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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 :)

Retina with Rocket and Pegasus?

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Gary Jones

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Would a top of the range 15" MBP with the rocket in a sonnet or magma and a Pegasus 6 bay enclosure (one plugged into each TB port) make for a pleasant R3D working experience? I am thinking mostly under Premiere here, with perhaps some Resolve and AE.

Just about to join the Red roller coaster and will probably wait until next year before upgrading my tower and I think this gives me the flexibility to port the peripherals at a later date. Who knows, as I doubt I will need a real time transcoding, perhaps this will be enough for me.

Thanks for any input.
 
I just shot 7 weekly episodic short films, cut and deliver them with a retina plus pegusus using adobe premier. I am going to do more thorough write up later but i will say its sufficient enough. The station itself can handle, its premier that starts to get buggy the more footage you ingest. I am also having cuda bugs as premier is not supporting it yet, and i get issues with the sonnet echo express box and my red rocket. So there are some major bugs needed to iron out the red rocket thunderbolt setup in my opinino...maybe FCP X sorted it out, i would be curious to see peoples performance there. I am loving premier when it works, I will test FCP X for the hell of it. The guys at adobe say that the latest RR firmware update caused them some issues as well.
 
I'll let you know once I get it working. I've invested in that exact setup. With sonnet.
 
I appreciate the feedback from both of you. Nice to know I am at least on the right lines even if there appears to be issues.

What is the problem you are both having with the RR in the external housing?
 
Well you have a bottleneck with thunderbolt being that its only x4 so you dont get the times x8 full speed of the RR...correct me if i am wrong but you only get about half of the power of the RR. I would be ok with this but the retina already can play back 1/4 rez without the RR...i just want real time export and real time playback (half rez) and i could never get that to work using premier. It took me hours to export a 5 minute film and this killed me when it came to delivery.
 
I wasn't sure if the rocket was saturating the x8 or not so I wasn't sure if the step down to x4 would make a huge difference. I was mostly interested in he rocket for exporting/transcoding as well but if there isn't much benefit from having it then perhaps I will re-think that option.

Sorry yu had to be the guinea pig though Clayton.
 
I have exactly this set up from a hardware POV.

One with magma and the other with the sonnet...

Notes:
If setup well I can render between 4-8hours of 5k rushes with RCX before a freeze.
I can render 4k footage faster than RT.
TB does not limit the performance of the RR in any of the ways I have tested. (It will be an issue with a TB GPU attempt)
The combination of TB, red rocket and hardrives on the TB buss is not 100% BUT I don't think Red alone can fix... My 1st thought was the Promise was the issue but I can get the same problems with a Gspeed Q attached to a H680 inside a TB chassis.
Don't put on the same buss unless you really have to...If you do have to use one TB port use the one nearer the screen and put the Promise on 1st.
The fan blew the wrong way on my Magma and needed to be reversed.
Sonnet feels more solid but it is a bit too heavy.
You need to instal the additional fan in the magma so it's 3 card advantage is lost..
They are both too loud and I wish somebody would take acoustic pollution seriously.

Good luck...

Michael
 
You are transcoding up front though aren't you Michael?

My current plan is to go native in Premiere and then, depending on performance, move into Resolve. Exporting from Resolve. If Resolve doesn't play nice with the native footage then I may export before going into Resolve.

I was curious whether a graphics card in an external housing would be of any benefit to Resolve, I assumed with the x4 nature of TB that it probably wouldn't. Has anyone actually tested it?

Cheers for your thoughts Michael, I still owe you a drink.
 
Gary Jones said:
You are transcoding up front though aren't you Michael?
Click to expand...

yes correct ... I am only really using for data processing and somtimes as a DIT station.

My current plan is to go native in Premiere and then, depending on performance, move into Resolve. Exporting from Resolve. If Resolve doesn't play nice with the native footage then I may export before going into Resolve.
Click to expand...

For Data wrangling Macbookpros with TB can compete BUT for work that really benifits from GPU then workstations are still the way to go... a top spec z820?

I was curious whether a graphics card in an external housing would be of any benefit to Resolve, I assumed with the x4 nature of TB that it probably wouldn't. Has anyone actually tested it?
Click to expand...

I don't think this works at the moment... and yes TB would prob be a bandwidth issue..

Jeff K is a bit of an authority on this stuff... I'm more image oriented with IT being a necessary evil (and evil is what it feels like)

http://www.reduser.net/forum/member.php?535-Jeff-Kilgroe

read up on his posts ?
 
Long term I am thinking the MB Pro will be purely a DIT station (occasionally an editing machine) and I will upgrade my heavy duty machine to a new Mac Pro next year when the new version comes out. I am just seeing if I can 'get away with' just having the retina for now.

I have read loads of Jeff's stuff. He really is 'the man' but he hasn't mentioned the retina that much. Was after some real world experience from people using it on a day-to-day basis. My gut feeling is that it is going to be fine using the retina for everything but Resolve. Resolve might work but not great for realtime playback.

Thanks again Michael.
 
is there any other fast storage besides the r6 that is really big and cheap? i wanna get a mbp with fast and big storage in a raid 5...i would settle for using usb3 for storage and thunderbolt for a RR
 
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