Workstation Configurations - Listings

[Jeff Kilgroe]

Please list your hardware configurations here for workstations used in your RED workflows. Format should be as follows. Please, no discussion or questions about these configurations in this list. Take all discussions to the discussion thread: http://reduser.net/forum/showthread.php?t=46968


Hardware Configuration:

Primary OS and Software used:

Pros:

Cons:

Misc Notes:

 

[Ian Laurie]

Hardware Configuration:
2.66 ghz 8 core 2008 Mac Pro 8GB's ram, rocket card

Primary OS: OSX Snow Leopard

Pros: works great, runs great, likes RED

Cons: Lugging that behemoth of a box around. It really gets to be a pain when your hauling it around for DIT work. Not the easiest thing to get in a cart either.

Misc Notes: I think shortly I will be giving an Xserve a try. So much better for hauling around and takes the abuse off my Mac Pro

 

[nima]

We use this configuration for 2k and 4k editing and grading:

Hardware configuration: Boxx i5, 24gb ram - Dulce raid drives
Primary OS: Windows, Premiere CS4, Assimilate Scratch Cine
Pros: very efficient delivery of multi formats,plenty of monitoring options and raid configurations.
Cons: not so cheap, right?

 

[Travis MacRitchie]

2.93 Ghz 8 Core Mac Pro, 16GB Ram
G-Speed 6 TB usable Raid Config
Red Rocket
Decklink HD-SDI
30" Apple Cinema Display
17" Panasonic BTLH-1700W Monitor
50" Viera Plasma Display
Euphonic MC Color Control Surface


Mac OS 10.6.4
Final Cut Suite
Adobe CS5, Premiere Pro, After Effects

Color runs with the decklink card
Redcine runs with RR
both output displays mirror on the 17" panny and 50" plasma at the same time.

Pros: Fast when everything is working, the 50" plasma looks awesome in the dark studio and impresses clients

Cons: Lack of tight integration between Color and native .R3d files. RedCine crashes, bugs with redrocket on occasion

 

[Curran Giddens]

Mac Pro (2008) ok for DaVinci?

Mac Pro (2008) ok for DaVinci?

Mac Pro (2008) 2 x 3.2GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon
16GB RAM
nVidia GeForce GT 120
Blackmagic Decklink HD Extreme 3D
4 x Hitachi 2TB Enterprise Series
1 x 120GB Mercury Extreme Pro SSD 2.5" SATA boot drive
1 x SATA media transport drive
MaxConnect internal HD mounting solution
RED Rocket
RED Rocket Breakout Box
HP Dreamcolor 24" 10-bit LCD
Apple 30" Cinema Display
Wacom Intuos4 Large
Tangent Devices Wave


*For DaVinci I just need to add a nVidia Quadro FX4000 when released in Oct.


SOFTWARE

Mac OS 10.6.4
DaVinci Resolve 7
Adobe CS5
ABSoft Neat Video for AE
R3D Data Manager
Clipfinder 2.5
Apple Logic 9



It is a bit of a hassle to get the SATA cables plugged into the motherboard. I had to loosen the screw (circled) holding the fan in place and pull up on the entire fan assembly in order to get the cables plugged in. Getting the cables through to the optical drive bay was also a tight fit. But it was all well worth the effort.

AJA disk test on my 4 x 2TB internal software RAID 0.

 

[jake blackstone]

Mac Pro (2008) 2 x 3.2GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon
8GB RAM
ATI Radeon HD 2600
4 x Hitachi 2TB Enterprise Series
2 x Seagate Barracuda 750GB Enterprise Series
MaxConnect internal HD mounting solution
RED Rocket
RED Rocket Breakout Box
HP Dreamcolor 24" 10-bit LCD
Apple 30" Cinema Display
Wacom Intuos 9x12


Mac OS 10.6.4




It is a bit of a hassle to get the SATA cables plugged into the motherboard. I had to loosen the screw (circled) holding the fan in place and pull up on the entire fan assembly in order to get the cables plugged in. Getting the cables through to the optical drive bay was also a tight fit. But it was all well worth the effort.

For DaVinci will I need to add 4GB more RAM, nVidia Quadro 4000, nVidia GT120, Blackmagic Decklink HD 3D, and Tangent Wave.







.

Thanks for great pictures and info. I think I'm going to do the same thing, if I to decide to use the Red Rocket and forgo FC controller.
My understanding, that Resolve "likes" either 6 or 12 GB of RAM, but I'm not 100% sure on that.
Unfortunately, although, Resolve on 2008 Mac will work, it will no be capable of real time playback without Red Rocket. Only 2009 and up...
But seeing, that you've got Red Rocket, you good to go.

