Using all 8 cores

[Alexis Hanawalt]

I'm used to using REDRushes with the render using all 8 cores function. I like the look of 16 blue bars hitting the ceiling in Activity Monitor and I'm pretty sure that means I'm getting the all the bang for my bucks. Using RedCine-X, is there a way to make all the cores power away like in REDRushes? The attached pic is what I'm getting in RedCine-X right now, and it's making me sad.

 

[Andrew M.]

Are you using RedCine-X with RedRocket?

 

[Alexis Hanawalt]

Not yet, unfortunately.

 

[Andrew M.]

I guess RedCine-X is optimized for RedRocket and it is not taking full advantage of your system.

 

[Jeff Kilgroe]

Lots of optimizations still to go, I'm hoping that REDCINE-X will make better uses of CPU resources. Then again, I wish that for many other softwares and it never happens. Properly coding for multiprocessor systems is a whole different animal. A lot more work and different thought process / different design philosophy than typical application development. Sadly, most software developers approach multiprocessor development with a "let the compiler handle it" attitude and that just does not work. In an ideal world, it should. But in reality, it's very difficult to scale beyond two CPUs/cores without specifically writing an application to do so.

I'm hoping REDCINE-X makes better strides in this regard.

That said, I found that the original REDCINE really choked itself off when scaling beyond 4 CPUs. It showed activity, but benchmarks showed that it was spinning its wheels in the mud in a sense... Allowing it access to all 8 cores in a system only gave about a 10% boost over running it restricted to 4 cores. I never ran any benches on the Nehalem architecture with HT and 16 virtual cores in a single box...

Multiprocessor rendering was still always the most effective with RedRushes, even better with Redline controlled via a good render management software that could assign CPU affinity for each instance.

 

[Aaron Hucker]

I was litterally just experiencing the same thing myself, I have a 2 x 3.2 GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon and my 8 bars are barely getting past half on average with REDCINE X, I was originally getting the same results with RedRushes, but I set the core settings to 2 clips at at time, 4 cores per clip and the results were impressive. It seems as though Redline has a hard time using all 8 when the system is 2 quads. (I could be wrong)

I was just looking for core settings in REDCINE X, is there such a thing?

 

[Jordan Livingston]

My understanding is that the REDRocket hardware takes over the debayering, which is the primary function of transcoding from RAW to whatever other format. The rest is mostly just reading from / writing to the disk, which is not very CPU intensive. Sure, REDCine-X and RocketCine-X could, in theory, be "more" multi-core aware, but I wouldn't worry if the CPUs aren't throttling up to the red (no pun intended) when debayering using the Rocket. In fact, that's probobly an indication that the Rocket is efficiently doing it's job.

- Jordan

 

[Aaron Hucker]

Jordon,

Neither of us Have Rocket cards.. Therefore transcodes out of RCX are Painfully slow and it appears they are not using all of the CPU which they should be for us NON-ROCKET users.

 

[Jordan Livingston]

Ah, I see. Before I started using the Rocket, on my 8-Core Nehalem, I would see all 16 "virtual cores" dip into the 60s and 70s in terms of percent used.

The best performance I ever achieved was setting three clips at a time and two cores per clip. Though I can't substantiate this voodoo, my inference was that six cores were were dedicated to the transcoding, and two cores were left for the system and the disk i/o.

Again, that might just be my imagination, but it consistently worked out for me to yield best possible performance, albeit nothing near the maximum theoretical potential of the CPUs.

- Jordan

 

[Rainer Fritz]

My understanding is that the REDRocket hardware takes over the debayering, which is the primary function of transcoding from RAW to whatever other format. The rest is mostly just reading from / writing to the disk, which is not very CPU intensive. Sure, REDCine-X and RocketCine-X could, in theory, be "more" multi-core aware, but I wouldn't worry if the CPUs aren't throttling up to the red (no pun intended) when debayering using the Rocket. In fact, that's probobly an indication that the Rocket is efficiently doing it's job.

- Jordan

the rocket does the debayer, but the encoding to the destination codec is done on the cpu. so i see here when the rocket is running and i go in real time to avid mxf dnxhd that the cpu load on the 8core is going to nearly 500%....

 

[Luca Immesi]

The new redline is coming and also the new clipfinder...

 

[Aaron Hucker]

Being able to decided how many cores per clip as well has how many clips are processed at the same time (like RED RUSHES) would be very nice. My machine works faster at 2 clips with 4 cores per compared to any other setup.