marcus

The weird corrupt frames that were showing up on gen 1/2 macpros were due a a faulty pci-e design in the early macpros. We spent quite alot of effort to find a workaround for those macs and we haven't seen the problem since we released the firmware updates a while back.

Embedded sound is now in the firmware and we're working to get it into all the different pieces of code. For now, it workflow is to transcode to an intermediate code and then burn that.

 

[Marcus Vasques Osorio]

excellent deanan. thx