When taking The Dragon Plunge

[Chris Vallier]

I'm prepping to purchase a full Dragon setup. I've read through pages and pages and still can't find answers: 1. Does a Red Epic that has been upgraded to a Red Dragon sensor have the EXACT same specs as if I purchased a brand NEW Red Dragon? 2. The New RedRocket X card, I'm assuming will not be compatible with the new Mac Pro (bass tube lol) . If that is true, then what is the Ideal mac or pc setup most are using?

 

[Brian Merlen]

1 All Epic Dragons are the same specs 2 Externally the pci card will need to live in an enclosure, that or buy a tower that still has slots. From what I have read letting a Red Rocket X live externally will be such a bottle neck you might as well use the prior gen Rocket, but to each his own

 

[Jeff Kilgroe]

1. Yes, same exact specs.

2. Rocket X card will work with new Mac Pro, or other Macs equipped with Thunderbolt when placed into a Thunderbolt enclosure. Thunderbolt 2 enclosures will allow for double the bandwidth to be usable by a connected device over original Thunderbolt. That should be good enough for many tasks, but the Rocket X card would essentially be restricted to half its potential bandwidth over Thunderbolt 2. These are answers that we really don't have just yet. And if anyone does, they're not allowed to talk.

EDIT> I see Brian beat me to it because I was slow...

An ideal computer setup is somewhat subjective and is always a moving target. With GPU acceleration of R3D decoding now enabled in REDCINE-X and soon in other apps and the open SDK, our options are opening up quite a bit. Even with that, you can get by with post processing and editing 5K EPIC MX footage just fine on a decent laptop or an iMac. Full quality renders and finishing is what takes all the time, but you can get real-time full quality 5K playback on a decent 6-core PC with a GTX780 or Titan video card. If you have the budget, a 16 to 20 core dual Xeon E5-V2 workstation combined with a Titan or Quadro K6000 video card and a Rocket-X should handle anything you throw at it. Or at least it will handle it better than mostly anything else out there...

The new Mac Pro isn't a slouch of a system at all. I would say it's a greatly misunderstood system, but as many have pointed out, it's not going to be a simple replacement of the old tower. I'm betting it will tear through R3D workflows just fine. Can't comment on R3D performance, but it should be great. We should know in the next month or two...

 

[Wes Howell]

Hey Jeff, Are you saying that you get full res, full quality 5k on a 6 core PC?

I have a z820 (16 core) and I can't play 1/2 res consistently without some dropped frames here and there (No rocket in this case)
1/4 res provides a REALLY nice editing experience, but I'm nowhere close to full resolution, full debayer playback.
I wish 1/2 res was totally smooth considering it's a 16 core system. 1/2 res in Premiere uses all the CPU's well but drops a frame here and there (without Rocket)

Just wondered

Wes

 

[Corey_O]

Jeff,
Thunderbolt 2 enclosures will allow for double the bandwidth to be usable by a connected device over original Thunderbolt.

I can use original thunderbolt cables for thunderbolt 2?

 

[Jeff Kilgroe]

Hey Jeff, Are you saying that you get full res, full quality 5k on a 6 core PC?

Well, outputting to a 4K (UHD) display at 4K, I can play back in full quality. With the current beta of RC-X. Both my Z820 16-core with Titan GPU will do it and so will my 6-core 3960X 4.7GHz build, also with Titan GPU. Editing is a different matter and that remains to be seen. Adobe is supposed to be releasing their CC update, like today, that should have GPU acceleration in Premiere. I have a Rocket in my Z820, nothing in the other box other than the Titan and a SAS card. There is the occasional hiccup, but the software is still very much beta.

I have a z820 (16 core) and I can't play 1/2 res consistently without some dropped frames here and there (No rocket in this case)
1/4 res provides a REALLY nice editing experience, but I'm nowhere close to full resolution, full debayer playback.

That's normal.

Jeff,
Thunderbolt 2 enclosures will allow for double the bandwidth to be usable by a connected device over original Thunderbolt.

To use the 20Gbps per channel of Thunderbolt 2, you need a Thunderbolt 2 enclosure or device and a Thunderbolt 2 port. Any Thunderbolt 1 devices or enclosures will operate at the 10Gbps per device channel. Attaching a TB1 device to a TB2 port locks the port and everything connected to it into TB1 operational mode.

I can use original thunderbolt cables for thunderbolt 2?

Yes.

Thunderbolt 1 and 2 both have 4 x 10Gbps uni-directional channels in them. With TB1, no peripheral could allocate more than one upstream and downstream channel, so you were locked at 10Gbps speed. Thunderbolt 2 operates the same way, but also allows for devices to allocate both upstream and both downstream channels for 20Gbps bi-directional aggregate bandwidth. The cables are the same.

Thunderbolt 3 will arrive in late 2015 or early 2016 and will require new cables.

 

[Gavin Greenwalt]

Full quality renders and finishing is what takes all the time, but you can get real-time full quality 5K playback on a decent 6-core PC with a GTX780 or Titan video card.