 

[Peter Chamberlain]

Its actually the Nehalem architecture in the 2009 MacPro that prefers the system ram in lots of 3. For those trying 2008 MacPro, 8GB is likely to be better.
Peter

 

[nima]

We use this configuration for 2k and 4k editing and grading:

Hardware configuration: Boxx i5, 24gb ram - Dulce raid drives
Primary OS: Windows, Premiere CS4, Assimilate Scratch Cine
Pros: very efficient delivery of multi formats,plenty of monitoring options and raid configurations.
Cons: not so cheap, right?

forgot to mention a red rocket to speed up the process

 

[Blair S. Paulsen]

Assignments

Assignments

I have been trying to suss out how to best utilize various resources, some of which seem to overlap in terms of functionality. I've included some notes below about my current setup, and any ideas are welcome, but the larger question is how to best distribute the load between CPU, GPU(s) and the Rocket. Yes, I realize the Rocket-X will change things - but even down the road, not every system I sit down at is going to have one. Yes, multi-GPU support in a future RCX release might change the equation as well but that's still a theoretical.

So which resource is best suited to each part of the processing pipeline? Can more than one resource work cooperatively with another on the same task? How is that arbitrated? For instance can a Rocket do some operations while a rocking GPU does others - like Alchemy or sharpening? What about encoding .RED files? Or transcoding to DPX or ProRes? Etc.

Case example:

Config: 12 core, 5,1 MacPro, 32GB RAM, nVidia K5000 in slot #1, RedRocket in #2, AJA Kona3G in #3, CalDigit FASTA eSATA/USB3 HBA in #4.

I am unable to sustain real time playback in RCX 20. I have the Rocket toggled to decoding only (K5000 is driving the monitor), a lot of the footage I'm working with is 5K. Setting 1/2 or even 1/4 in the viewer pane has no discernible effect, Rocket does full decode anyway so I'm not surprised.

I have assumed that asking the Rocket to decode only and not also drive a monitor takes some load off of it, does anyone know if that's the case?

I was hoping that a recent vintage 12 core CPU would help, but is it mostly sitting around when the Rocket is engaged?

I was hoping the K5000 would help, but since I'm on build 20 instead of 21 perhaps that's of no real help.

If I went to beta build 21 to engage the K5000 would it work in tandem with the Rocket? Or would I have to toggle the Rocket off?

RCX is not supported by the Kona3G so it's no help.

I don't have fast storage IO but is there any flavor of REDCODE that requires more than 100MB/s read speed? I'm just scrubbing footage and pulling selects which I will then copy to a fast RAID for further manipulation.

IAC, I may be making some incorrect assumptions, if so please enlighten me. WWJD? (What would Jeff Do ;-))

Cheers - #19

 

[joe hedge]

Config: 12 core, 5,1 MacPro, 32GB RAM, nVidia K5000 in slot #1, RedRocket in #2, AJA Kona3G in #3, CalDigit FASTA eSATA/USB3 HBA in #4.

I am unable to sustain real time playback in RCX 20.

Are the R3D's on drives accessed by the CalDigit card? I've had much better I/O using either an Atto H680 for eSata or a HighPoint RocketU 1144BU for USB 3. Supposedly the FASTA card chokes bandwidth due to lack of controllers?

 

[Blair S. Paulsen]

I'm not sure what the speed limit is on the CalDigit card, but would it really be too slow to just read R3Ds?

My usual strategy is to scrub footage from the shuttle drives (usually G-RAIDs over eSATA) then copy the selects to a fast RAID. I suppose I could copy everything to the RAID first and then toss what I don't need, but is that really necessary? I was under the impression that the max write speed of the RedMags limited the data rate of R3Ds to around 160MB/s.

Does anyone know the maximum data rate for R3Ds? Maybe I'm making bad assumptions...

Cheers - #19

 

[Chris Nguyen]

Hardware Configuration:
Intel Core2 Quad
16 GB Ram
EVGA 9800GTX+ 512 MB DDR3 (128 CUDA cores)
1 - System drive just for OS/ Software
4 - Additional drives for Source files/ composites and back ups
2 - Dell 24" 1080 LCD Displays


Primary OS and Software used:
Windows 7, CS6, Red Cine X/ Red Player

Pros: Edits raw red 4k perfectly

Cons: source/ program playback is set to 1/8, sometimes 1/16 quality, 4k exports take forever, no USB 3.0

Misc Notes: I plan on building an i7 machine w/ 32gb ram and ssd later this year with a 4gb video card w/ 386 cuda cores.