RED Rocket breakthroughs...

[Lucas Wilson]

Hi all,

A few things that are happening in SCRATCH right now, that we showed this past Saturday at RED Day Hollywood.

1) Stereo R3D.


We showed this with two Rocket cards. They were playing back, in realtime, two R3D streams of 4K 16:9 material. Left Eye / Right Eye - full debayer/demosaic from dual RED Rocket™.

And in SCRATCH - realtime flip/flop (for beamsplit eye), LUTs on both eyes, convergence fix, interocular fix, rotation adjustment, and a few levels of color grading on each eye.

ALL of this... playing back directly from a FW-800 drive brought from the set.

This is a faster, cheaper, and better workflow for stereo than anything else out there. Stereo Dailies now happen at the end of the day... instead of having to wait for all footage to transcode and load in.

2) Hugely accelerated rendering


We also showed THREE Rocket cards in one unit... all tied to one stream of R3D. That meant a few things:

a) Playback of MX footage at 60fps (10-bit) and 35fps (16-bit)
b) That also means that rendering is faster than anything else out there... with multiple Rockets, SCRATCH can render to 2K DPX from MX at 60fps to disk. Render to 16-bit TIFF at 35fps

3) New RED Color Page


Not a big deal to those not on SCRATCH, but in v5.1, we have a separate page of color controls that contains ALL the SDK options - FLUT™, ISO, Saturation, Exposure, etc. This works in conjunction with the standard L/G/G and shape controls that we have always had.

More announcements and good stuff to come in the next few days... more firsts... ; )

Best,

Lucas


Lucas Wilson
--------------
ASSIMILATE, inc.
LA, CA, USA

[mikeburton]

Congrats Lucas! Rendering at 60fps to disk is amazing! Glad to see you put all the RED metadata into its own page, a much desired feature. Is this all running on a GlobalStore Box, overclocked?

[Emery Wells]

Wowza, wish I came to this red day. 60fps is indeed *fast* but the problem is we are now going to be more limited by the disk. As a Scratch based facility, we are usually making DPXs because they have to *go* somewhere which means we typically render directly to a shuttle drive. Right now we get about 8-10fps rendering with a RR onto a decent firewire 800 drive. 60fps is phenomenal but we would still need to copy that to a slow drive... damn bottle necks. Anyway, thats super cool Lucas, can't wait to try it out.

[Lucas Wilson]

... Is this all running on a GlobalStore Box, overclocked?

Not overclocked. RED Rocket means those days are gone. This is a perfectly normal non-overclocked CoreI7 system.

Lucas

[Nikolai Pigarev]

WOW! this is impressive. Will the 3 ROCKET system be available to may be non SCRATH users at some point?

[Steven Caesare]

I've posted this elsewhere...

2 Rocket owners need to get together and plug their cards in to a single machine and see what the driver does, and how the apps behave.

There are indications that the base Rocket drivers form Red were written with multi-card support in mind...

-sc

[Jeff Kilgroe]

WOW! this is impressive. Will the 3 ROCKET system be available to may be non SCRATH users at some point?

Anyone can buy or build their own system and install as many Rocket cards as they have room for. The catch is software support. Other than SCRATCH, no one else supports multiple Rocket cards, in many cases most post tools don't support the Rocket at all.

I think I finally have reason to buy that SCRATCH system. Now I just need to find some money...


I've posted this elsewhere...

2 Rocket owners need to get together and plug their cards in to a single machine and see what the driver does, and how the apps behave.

Does not do anything, already tried it. But REDCINE-X / ROCKETCINE-X report having more than one Rocket in the log files. :)

Have to wait for more software support.

[Tai Wah Lim]

Hi all,


3) New RED Color Page


Not a big deal to those not on SCRATCH, but in v5.1, we have a separate page of color controls that contains ALL the SDK options - FLUT™™, ISO, Saturation, Exposure, etc. This works in conjunction with the standard L/G/G and shape controls that we have always had.

More announcements and good stuff to come in the next few days... more firsts... ; )

Best,

Lucas


Lucas Wilson
--------------
ASSIMILATE, inc.
LA, CA, USA

Lucas, any estimate when 5.1 will be released? Lim

[Kwan Khan]

Fantastic @ Lucas

[Cüneyt Kaya]

wow congrats lucas!