Ehhh.. not really. If you want 5k you need 8 cores. I have a 6 core + Titan and the CPU is definitely the bottleneck. I get about 16-18fps @ 5k.
EDIT:

my 6-core 3960X 4.7GHz build

Oh... "6 core" but 3.3GHz OC'ed to 4.7GHz. That's a pretty substantial OC.

 

[Jeff Kilgroe]

Ehhh.. not really. If you want 5k you need 8 cores. I have a 6 core + Titan and the CPU is definitely the bottleneck. I get about 16-18fps @ 5k.
EDIT:


Oh... "6 core" but 3.3GHz OC'ed to 4.7GHz. That's a pretty substantial OC.

Hehe. It is... It's a 40% OC at 4.6-something GHz and Windows and most things just report 4.7. I'm surprised it hasn't burned itself up yet. It's liquid cooled and I still get heat warnings quite often when rendering anything, but it's solid as a rock. Truly sad, and a bit curious, but it's one of the most stable systems I've ever built and it hangs with my Z820 for stability. The i7 3930K can OC that far easily, but it's not as robust of a CPU. For most 'normal' configurations an 8-core Xeon is really the minimum, dual 6-core or better is really where it's at. Too bad overclocking the Xeons isn't really feasible. Haven't even tried with the Ivy Bridge EP, only just built my first one of those and it was for someone else. With the E5-2687W and E5-2690 Sandy Bridge Xeons, best we can do is a 4 to 5 % external bump and it seems that 5% is only stable on some of them. Waste of time, really. Too bad Intel won't budge on their policy of locking the internal multipliers.

 

[Brian Merlen]

@Jeff

I only beat you to it cuz I been logging a ton of clips the past 2 years. I'm like practically a professional court room typist at this point...

Do you agree with my theory that the current Rocket will run similar to a Rocket X performance wise when ran through a thunderbolt 2 (or 1) enclosure externally? Its my understanding that due to the bus limitations we will encounter by running say a Rocket and storage on TB, along with maybe monitoring too?, that we will end up with a bottle neck that won't really let the Rocket X work at the 16x slot capacity its capable of via TB1 or TB2 external solutions since it doesn't run as fast and theres more things still on the bus?

My question being if your a new late 2013 mac pro perspective owner, does it make fiscal sense to get the new card if you have to run it externally or can your old card provide similar results?


Granted the new Mac Pro nor TB2 exclosures don't exist yet, but they soon will, so its worth while to consider I think for those of us ordering Dragon upgrades that can get the Rocket X card discount

I wonder if the build factor toughness will be increased as well? Perhaps another incentive for the new card?

 

[Jeff Kilgroe]

@Jeff

I only beat you to it cuz I been logging a ton of clips the past 2 years. I'm like practically a professional court room typist at this point...

I'm not sure how to respond to that... Perhaps my condolences are in order? hahahaaaaa

Do you agree with my theory that the current Rocket will run similar to a Rocket X performance wise when ran through a thunderbolt 2 (or 1) enclosure externally? Its my understanding that due to the bus limitations we will encounter by running say a Rocket and storage on TB, along with maybe monitoring too?, that we will end up with a bottle neck that won't really let the Rocket X work at the 16x slot capacity its capable of via TB1 or TB2 external solutions since it doesn't run as fast and theres more things still on the bus?

Hmmm... It's really difficult to say with certainty here. We just won't know for sure until we get our hands on all the bits and pieces. What we do know is that Rocket-X is supposed to be 5X faster than the original Rocket. Feeding R3D data into the Rocket is not going to be a bottleneck and we know it should crank out frames 5X faster. Meaning that playback from the Rocket-X should be a lot better, especially in terms of 5KFF and 6K and this doesn't really matter on the PCIe/ Thunderbolt interface if we're viewing from the Rocket.

For 6K frames, I think that works out to about 115MB per frame uncompressed at 16bpc color. Or 2.7GB/s for 24fps footage. While the Thunderbolt 2 interface at 20Gbps is presumably about 1/4 of the maximum bandwidth of the Rocket-X (assuming it's a v2.0 X16 card), that doesn't mean it's automatically restricted to 1/4 of its potential. 20Gbps equates to 2.3GB/s throughput, so the card is going to be able to feed back full resolution 6KFF frames at 16bit uncompressed to the system at near real-time over a Thunderbolt 2 connection. Something tells me that if you're transcoding those, the Rocket isn't going to be much of a bottleneck. There's also some hope that we'll see Thunderbolt 2 PCIe expanders that use more than one Thunderbolt 2 connection to compound the bandwidth. TB2 allows for port aggregation or bonding for this purpose. Not sure if it will happen, just saying that it's possible.

If you're shooting 6K and having the Rocket generate 4K uncompressed frames for transcode or other encoding at 24 or 30fps, you'll have ample bandwidth over TB2 with the Rocket-X for that purpose. Or at least the numbers say we will. Should be able to pull it off at 5K and 24fps too.

My question being if your a new late 2013 mac pro perspective owner, does it make fiscal sense to get the new card if you have to run it externally or can your old card provide similar results?

