What is the recommended editing system for doing 5K on the red epic-m?

[hans de vries]

Macs can be equipped with CUDA, only the choice of cards is smaller. Get the 4000.

Uli! Is it your experience that the 4000 gives good performance with Red material? I'm going to buy a new card next week and was thinking about the 4800, but the 4000 is obviously less expensive. Trying to upgrade my mac, but adding ram up to 16 gb didn't do much. I hope a good card will.

 

[Uli Plank]

No, it won't!

R3D-decoding is all about CPUs, not GPU. The CUDA card will accelerate your effects, and the 4000 is fast, reasonably priced and needs only one slot.

But for better performance with Red material, get a 12-core or a RED Rocket.

 

[hans de vries]

auch, that's what I was afraid of; no money right now for a red rocket. But thanks very much for your input!

 

[Andrae Palmer]

From an editor POV I don't see the need for the RED Rocket. Many people on here don't have a 12 core Mac Pro so they purchased the RED Rocket to get realtime playback on their slower systems. Mostly to support the backwards workflow of quickly transcoding over to Apple ProRes for editing in FCP7. Which was necessary due to FCP not being 64 bit, not being multicore optimized and not supporting CUDA or OpenCL. All these lead it to not supporting R3D natively. Because the industry was patiently waiting for an update, they put up with this workflow for years.

On a 12 core Mac Pro with Premiere Pro CS5.5 and Epic camera plugin... you can get 5k realtime playback at 1/2 res which basically equals HD or 2K. Since some are recommending two RED Rocket cards for full 5k res playback... Due to one RED Rocket card not being able to handle full 5K realtime playback. Then it makes even more financial and logical sense to use a 12 core Mac Pro at 1/2 res without a RED Rocket card for realtime playback. Unless you are an editor with a 5k projector, I don't see why you would need the RED Rocket card.

So briefly to answer your question:

Mac Pro 12 core 2.66 or 2.93
24GB of RAM
Blackmagic Decklink Extreme 3D+ (due to only BM cards supporting Davinci which you may chose to use too)
Quadro 4000 (due to one slot design)
Flanders Scientific LM-2461W 24" --- put that RED Rocket card money into this. Your colors and broadcast monitoring will love it.

The old transcode workflow is dead... long live R3D native editing.

 

[Subhadip Sen]

In case anyone is customizing and building their workstation, do have a look at the PPBM5 benchmarks for PPCS5 - http://www.ppbm5.com/Benchmark5.html

Core i7 980X/990X are the standout performers - going toe to toe with 12-core Xeons. For a $320 CPU the overclocked Core i7 2600K are remarkable value, beating out 12-core Xeons and laying waste to 8-core Xeons. It seems like the Core i7 series is a better value for money than Xeon server CPUs for Premiere Pro CS5. Same applies for graphics - the Geforce 480/570 cards far outperform their workstation Quadro 5000 counterparts. Of course, the disk performance is important as well, especially for high bitrate R3Ds. For Epics, SSDs are a must, hard drives will never be able to play real-time. Anyway, a lot of useful information on that site.

 

[Alex Mack]

Cuda is critical - it takes over all effects/transforms (such as horizontal flip, scaling), freeing other resources to stay focused. If you never use such effects, then no difference during the edit. Though I understand that it is unleashed in rendering, and the difference is significant. In this case for cs5.5, more beefy quadros are quite valuable, because I understand that the more powerful cuda cards were much better utilized in cs5.5 (from cs5).

 

[Maz Mawlawi]

just to throw this out there. has anybody cut a entire feature film entirely with r3d, doing all the round trip after effects, sound, color, etc. etc. did it stay stable the whole time? just curious cause i haven't done it myself, and i'm still very speculative of native r3d editing whether it's really faster or will it slow you down because when it gets heavy,t he performance hit would out way the time it took you to do a offline edit first...

short form stuff i can see it being a big benefit if the turn around is immensely fast.

We have done it on 3 films so far. Worked natively in r3d all the way from beginning to end. stable the whole time! (on pc and mac) Between Premiere and AE including color correction and visual effects. We have a client that just finished shooting and we converted his editor to CS5.5 after we showed them the time saving, performance and flexibility of editing in RAW and R3ds. (no transcoding needed, no BS QuickTime wrappers, and the ability to manipulate the RAW file non destructively) I honestly don't understand why anyone still want to cut their RED project on FCP in it's current outdated stage....

