What's the Hold Up???

[Michael Gregory]

This is probably a Red Eng question but I have pretty much the fastest mac pro tower ever built (12 core 3.46Ghz with 128 Gb Ram and 4 video 290X AMD cards plus a RRX with all SSD drives on a dedicated PCI RAID). I get what most would consider amazing render speeds. However, despite this I can only get about 10-12 core max performance (so 1000-1200% on my activity monitor) so no real hyper-threading. This gives me ProRes export at 4444XQ to 1080p from 5K HD format at 12:1 of about 90% of real time, meaning it takes about 90 minutes to export a 60 minute clip at these settings.

My question is where is the bottleneck? I am not sure it is the debayer in the RRX (although 5k, 60 times a second adds up over an hour) and I don't think the video cards are anywhere maxed out based on test I have run. I would like to go faster and I am not particularly concerned about cost.

If I "could" run two RRX's would that help? Adding more GPUs doesn't seem to help.

I have tried Premiere Pro CC 2014 vs FCPX and FCPX wins hands down on my machine (a mac) but I am willing to switch.

My dream is to go from 5kHd Red Raw to 40 Mbs/60fps 1080p blu-ray in about 2 hours per hour of footage... my current workflow.... RedRaw to RCX-P to FCPX to Compressor to Toast to Blu-Ray takes about 4.5 hours per hour of footage.

Peace,

michael

PS: I am coo koo for coco puffs...

 

[Blair S. Paulsen]

Best immediate fix I know is to just get another station (or two) rolling and split up the job into reels (sections). I used to use 4 machines concurrently on bigger jobs in order to keep up. Any single workstation, no matter how beefy, will likely have a bottleneck somewhere. Just a thought.

Cheers - #19

 

[dino g]

buy 2 rockets put them in a JMR Silverstor connect via sonnet tb2 3d with the infiniband card from JMR in it...fast.

 

[Michael Gregory]

Guys, I have looked far and wide for a faster work flow technology. As far as I can tell, hardware beats software. I debayer with Rocket-X and I encode with Matrox CompressHD. I bitch about times that are 1.5 times real time at 60 fps. Sorry. The dedication in my high school year book read "everything, all the time". I want to switch to Windows because I feel Apple has abandoned me.

 

[Nick Pasquariello]

Can you detail your internal plumbing a bit more? You list 6 PCI cards (1 rocket, 4 GPUs, and 1 RAID), but there are only 4 slots inside the machine. Which means you're using some sort of expansion chasis. But also, the bottom two slots have more lanes than the top two. It could be that merely moving some stuff around would help.

Or, maybe you could change your workflow. You're transcoding, then FCPX, then transcoding again. Maybe use the R3D Raw in FCPX, and forego RCX entirely? Just a thought. It's one less round of transcoding, and if you work in 1/2 debayer, you shouldn't be terribly impacted by speed of working with raw instead of prores.

 

[Richard Kynaston]

Hey Dino/Michael,
Sorry to hijack the threat - but I was just about to ask if there is any advantage to using two RedRocket-X cards when I saw this - we're on the verge of buying a couple of Epic Dragons and are currently looking at the IT side of things. As 95% of our footage will be 6K HD or 6KWS at that point - would the suggested JMR Silverstor set up help in rendering times from R3D? We were thinking of a Sonnet EchoExpress 3D - but again would RRX 2 cards help?

Edit wise we're using Premiere Pro CC and will be adding Redcine-X to that set up.

We're using the latest MacPros too. Appreciate any help/insight/suggestions?

Richard

 

[Michael Winokur]

I'm pretty sure that debayering is not multi-threaded. So what I have gathered is Reslove wants GPU memory over speed and debayer needs processor speed over cores.

 

[Michael Gregory]

I use a Cubix Expander using the 2nd PCIe Slot which brings a full 16 lanes over the the expander where I have 3 Radeon R280Xs and the RRX, in the Mac Pro (5,1) I have 128Gb of Ram 8 SSDs hooked to Acera Raid (with 16Gb of Ram on the card), the internal slot configuration is: Slot 1=R280X, Slot 2=Cubix Expansion Adapter, Slot 3=CompressHD, Slot 4=Raid Card. This is pretty much the fastest hardware I could find for the Mac.

I am testing the new RRX drivers 2.1.19 now. So far doesn't seem to help FCPX export speeds of a 5k-60fps, 1 hour movie to 1080p-60 ffs ProRes4444... I will wait for it to finish and compare the export times to the same movie exported last weekend on the old drivers. This is the real bottle neck for me right now, that and compressing to H.264. The Matrox card is great but it hasn't been updated in a few years and only gives me about 45fps of output which means an hour movie takes about 90 minutes.

Thoughts???

 

[Michael Gregory]

Update on this issue

Update on this issue

I just wanted to update you on how my system is performing with the new RRX driver/firmware... It has speed up considerably. I am getting 15-20% more speed on 60fps exports out of FCPX to ProRes4444XQ files which means they are almost real time. I did a 30 minute 30fps 5k export today in under 15 minutes.

A Giant THANK YOU to the team at Red!!!! The new software has improved my workflow dramatically.

Michael

 

[Steven Decker]

Hey Dino/Michael,
Sorry to hijack the threat - but I was just about to ask if there is any advantage to using two RedRocket-X cards when I saw this - we're on the verge of buying a couple of Epic Dragons and are currently looking at the IT side of things. As 95% of our footage will be 6K HD or 6KWS at that point - would the suggested JMR Silverstor set up help in rendering times from R3D? We were thinking of a Sonnet EchoExpress 3D - but again would RRX 2 cards help?

Edit wise we're using Premiere Pro CC and will be adding Redcine-X to that set up.

We're using the latest MacPros too. Appreciate any help/insight/suggestions?

Richard

Richard,

I have already attempted to run 2 RedRocket-X cards on the same system. I have my own and the production that I was on had one that was part of their Dragon Rental. I had them in two separate TB2 Enclosures on different bus on my 2014 nMacPro.

There is no benefit to trying 2 Rocket-X cards. Cine-X as we know it will only support 1 RedRocket-X card (Straight from RED October 2014).

Steven

 

[David Ibbitson]

Hi Steven,

Can you point out where we said that? If there is some error in the documentation somewhere I would like to have that corrected. It is definitely the case that you can have more than one REDRocket-X card be used and recognized by REDCINE-X.

David