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  • Hey all, just changed over the backend after 15 years I figured time to give it a bit of an update, its probably gonna be a bit weird for most of you and i am sure there is a few bugs to work out but it should kinda work the same as before... hopefully :)

Workstation Benchmark Rankings

I was kind of suggesting this as well - focus on CPU rather than GPU in the short term - simply because everyone has a multi-thread cpu these days and it would be easier than having to write two separate code for both ATI AND nVidia graphics pipelines.

Conversely, if it were to happen an RR would be obsolete pretty quickly, even on older systems, because it would be cheaper to buy a brand-new computer system with even the highest-end hardware, than to buy a RR.

Jon Thomasberg said:
So far I have tried to merely present facts and benchmarks without adding much commentary. But GPU accelerated debayer would be great ultimately, but I was thinking more along the lines that it would seem reasonable if they would unlock/optimize RCX Pro to even use merely the CPU cores and threads to their potential. However, if they were able to enlist MPE into the mix, I am confident I would be able to render 5k realtime (or close to it) given my current build.

RedRocket is still viable and useful for those with systems that cannot handle such load without the assistance of the card, but it would seem that if the system were able to handle the load natively on its own merit, the SDK shouldn't hamper/throttle its performance just to sell proprietary J2000 cards. Given how gracious Red has been with free firmware updates and free software, I highly doubt that this is Red's motive, as some have alluded. With that said, I am not Rob, nor is my strength in coding, but it seems reasonable that with some tweaking of code RCX Pro should be able to enable full CPU usage for software-based debayer.
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Jon, what are your full-quality/full-res/full-debayer transcode times with 4kHD? I'm confused by the numbers presented (2:48min render for a 3:23min clip); isn't that just going from r3d to r3d (which isn't really rendering anything, other than playing it back and saving it as a r3d file)? I was under the impression that a RR makes going from .r3d to any other file format (particularly ProRes, since that's usually what clients want footage delivered on) is where the card really shines, since it can do it in real-time. If you're saying you've already got that transcoding to be faster than real-time with your new SB-e system than I really don't see the need for an RR.
 
Why no GPU/CUDA support? Because of RED Rocket, I guess.
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The RR does both decoding and debayer. GPUs perform poorly at decoding any type of compressed video. AMD, Intel, and NVIDIA have a special video decoding HW (H.264, MPEG2, and VC-1) block that is part of the GPU. When Vista shipped, ATI had removed the special HW block from that generation of GPU to cut costs. The GPU performed worse than pure software decode and this was for MPEG-2! It killed DVD playback at that time. The next gen GPU added the special HW block back.

GPUs do well with some tasks and poor with others. CABAC is an example of something that works better using a CPU than a GPU. CABAC is the entropy coder that is part of H.264.
 
My proposal for a benchmark is to convert a 4k clip that everyone can find online to 1920 sized dpx.
It is common to finish at that resolution, and the dpx format is very easy to encode, so the benchmark is really the r3d decode and debayer.
The resize to 1920 is pretty easy too, some apps will harness the gpu for that part of the task.
The overall number we want to see is render (transcode) frames per second.

One thing I want to clarify: transcoding r3d is more than debayer. It is a compression decode and then a debayer. Debayer is easier than decompression .
like Stacey said, the jpeg 2000 that is the compression used is not a good speedup candidate for gpu code.

So who can point me to a 4k r3d that we can start with ??? Anything on a Red site maybe ?

-Les Dittert
 
So I found this r3d file, 222 frames of hockey footage, 4k x 2k
http://www.tomguilmette.com/wp/download/43/

Imported into prem cs5.5, no color correction, just a motion scale 47% to get it into a 1920 sized frame. Max bit depth and max render quality.
Rendering to a DPX sequence ( no log conversion ) took 75 seconds. That's 2.96 FPS render speed out of Premiere .
RCX took 96 seconds.
 
Tested render out of 5k@24fps @ RC9:1 R3D 00:02:59.03 sequence / Export times in PP5.5.2

to: 4kHD 23.976 DPX Full/Max = 28min 47.0sec
to: 1920x1080 23.976 DPX Full/Max = 10min 24.2sec
to: 1920x1080 23.976 H.264 Blu-Ray Max/VBR1pass bitrate25-30/MaxRenderQ = 41mins 0sec

If I get time I'll test RCX Pro b8 and 4kHD clips also and let you know what I find.
 
I notice on your rig you are using windows 7 pro. Is there any reason to get windows 7 ultimate? Thanks for this thread, will check back often.
 
Jon,

I noticed you use WD RE4 2TB and not the Black Caviar 2TB drive - is there a reason? I've seen a few benchmark tests between the two where the Caviar Black beat the RE4 (though they were close.) Is there something the RE4 does better in terms of editing that I'm unaware of?

I'm putting together a system - not too different that what you put together - and this is one of my last decisions. Right now the Caviar Black drives are cheaper than the RE4 so if there's not much of a difference I'd prefer to go the cheaper route.

 
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MDH,

The RE4 is optimized for use in a RAID, whereas the Caviar Black isn't. HTH

Jon
 
Great thread !

Jon, why did you use a SSD RAID 0 config for your system drive, rather then just a single one ? Did you use the onboard controller for that ?

Would you recommand using the onboard controler for a media RAID 0 config or going with a third party card ?
 
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