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System recommendations for editing 3K raw Scarlet footage

Joseph Podlesnik

Joseph Podlesnik

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Been posting on the Adobe Premiere Pro CS5 forum for the past couple of days, asking the veterans what system would work with Scarlet raw 3K footage. What better place to ask the question than here --

Here is my proposed system:

1 Asus P6X58D premium motherboard
1 Intel i7 930 CPU
1 12GB Kingston PC3 10600
1 80GB Intel X25M MLC GEN 2 SSD Drive (only for OS and Adobe apps)
2 Western Digital 300 GB Velociraptor 10,000 RPM drives, configured in striped RAID

1 [FONT=&quot]Areca ARC-1680iX-[/FONT] PCIe Raid Card

1 Antec CP-1000 1000 Watt PSU
1 Nvidia GTX Fermi 480 card
1 Western Digital Quiet 2 TB 7200RPM 32MB SATA 2 Hard Drive (only for projects)

I've been told that I would need 24GB RAM when dealing with 3K RAW footage; the good news is the Asus P6X58D motherboard supports this amount. Then I assume I need to beef up the RAID set up with more drives. An upgrade to a i7 980 cpu might be a big help, too. By the time the Scarlet is shipping I should have a decent system to work with its raw footage.

 
Joseph Podlesnik said:
I've been told that I would need 24GB RAM when dealing with 3K RAW footage
Click to expand...

People have managed to edit 4K RED ONE footage (about 50% larger in terms of resolution) on MacBook Pro laptops with 4GB of RAM. I'm sure your 12GB will cut it for Scarlet...

That's as long as you aren't planning on trying to handle it uncompressed (which would be unnecessary, and, with current technology frankly insane).
 
Stephen Gentle said:
People have managed to edit 4K RED ONE footage (about 50% larger in terms of resolution) on MacBook Pro laptops with 4GB of RAM. I'm sure your 12GB will cut it for Scarlet...

That's as long as you aren't planning on trying to handle it uncompressed (which would be unnecessary, and, with current technology frankly insane).
Click to expand...

Thanks, Stephen. I appreciate your feedback; I will keep this in mind. I realize in PPro I can adjust the preview rez, too. I hope to work with 2, perhaps 3 tracks of raw 3K footage (not uncompressed). Am hoping for real-time editing performance. :-)
 
I posted something just like this a few weeks ago, and people told me that I'd be fine with my system, which is a Asus P6, Intel i7 920, 12 GB, GTX 260 system.

They also told me to go download the example 4K R3D's that can be found on this site and to play with them. I believe this is a link to at least one example:

http://reduser.net/forum/showthread.php?t=42130

Does anyone have any other links to some R3D's on here?
 
Pietro Impagliazzo said:
What about storage reliability? Are you gonna have an external/separate RAID 1/5 or the likes?
Click to expand...

Yes, I'm planning to attach more and more drives (up to 10 eventually) to the [FONT=&quot]Areca ARC-1680iX-12 RAID card I'm getting. My understanding is the more drives added to an array the faster the retrieval of the data, yes? Correct me if I'm wrong.

Again, I think I'm sitting well with the motherboard I chose ([/FONT] [FONT=&quot]Asus P6X58D premium motherboard) which will support up to 24 GB RAM and an i7 980x cpu. On top of this, I'll keep adding RAID drives to the Areca card... and we'll be to the races with the up and coming Scarlet 3K[/FONT] raw footage.
 
Jeremy_Sawatzky said:
in have an extremely similar system. i made a video of it right here.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0lyJxBtQqMg
Click to expand...

Jeremy, I watched this video just last night. I forget what kind of drive set-up you have, so will view the video again. And I can see your performance (very nice). Of course we're not seeing RED files on the timeline, correct? It's AVCHD footage, isn't it? Thanks!
 
Joseph Podlesnik said:
Yes, I'm planning to attach more and more drives (up to 10 eventually) to the [FONT=&quot]Areca ARC-1680iX-12 RAID card I'm getting. My understanding is the more drives added to an array the faster the retrieval of the data, yes? Correct me if I'm wrong.
Click to expand...

It really depends on what kind of RAID setup it is - what level do you plan to use?
 
Simple solution.

Simple solution.

Please don't attack me for my technical ignorance. But what I would really like to know is what off the shelf PC and Mac is going to work with 3K footage. And what is the minimum extras your going to want IF any to cut this stuff.

These days new Computers have pretty beefy Specs so i am wondering what systems people have used and have done the job. I wanted to go mac cause I like Final Cut and was hoping the new Imac would work. But Ilive in Asia where mac are not the norm so wondering about the PC option as well.
 
Joseph Podlesnik said:
Jeremy, I watched this video just last night. I forget what kind of drive set-up you have, so will view the video again. And I can see your performance (very nice). Of course we're not seeing RED files on the timeline, correct? It's AVCHD footage, isn't it? Thanks!
Click to expand...

my drive setup is nothing, ive got 3 drives 1 ssd, no raid. thats my next big purchase. I tried red footage. runnin off one drive i could manage 1/4 res r3ds. im sure with a raid i could go higher. thats 1/4 res with as many effects as i want on it.
 
To the first poster: what importance is that specific mobo? Or is it simply because it supports that CPU with that amount of RAM?


