RED ROCKET and RocketCineX Heaven...

[Meryem Ersoz]

Heaven... I'm in heaven,
And my heart beats so that I can hardly speak.
And I seem to find the happiness I seek,
When we're out together dancing cheek to cheek.

ok, this is goofy, but I can't help but smile, while I'm playing with the new card and the accompanying software. I have this happy fluttery feeling in my gut. It's almost like being in looooove....

(that's the sound of Lerner and Loewe shoving aside Irving Berlin...)

Mark may be finding realtime 4K playback without a 4K monitor a torture, but I'm playing back full screen, full res, full 4K Build 20 lowlight experiments on my 2K Apple 30" cinema display without a single stutter, not even a twitchy candlelight flutter, and it's all faaaabulous, dreamy.

What a vast improvement over the playback in RedCine and RedAlert. For those of you, like me, who don't own a more expensive higher end system, like SCRATCH, you too will be in heaven.

It's not fully enabled yet, and it has crashed on me one time already. But it's coming, it is wonderful, and it is for real.

More later, still playing.

[Christian Edwards]

Man thats so F'in cool !!!!! Red stars are aligning ,dont be selfish keep us posted :-)

[Meryem Ersoz]

There isn't too much to tell yet. It's not fully enabled, but you can see from the layout of the program that, when it is, it will be pretty sweet.

one nice feature is the "hide rocketcineX" button that allows you to toggle in and out of the program...

one thing currently missing that i'd like to see is the return of the zebra toggle switch, which appears to be gone.

so, as i said, a few things, but we'll need to see more of it working before the real critiquing and feedback can begin...

[Kevin Wild]

Meryem, if you're talking about that little rocket button, that is actually going to enable your monitor-out function and not actually hide the program. However, apple-H does hide it nicely.

It's still very alpha, but when it works completely, it is going to be great.

[Simon Blackledge]

So wheres the download for RC-x?

s

[Kevin Wild]

So wheres the download for RC-x?

s



It's a secret. :-) Alpha version for only the lucky ones who already have a Rocket.

[Greg M]

So wheres the download for RC-x?

s

RocketCineX is no good w/o a Rocket

[Kwan Khan]

hummmm.....

[Meryem Ersoz]

Meryem, if you're talking about that little rocket button, that is actually going to enable your monitor-out function and not actually hide the program. However, apple-H does hide it nicely.


yes, by button, i meant the pull down menu, or apple-H, as you say...not a button....

have you hooked yours up to an external monitor, Kevin? That is one thing that I haven't attempted yet - weekend family obligations are kicking in...

[Kevin Wild]

Meryem, it doesn't work yet per RED and my own eyes seeing a giant green screen on my monitor. :-) They are working like crazy to get this software to 100%. Can't wait...

[MichaelP]

Other than being a "dailies" viewer, what else have you tried with it? Encoding to another format? Play out as HD-SDI? Does it have timecode embedded in the signal? Which timecode? Choice?All 4 audio channels embedded? Does it have a TC out where an audio device could chase it? What does REDCINE X export?

So many questions.. :)

Michael

[Kevin Wild]

Whoa, hold on fella'. :-) This thing is brand new and pretty cutting edge stuff...only a few are even out there. Currently it does little of what you ask, but I would guess (RED can chime in) that most of these things would be supported in the future.

All the card does currently in Alpha state is play back clips real time and do some glitch-filled color correction. (They're working on getting rid of those.) So, right now it's all about potential. The great news is that as Mark from OH says, "this is a game changer." (I think he said that.) The reason being, that even in Alpha state, I was quite excited to play a 4K file, full resolution real time with zero dropped frames. Then, I would color correct the shot (primary) and no matter what I did to the image, it would still play back real time. THAT is awesome.

FWIW, I was encoding to ProRez422 HQ on many clips and they all looked great and encoded fast. I'm not going to state any numbers because a new build is coming very soon that will increase it even more.

Jarred just stated that the HD-SDI play out to monitors will be in a build released next week.

[Chris Bell]

So I can grade footage on my HD CRT via the SDI out?

[Pawel Achtel]

hahaha, nice one!

We don't need a lot of things in life, just the right stuff.

[MichaelP]

FWIW, I was encoding to ProRez422 HQ on many clips and they all looked great and encoded fast. I'm not going to state any numbers because a new build is coming very soon that will increase it even more.

Is the increased time due to faster than real time decode of the R3D file at 4K, 1/2, 1/4, etc. or because the hardware has on board encoding other formats? In theory playing out over HD-SDI will get you real time encoding, but is there something there for faster than real time encoding "potentially" in the future?

Michael

[Lawrence Jordan]

Got to play with my new RR for about an hour yesterday evening. I just want to concur with everyone on these boards who has been saying this thing is going to be BIG.

I don't own a RED Cam but I'm a feature film editor with a passion for digital filmmaking technology and am now cutting a film being shot with it. My crew and I are doing all the transcoding and dailies prep "in-house" and have been putting in the hours to keep up with production and to get up to speed on everything RED as quickly as possible. I believe we are creating new workflows which will be used by savvy filmmakers for years to come.

I've been following the Rocket since the day the honorable Jannard announced it and have been really eager to see what it will do for us. So when it arrived yesterday morning you can imagine how psyched I was. As soon as our "transcode station" was free for a minute I installed the card, SDI connectors and the driver. I'm running the Rocket concurrently with an ATTO 41-ES fiber channel card, ATTO H380 SAS card, and a stock Nvidia GT 120 video card which shipped with the 8-Core 2.66 "Nehalem" MacPro.

The Rocket clicked in nicely and it wasn't a few minutes before everything was ready. I fired the Mac back up and installed the drivers as instructed. The Rocket card didn't add even a decibel of noise. In fact, it was so quiet I took the cover back off the Mac and put my hand over the fan to make sure it was spinning. Indeed it was. All I needed now was some ROCKETcine-X magic.

Being the gear junkie I've come to be, I wasn't just going to wait around for the email promised from Brent. I went back to cutting but couldn't resist the temptation to refresh the RED support page about every 15 minutes. A bit after 6 as promised, ROCKETcine-X was posted. For crying out loud it felt like X-mas-friggin' eve.

ROCKETcine-X has a slick interface, I didn't expect anything less from the people who gave the world RED Digital Cinema. I loaded the closest footage I could grab, and after a few minutes of fumbling, I was playing back 1/2+ footage from a single firewire drive in real time. Simply amazing. Firewire didn't seem to be able to handle full res 4K, so I accessed some dailies from our master "vault", a 16TB Dulce Systems fiber channel RAID (http://dulcesystems.com/) 5 SAN, parked in a closet in the front of our offices. I set RC-X to full, and the files played back ever so sweet and smoothly. Very, very cool.

But like others have said it's just the beginning, ROCKETcine-X has huge, huge potential. Make no mistake, like Avid, like FCP, like RED ONE, it's a game changer. But as of right now, it's just a glimmer of what it could, and I believe eventually will become.

-- Larry