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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 :)

Rocket with 1.1 Mac

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Tyler Black

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Will a RED Rocket work with an early 2008 MacPro 1.1?

Thanks
 
Here's a little more information about my system and what I do. My issues actually go beyond the RED Rocket.

MacPro 1.1 from early 2008.
2 x 3 GHz Dual-Core Intel Xenon
16 GB 667 MHz DDR2 FB-DIMM
ATI Radeon HD 5770 1024 MB
OSX Lion 10.7.4

I have edited on Final Cut for 12 years but I feel Apple is moving in more of a consumer priority direction lately. So I have decided to jump ship and try Premier. So I bought the CS6 Creative Suite. I shoot on a RED EPIC. So I'm editing on Premier and I also use After Effects all with RED footage. Final Cut had no problem working with RED footage, but I think my ATI card is bottlenecking my workflow because it's taking 3 hours to output an h.264 1920 x 1080 30 second commercial. These are the questions I face:

Will a RED Rocket solve my CS6 rendering problems in addition to making life with RED footage better?
Will the RED Rocket work with my older machine?
Or will an nVidia card solve most of my problems? If so, will any of those work with the older mac?
Do I need to buy a newer mac?

Any suggestions are welcomed. Thank you all for your opinions.
 
Tyler Black said:
Here's a little more information about my system and what I do. My issues actually go beyond the RED Rocket.

MacPro 1.1 from early 2008.
2 x 3 GHz Dual-Core Intel Xenon
16 GB 667 MHz DDR2 FB-DIMM
ATI Radeon HD 5770 1024 MB
OSX Lion 10.7.4

I have edited on Final Cut for 12 years but I feel Apple is moving in more of a consumer priority direction lately. So I have decided to jump ship and try Premier. So I bought the CS6 Creative Suite. I shoot on a RED EPIC. So I'm editing on Premier and I also use After Effects all with RED footage. Final Cut had no problem working with RED footage, but I think my ATI card is bottlenecking my workflow because it's taking 3 hours to output an h.264 1920 x 1080 30 second commercial. These are the questions I face:

Will a RED Rocket solve my CS6 rendering problems in addition to making life with RED footage better?
Will the RED Rocket work with my older machine?
Or will an nVidia card solve most of my problems? If so, will any of those work with the older mac?
Do I need to buy a newer mac?

Any suggestions are welcomed. Thank you all for your opinions.
Click to expand...

If you are shooting in 4k or 5k, editing the .r3d's directly with some effects, and then rendering to h.264 on that machine I'm actually surprised you're getting it out in 3 hours.

The only function the Rocket does is debayer the .r3d files, which is likely a large chunk of that 3 hours.

To determine how big a chunk, try turning off all effects on a 30 second spot, so it's just native .r3d in timeline, and export that. That will give you a baseline for what to expect in terms of improvement from a Rocket, because the Rocket will get you near real time (some overhead added for h.264 encode on CPU after debayer).

The nVidia cards will only help if you are using GPU accelerated effects in AE or Premiere. So yes they are likely to help some, but how much will depend on what you're putting into the edits. They do not help .r3d debayer.

A newer Mac will certainly be faster, but if the debayer is what is really dragging you down the Rocket might be the solution.

Also note that you can upgrade the CPU's in that Mac Pro to dual Quad cores for a few hundred bucks. Check on some of the Mac sites such as Macrumors forums for instructions.
 
Spend your money on a new computer before you buy that Rocket card. The Mac Pro 1,1 was launched in Augest 2006 -- so right at 6 years old, even if you bought it in early 2008. The 2007 spec bump brought some new CPU and GPU options to the table, but it was the same system and carried the 2,1 designator. In 2008, new CPUs and a new logic board were added to the line-up and the Xeon core was updated as well as the memory interface and other aspects of the system. The 2008 Mac Pro 3,1 boosted RAM speed to 800MHz, a 15% increase while the CPUs were about 20% faster per core per clock. Even at 800MHz on the RAM, the '08 Mac Pro isn't fast enough to do a lot of things -- like play back higher than 1080p streams in Resolve at greater than 8 bits.

THere is no nVidia card you can buy that will work in your system and provide CUDA support. GTX285 (discontinued) and everything newer require a 2008 Mac Pro or later, due to the EFI system interaction with the card. Even if it were a possibility, the GPU only accelerates certain things. It does not aid in the decompression and debayer of the R3D files. Which is the bulk of the workload here -- that is all CPU-bound, or offloaded to the Rocket if you have one.

Rocket will work in your system, but your system's older CPUs and slow memory will bottleneck your efforts. You will gain more with a newer, faster computer than you would by installing a Rocket.

I wouldn't mess with CPU upgrades for that system as DJ Meyer offers up. There are quad-core CPUs for that generation that run at 3GHz, but you would have to ask yourself if it's truly worth it. Adding more capability in the CPUs or other areas is only going to point out how your memory is a huge bottleneck, IMO. A current model Mac Mini with 2.7GHz quad-core and 32GB 1600MHz RAM will run circles around your 6 year old Mac Pro. sad, but so very true...
 
Hey All,

I'm moving my home studio into a greenscreen studio across town but I don't want to move my faster computer (12core Macpro) there but rather my 2006 MacPro 1.1. Can I take my RED Rocket out of the 12core and put it in my older MacPro.






I didn't want to chance the card or the computer until I know.
Thanks
 
Alonzo,

The Rocket will work in that system. However, you have a rather small amount of RAM to work with and these older systems lack a lot of the bandwidth necessary to really work with R3D post. It is work-able, you will just have to be patient while you wait for the system to complete tasks you give it. As I stated above, I wouldn't dump any money into the older system, there's really nothing you can do to make it perform like something more current. Even though what I said above, about GPUs not assisting R3D decoding, is no longer true with the latest REDCINE-X version, you will be in a bind with GPU options. Your ATI card is older and underpowered, but there really are no good options to upgrade to for that system.
 
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