Which leads to a further question: is there any specific hardware "required" for good RED editing? Or could you get away with anything that has good processing power and RAM? (and a decent GFX card)
 
Stephen Gentle said:
It really depends on what kind of RAID setup it is - what level do you plan to use?
Click to expand...

Good question. Guess I'll admit ignorance on this. :-) Check out the top performing PPro work station configurations here - http://ppbm5.com/Benchmark5.html and you'll see their RAID configurations. This is pretty much what I'll be shooting for. Do these benchmarks reflect performance specifically with RED files? Not sure; but since Premiere Pro supports RED files, well, we can guess on this.
 
Jeremy_Sawatzky said:
my drive setup is nothing, ive got 3 drives 1 ssd, no raid. thats my next big purchase. I tried red footage. runnin off one drive i could manage 1/4 res r3ds. im sure with a raid i could go higher. thats 1/4 res with as many effects as i want on it.
Click to expand...

I tried the downloaded r3d files last night (thanks to that poster for that link) and my (current, old!) Dual Opteron 2GHZ (8 GB RAM), Nvidia 9800GT card system could NOT handle them at all. I hope my new system will change this. If it can handle 4K RED files, it should have few to no problems working with Scarlet 3K raw files.
 
Tom De Roeck said:
To the first poster: what importance is that specific mobo? Or is it simply because it supports that CPU with that amount of RAM?

Which leads to a further question: is there any specific hardware "required" for good RED editing? Or could you get away with anything that has good processing power and RAM? (and a decent GFX card)
Click to expand...

What started this was my search for a quieter PC (the current station sounds like a jet engine!) Went to endpcnoise,com and configured a few workstations (from the drop down menus). After talking with an agent, I learned that the Asus motherboard mentioned supports USB 3.0 and, later learned it supports up to 24 GB RAM. The Asus P6T WS Pro only supports up to 12 GB. So I'm staying with the
 
Pietro Impagliazzo said:
I remember discussing this a lot and receiving lots of advice from Peter Majtan over at Scarletuser, we settled for RAID 5 as the best RAID level for good reliability and fast speeds, it's also more space efficient than RAID 1.

- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAID#Standard_levels

- http://www.ibeast.com/content/tools/RaidCalc/RaidCalc.asp
Click to expand...

Thanks, Pietro. Now I have to learn how to get to RAID 5. Thanks for the links. Just trying to get my 'work tools' situation sorted out before Scarlet ships, so I can focus on playing with its images and sounds. :-)
 
Joseph Podlesnik said:
Here is my proposed system:

[/SIZE][/FONT]1 Asus P6X58D premium motherboard
1 Intel i7 930 CPU
1 12GB Kingston PC3 10600
1 80GB Intel X25M MLC GEN 2 SSD Drive (only for OS and Adobe apps)
Click to expand...

That's fine. 12GB can be a bit light on the RAM, depending on what you're trying to accomplish. Many apps are still 32bit and can't use more than 2~3 GB of RAM anyway. This includes the current tools from RED. Adobe CS5 is 64bit, but with the exception of AfterEffects, you really won't need more than 12GB unless you're doing a lot of very complex projects or you're trying to load up several apps at once. If you can go to 24GB, then do. But also watch out for higher memory capacities on that motherboard and most motherboards out there. They often force the RAM to run at slower clock speeds as capacity increases. So you may be taking a performance hit in that regard.

2 Western Digital 300 GB Velociraptor 10,000 RPM drives, configured in striped RAID
Click to expand...

Don't waste your time/money. First of all, two of these isn't going to be enough. 600GB is nowhere near enough storage for working with 3K RAW or HD footage unless you're only going to work on a single short film at a time or a TVC or two and then offload all that to backups before starting anything else. You will get faster and more reliable performance, as well as 3.5X the capacity, out of 4 x 1TB 7200rpm HDDs in a RAID-5.

1 [FONT=&quot]Areca ARC-1680iX-[/FONT] PCIe Raid Card

1 Antec CP-1000 1000 Watt PSU
1 Nvidia GTX Fermi 480 card
Click to expand...

OK.

1 Western Digital Quiet 2 TB 7200RPM 32MB SATA 2 Hard Drive (only for projects)
Click to expand...


See above notes on the RAID. Just build yourself a nice, decently fast storage volume to work from. And set up a good methodology for backup and archival.

I've been told that I would need 24GB RAM when dealing with 3K RAW footage; the good news is
Click to expand...
the Asus P6X58D motherboard supports this amount. Then I assume I need to beef up the RAID set up with more drives. An upgrade to a i7 980 cpu might be a big help, too. By the time the Scarlet is shipping I should have a decent system to work with its raw footage.
Click to expand...

If you don't need this system now, then I would wait. By the time Scarlet is shipping, there's going to be entirely new options to consider.
 
Do note that only the mainstream dual/quad core Sandy Bridge releases in Jan 2011. So, the six-core Core i7 900 series will continue to be the fastest CPUs for a while. Remember, Sandy Bridge is an evolutionary upgrade focusing on GPU integration and efficiency rather than performance. The AVX extensions could be very useful for future NLE/post-production apps, though.

The performance/enthusiast six/eight core Sandy Bridge releases in second half 2011. AMD's Bulldozer also releases in a similar time frame. So, if you want a powerful PC now, don't wait - get a Core i7 970/980X based PC.

Having said that, if you aren't planning to use it now, it's best to hold on and wait for the options that arrive whenever Scarlet does.
 
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