[Sven Seynaeve]

Wow Lucas, incredible news for all of us who do care a lot about speed and future proof systems. Hope you'll get a lot of advantage on your selling rates by this.

[Lucas Wilson]

Lucas, any estimate when 5.1 will be released? Lim

5.1 will be in beta very soon. Release is dependent on the beta cycle.

Lucas

[Lucas Wilson]

2 Rocket owners need to get together and plug their cards in to a single machine and see what the driver does, and how the apps behave.

Steven,

Managing the cards correctly in single thread or multi-thread mode (stereo) is non-trivial.

Doing realtime stereo playback with multi-Rockets -> GPU -> SDI output is not a matter of plugging them in and "poof" they magically work.

Lucas

[Steven Caesare]

Oh, I didn't expect that they did... but RED has given us indication previous to your announcement that multiple Rocket support is already mart of the roadmap... Jeff's comment about it showing up in the logfiles mirrors a comment that was made her esome time ago, and when I recently mentioned that, it prompted a response from Deanan.

Assimilate's recent announcements simply suggested that this was possible even more so.

So, I certainly didn't intend to trivialize your announcement, what Assimilate is offering is amazing indeed, and I applaud your pushing the envelope in what's possible.

Congrats to you and the Assimilate team on what sounds like an amazing product.

-Steve

[Darren Orange]

Hey Lucas,

This was really awesome setup you had, I can really speak for how darn impressive it was. We need to talk soon ;)

[Jeff Kilgroe]

Lucas, is it safe to assume you guys will be at the RED NAB event? Or that Assimilate will have a NAB presence? I really want to see this!

[Lucas Wilson]

Lucas, is it safe to assume you guys will be at the RED NAB event? Or that Assimilate will have a NAB presence? I really want to see this!

Jeff,

We will be at NAB - I'll post details soon.

If you're in LA - we will be at the Entertainment Technology Expo tomorrow at the Universal Hilton showing this system!

Best,

Lucas

[Russ Lasson]

Lucus,

You guys freaking rock! When you buy a product, you really buy into the company too and Assimilate has been top notch. And it Scratch keeps getting better and better and an almost unbelievable rate. Thanks guys!

So now I just need a motherboard with like ten 16x PCIExpress slots on it. Any suggestions:)

-Russ

[Mithun DSouza]

Great going Lucas.
Cant wait to rig it up and show it off here in the other side of the world!! Woohooo :)

Go Assimilate!!

[Tai Wah Lim]

5.1 will be in beta very soon. Release is dependent on the beta cycle.

Lucas

Thanks - Lim

[Rob Lohman]

but RED has given us indication previous to your announcement that multiple Rocket support is already mart of the roadmap...

Correct

[Steven Caesare]

Correct

That makes me happy.

I look forward to seeing the first machine with 8 rocket's in it for the 617.

:yesnod:

-sc

[MichaelHalsell]

That makes me happy.

I look forward to seeing the first machine with 8 rocket's in it for the 617.

:yesnod:

-sc

Easy Steven, ease up on the Crunk Juice! :lol:

[Fredrik Harreschou]

Lucus,

You guys freaking rock! When you buy a product, you really buy into the company too and Assimilate has been top notch. And it Scratch keeps getting better and better and an almost unbelievable rate. Thanks guys!

So now I just need a motherboard with like ten 16x PCIExpress slots on it. Any suggestions:)

-Russ

Our new Scratch system runs on this motherboard that has seven 16x PCI-e slots: http://www.asus.com/product.aspx?P_ID=9ca8hJfGz483noLk

We are running 24x1TB disks in RAID6 on Areca controller, 12 GB ram, SSD system drive, QuadroFX 5800, Lynx AES-16e etc. It is a super computer if not a supercomputer...

[Stacey Spears]

I am running Scratch on this MB: http://www.supermicro.com/products/motherboard/QPI/5500/X8DAH_.cfm

16x1TB RAID5 and 16x750GB RAID6 on Adaptec 5085 controller, Dual 2.8 GHz quad core, 24 GB tripple channel DDR3 RAM, Intel SSD, Fusion IO SSD PCIe, Quadro FX5800 w/ SDI, NitroAV 1394b/eSata PCIe, RED Rocket.

[Tony Lorentzen]

To quote one of my all-time favorite Pixar characters:

http://cheeserland.com/images/nemoturtle.jpg

You rock, dude!