Red Frames in RedRocket render & playback

[dave_garcia]

Hello,

I'm getting intermmitant red frames in renders and playback out of my RED ROCKET card.

I see them on the video playback as well.

I have it in the top slot of a 1st gen macpro. Expansion Utility says the slot is set to 8x.

Also Rendering to Pro-res is taking about 1.5x realtime. Is this normal? I thought it would be realtime.

Thanks for any help.

David

[Jordan Livingston]

Hi Dave,

The "realtime"-ness of the REDRocket depends partially on how many channels of audio are present, as well as your CPU speed and hard drive speed, etc. Are you reading and writing to / from the same drives? I have found that I get significant performance increases by reading and writing to / from two different drives. Also, eSATA drives (as opposed to FireWire) or even better, SCSI-3 or SAS RAIDs, provide performance improvements.

As for the random red frames, I haven't yet seen that problem myself. Check the proxy files playback to determine if they are actually present in the original recording. If not, I'm sure someone else who's experienced this will chime in here...

I'm curious, are you working with MX footage or regular M footage?

- Jordan

[dave_garcia]

I am writing to the same drive, so I could see that being an issue. It is a Fiber Raid that does 700MBs though.

The Red frames are not in the original footage, but they are coming through in the renders.

[dave_garcia]

Looks like I may have installed the driver but not the firmware. That's probably the problem.

[dave_garcia]

A quick update on this... The firmware didn't help, but I discovered the problem seemed to happen when my Kona 3 was in the machine. I was on a shoot the other day and pulled the K3 and we were fine.

After a day of using the Rocket solidly, I got back to the shop and tried the K3 in again and now it's working fine... although I didn't test with Kona outputting video. Maybe that's the thing. Maybe Kona can't be pulling while RR is....

[Russ Campbell]

I had similar problems using Rocketcine and some of the older Redcine-X versions when transcoding to Prores. This seems to be sorted out with the newest build of Redcine-X, but I still get random red frames with Rocketcine.

[Jay Silver]

I'm getting intermittent red frames as well...not sure what's going on.
I processed other footage and outputted to the same Apple Prores HQ and didn't have one red frame in 250gb of footage.
Now, every processed shot I get red frames.
I looked at the original footage off the RED drive as well as the backed up copy and nothing but clear, beautiful Stanley Cup footage...

Very frustrating as I'm on a deadline and it looks like it's gonna be a long night...

Any ideas out there???

[Jay Silver]

Here's an update to my red frame issue.
I tried to process some footage with out the rocket card and the footage came out fine. So my conclusion was that the card was the problem. Before I sent the card back to RED, I figured I'd try one more thing. A couple of days ago I borrowed a friend's Red Rocket card and installed it in my tower. I processed some footage using his card, but I got the same results, intermittent red frames.
So I'm now guessing there might be something wrong with the tower that I have. Tonight, I'm going to be trying a different one...hopefully this works.
Very frustrating.

[Deanan]

Here's an update to my red frame issue.
I tried to process some footage with out the rocket card and the footage came out fine. So my conclusion was that the card was the problem. Before I sent the card back to RED, I figured I'd try one more thing. A couple of days ago I borrowed a friend's Red Rocket card and installed it in my tower. I processed some footage using his card, but I got the same results, intermittent red frames.
So I'm now guessing there might be something wrong with the tower that I have. Tonight, I'm going to be trying a different one...hopefully this works.
Very frustrating.

Is this a macpro 1,1 or 2,1?
Both had sketchy pcie architecture that we try to work around in the latest drivers/firmware for rocket:
http://www.reduser.net/forum/showthread.php?t=46029

[Jordan Livingston]

Jay,

Without knowing anything about the PCI architecture issues, I do think the problem is a widespread REDRocket firmware / drivers issue. My understanding is that RED is working incredibly hard to improve these with each release. That said, the bugs seem to persistent across multiple REDRockets and MacPros, so my guess is they will be addressed in software and drivers as the product matures... hopefully soon!!!

I also have a dilettante theory that the RMD metadata might have something to do with a lot of the REDRocket bugs we have been hearing about lately. Before RMDs, my REDRocket worked at 30fps with no issues whatsoever every time. It was rock solid. After RMDs, the bugs such as black frames, red frames, and color inconsistencies in ProRes 4444 transcodes started to come to my attention. My REDRocket also seems to have inexplicably slowed to about 15-20fps with no other changes to my system whatsoever. It could be just a coincidence, but since all of this software is still considered BETA, it's at least a semi-logical guess.

I'm sure Deanan will jump in and correct me if I'm wrong here. Please understand, I mean no disrespect whatsoever... I just want some definitive answers and a rock-solid workflow, because that's what my paying clients demand from me.

Best,

- Jordan