Difficult to answer. A month ago, I would have said yes it does make sense. However, now that we have GPU acceleration in RC-X and a promise of support for multiple GPUs as things move forward, I'm not so sure the Rocket-X is a must-have. For those needing full-quality renders much of the time or doing finishing or compositing workflows, I would say that the Rocket-X is still going to be a good idea.

Granted the new Mac Pro nor TB2 exclosures don't exist yet, but they soon will, so its worth while to consider I think for those of us ordering Dragon upgrades that can get the Rocket X card discount

I wonder if the build factor toughness will be increased as well? Perhaps another incentive for the new card?

I pre-ordered two Rocket-X cards with my two Dragon upgrades. I will definitely get one as soon as my order comes up. I'll stall the second one off until my second Dragon upgrade comes up, so I should have a bit of time to assess the situation. Something tells me that with my current workloads and being a 1.5-man operation most of the time, along with the new GPU acceleration in RC-X and soon Premiere and others, etc... I'm probably going to be fine having just one Rocket-X card. I think many people will do fine without the card if they have a reasonably competent system with a good GPU or two.

I haven't had any Rocket cards fail on me <knock wood>, but I know many have. From the pictures and what I saw of the card at NAB, it does look a bit more rugged. I think the common practice of shuffling the Rocket card around, even inside a PCIe enclosure, for rental or between systems is not the best idea. PCIe cards are not made for that sort of abuse, yet we see a lot of that in this biz...

 

[Will Keir]

I believe the Epic MX w/ Dragon upgrade = Epic Dragon. Same except wear a tear of a used camera.

The RRX card should work in an older Mac Pro... I'm banking on that and have heard nothing to make me believe otherwise.

I'm prepping to purchase a full Dragon setup. I've read through pages and pages and still can't find answers: 1. Does a Red Epic that has been upgraded to a Red Dragon sensor have the EXACT same specs as if I purchased a brand NEW Red Dragon? 2. The New RedRocket X card, I'm assuming will not be compatible with the new Mac Pro (bass tube lol) . If that is true, then what is the Ideal mac or pc setup most are using?

 

[Will Keir]

Who is the .5? Your wife?

Something tells me that with my current workloads and being a 1.5-man operation most of the time.

 

[Will Keir]

Hurmm...

I was hoping to use my 4,1 Mac Pro with the RRX Card, are my dreaming?

2. Rocket X card will work with new Mac Pro, or other Macs equipped with Thunderbolt when placed into a Thunderbolt enclosure. Thunderbolt 2 enclosures will allow for double the bandwidth to be usable by a connected device over original Thunderbolt. That should be good enough for many tasks, but the Rocket X card would essentially be restricted to half its potential bandwidth over Thunderbolt 2. These are answers that we really don't have just yet. And if anyone does, they're not allowed to talk.

 

[Jeff Kilgroe]

Who is the .5? Your wife?

Haha... I have a part-time assistant. At least as far as all this production and media type work goes.

Hurmm...

I was hoping to use my 4,1 Mac Pro with the RRX Card, are my dreaming?

That should work just fine. The '09 Mac Pro is showing its age, but that Rocket-X card should look and work beautifully in slot #2.

 

[Will Keir]

Will I get full performance?

That should work just fine. The '09 Mac Pro is showing its age, but that Rocket-X card should look and work beautifully in slot #2.

 

[Jeff Kilgroe]

Will I get full performance?

I don't see any reason why it wouldn't run at full speed. Now as to whether or not the rest of the system can keep up, that's another matter. The PCIe slot and system bus are not going to be the bottleneck. The hold-ups will be the 1033MHz RAM and the CPU power in and of itself. It's still a nice system, especially if you have an 8-core at 2.6GHz or faster. Seeing how GPU acceleration is progressing, I think a GTX570 and up or GTX680 or recent Radeon 69xx or 79xx card will also help speed things along. You will want plenty of RAM to buffer playback and cache ahead.

 

[Will Keir]

8 core at 2.9GHz and 48 GB of RAM with a GTX 680.

I've never seen the RAM make much of a difference going from 8GB to 48GB.

I don't see any reason why it wouldn't run at full speed. Now as to whether or not the rest of the system can keep up, that's another matter. The PCIe slot and system bus are not going to be the bottleneck. The hold-ups will be the 1033MHz RAM and the CPU power in and of itself. It's still a nice system, especially if you have an 8-core at 2.6GHz or faster. Seeing how GPU acceleration is progressing, I think a GTX570 and up or GTX680 or recent Radeon 69xx or 79xx card will also help speed things along. You will want plenty of RAM to buffer playback and cache ahead.

 

[PC Greene]

Thunderbolt 3 will arrive in late 2015 or early 2016 and will require new cables.

Oh dear...I'd hoped we might see it sooner like in the second generation tube mac pro. We're certainly getting a "tube pro" but may need to reconsider the rocket X if it will be crippled for the first 2-3 years we own it. Guess we'll be relying on software decode and possibly an external GPU unless that too will be crippled by TB2 spec.

I just had a sad lol

Thanks as always for the CPU / Post insights Jeff!

PCG