 

[Uli Plank]

BTW, the CUDA cards have better scaling than the software version, in particular if you are changing the PAR.

 

[Andrae Palmer]

I honestly don't understand why anyone still want to cut their RED project on FCP in it's current outdated stage....

With Apple crushing their hopes... they are now smelling the roses on the other side of the fence. What's amazing is how long they held out hope for better.

 

[Alex Mack]

With Apple crushing their hopes... they are now smelling the roses on the other side of the fence. What's amazing is how long they held out hope for better.

Isn't that the truth!


Fwiw, if the funds are available, the rocket is incredible for native r3d editing. It frees up resources from the very act of debayering, which is even more impactful than cuda freeing up resources from effects.

 

[Andrae Palmer]

It does free up resources... but I like my CPU's to be fully utilized. I take great pleasure from viewing the activity monitor while around 80% of the resources are used in debayering. There are benefits if you are utilizing the multicores for another CPU heavy task while editing. Then again I don't think that's a best practice.

 

[Chi Ying Chan]

"The old transcode workflow is dead... long live R3D native editing."

"We have done it on 3 films so far...."

Can the system handle +16T r3d together with sound and effect?

Regards
DP HK

 

[Maz Mawlawi]

All I can tell you is the average project we worked on were about 8.5TB. The time line had tons of color correction with primary and secondaries as well as come composited 3d shots. It had multiple audio tracks but the soundtrack and all audio leveling/foley were done in Pro Tools I believe and brought in at the end ( we were not in charge of audio so I don't really know). DIsk I/O Is very important so make sure you have some fast RAIDS to work with. (and of course tons of RAM helps )

 

[Johnny Friday]

"The old transcode workflow is dead... long live R3D native editing."

"We have done it on 3 films so far...."

Can the system handle +16T r3d together with sound and effect?

Regards
DP HK

That's a bold statement sir. One i'd have to disagree with---although i'd like to stay wtih R3d througout, but for most tv/commercials, i've been very happy with shoot 4k or 5k, then one light; transcode to prores 4444 or 422HQ, and then online edit with prores and final color via color or 3 way color in FCP. I doubt you will find a huge difference in final product.

 

[Donald Mckinnon]

Thank you everyone, been out gaffing a show. I will try to make sense of all of this and ask further questions when I form them correctly.
Love this forum.

 

[Alexander Ibrahim]

Perhaps even before you get your hands on an Epic.

Too late ... I've already had my hands on three Epics.

Now its almost certain they'll get it done before I can BUY an Epic of my own.

 

[shashbugu]

Don't leave out Storm. Recent versions of Storm have become somewhat stable and will make your life very easy. Long-form 4k R3D filmmaking without serious effects can be easily accomplished with PProCS5. But rest assured if you need to do lots of effects. The best route would be to break your script down into an Excel or Filemaker database matrix. You can at least figure out which shots will need effects and which would'nt. This way you don't necessarily need a super-fast computer to edit and do effects work. Both Storm and AE can output very light proxy files for effects placeholders which can easily be replaced with the Raw files, Resolve is pretty awesome with R3D files. You can grade scene sequences or Shot to shot as needed. Native editing is great, its not the be all end all. The future is now. Get PPro CS5.5

 

[Linda Nelson]

Regarding experience using raw files on long form projects - We used CS5 to edit our feature DELIVERED using raw files throughout the entire workflow. It was flawless. All After Effect compositions were dynamically linked into the Premiere Pro timeline and the Blu-rays were created with Encore which was also dynamically linked to the timeline. We went straight from the camera to the timeline to a Blu-ray which is being used for film festival projection. We also just shot six 30 second commercials in two days and turned the edited, color corrected commercials over to the client within a week. This couldn't have been done with any other workflow. The key to an efficient workflow for a long form project is organizing the files. We break features down into four or five reels (bins). Each reel has five to ten sequences, each sequence has a bunch of scenes. After the rough cut is done for each reel, we make a master nested sequence that includes each reel. Because there is no waiting for rendering, we we can work extremely fast and experiment with lots of different options. We can see all the detail because we are always accessing the raw files rather than low res proxies, so we can play with color, effects, etc. using split screens and outputing to a large flat panel (we use an NVidia card). Next film we will use Adobe Story to develop the script because it will set up all our bins automatically and as we shoot the footage will be organized and ready for editing. Even when we have to use an outside post house for sound sweetening or ADR, it's easy to spit out OMFs and reference video that can be sent by ftp and then dropped back in when we get it back.