Divinci Resolve With Cubix GPU Xpander

[Jesse Korosi]

I am just curious if anyone out there has got there hands on the Cubix GPU-Xpander to use along with Divinci Resolve yet?

Will this speed up renders as well or just the playback/realtime performance of your color grading experience?

I am currently running Divinci on a MacPro with the Quadro FX 4800 along with a RedRocket. But I am curious if I would get better performance for specifically Rendering if I were to add another rocket ... or two, or another Quadro FX card?

Thanks in advance!

[Steve Johnson]

Jesse,

I spoke to a company here in the UK called jigsaw24 about this and got talking with one of the techies. I asked how much to full 4K playback etc you could get if you added the expander box with 3 Quadro 4000 cards as per the spec on the website.

He said that they where talking directly on a weekly basis with the guess test Davinci for Mac and with the expander box and 3 Quadro 4000 cards, they where getting full 4K half debay with 24 nodes, so I would get you could get 4K Full debay with 12 nodes.

You might want to get that checked independently but thats what I was told.

Hope that helps.

Steve

[Jesse Korosi]

Hey Steve,
Thanks for the response!

That is awesome. But I am not getting a 4K monitor ANYTIME soon. haha My main concern was whether or not I could speed up rendering specifically if I had the Cubix.

One of my co-workers was just told by a Divinci Rep today that we would be best served to go with a 12 Core Mac if we were to mainly use it for transcoding.

"The GPU will make it faster but when working with compressed formats the CPU
plays a greater role.

So if you were going DPX to DPX I would say yes as many GPU's as possible
but if you had to pick between CPU or GPU additions with h.264 etc I would
say go 12 core CPU"

[Nick Shaw]

…they where getting full 4K half debay with 24 nodes, so I would get you could get 4K Full debay with 12 nodes.

I don't think that logic works. Apart from anything else, 4K is four times as many pixels as 2K, not twice as many.

[Jeff Kilgroe]

I don't think that logic works. Apart from anything else, 4K is four times as many pixels as 2K, not twice as many.

Correct. 4X the amount of calculations for the demosaic / debayer operations to go from half to full debayer. Not sure how that would translate to overall performance as there's a lot of other things going on as well. But I would say that it's going to be less than just half as fast.

[Chris Parker]

also, as i understand, the GPU expansion helps only with applying color fx or nodes on an uncompressed image (eg. 2K DPX). But if your source material is compressed (eg. QT) then it is CPU power you need more than GPU power.

and that the gpu expander won't work any magic on render times.

if you are needing to have more nodes applied to 2K DPX files and maintain realtime playback and monitoring, this is where the multi GPU comes in.

is this correct?

[Dustin Cross]

Decklink is also talking with Cyclone to confirm the Cyclone 600-2707 works with Resolve. I looked at Cubix and Cyclone and went with the Cyclone for my DIT cart and have been extremely happy with it. PCIe Expanders are great. Haven't tried Resolve yet.


Dusty

[Jeff Kilgroe]

Any further news on the Cyclone and the ATTO 6Gbps SAS cards? I would want the ATTO R680 to work in Slot-4 of the Mac tower, so not in the expander itself, although I may throw an R308 3Gbps card in the expander and do an internal RAID, maybe with LTO, there.

[Dustin Cross]

Jeff,

Last I heard, Atto had a Cyclone and was working on it.

I really like having my R30F in my Cyclone with 10 drives connected and an LTO4. I am thinking about getting a half height LTO4 and adding three more drives. The R30F with 10 drives in RAID 6 does 500MB/s no problem. That is enough speed for now.

Can't wait to be able to use the R60F and get even more speed out of my raid. Should be able to get closer to 1GB/s with 13 drives then.


Dusty

[Steve Johnson]

Hey Steve,
Thanks for the response!

That is awesome. But I am not getting a 4K monitor ANYTIME soon. haha My main concern was whether or not I could speed up rendering specifically if I had the Cubix.

One of my co-workers was just told by a Divinci Rep today that we would be best served to go with a 12 Core Mac if we were to mainly use it for transcoding.

"The GPU will make it faster but when working with compressed formats the CPU
plays a greater role.

So if you were going DPX to DPX I would say yes as many GPU's as possible
but if you had to pick between CPU or GPU additions with h.264 etc I would
say go 12 core CPU"



Hi Jesse

No problems - hope it was some help.

Steve

[Steve Johnson]

I don't think that logic works. Apart from anything else, 4K is four times as many pixels as 2K, not twice as many.

Hi Nick

Yes i would agree with you on that logic. That is what I thought at first but that's what these tech guys told me. Never believe a tech guy! ;-)

Steve

[Steve Johnson]

Correct. 4X the amount of calculations for the demosaic / debayer operations to go from half to full debayer. Not sure how that would translate to overall performance as there's a lot of other things going on as well. But I would say that it's going to be less than just half as fast.

It would be interesting to see on a system that actually is running using the expansion box and the extra 4000's to see exactly what you can get out of them in terms of what resolution vs what debayer vs how many nodes!

[Steve Johnson]

also, as i understand, the GPU expansion helps only with applying color fx or nodes on an uncompressed image (eg. 2K DPX). But if your source material is compressed (eg. QT) then it is CPU power you need more than GPU power.

and that the gpu expander won't work any magic on render times.

if you are needing to have more nodes applied to 2K DPX files and maintain realtime playback and monitoring, this is where the multi GPU comes in.

is this correct?

Chris,
So does that not make the case to work in an uncompressed format on Davinci for Mac? So by that rational, correct me if I am wrong, if you work in r3d files, which are not compressed (e.g. QT) is that not better as you would have all the RAW data, so therefore the GPU expander would work. Is that right?

[Stephen Lovett]

Hi All,

Dustin, I'm pretty much heading in the same direction.

btw Steve, R3D files are compressed, and then there is the debayer..., which leads to the heart of my question.

So I'm looking at a similar product that hasn't been released yet. It provides PCIe expander capability and up to 10 drives in the same enclosure.

I've got a Rocket, Quadro 4000, a GTX 285, a 120, plus the BMD 3G card, ATTO raid card etc., pretty much what most of us will use.

The $64,000 question that I don't have an answer to is what is the bottleneck? Is it debayer / rocket, CPU, or GPU? Right now I don't have a rocket in the Resolve box, as a fast raid is pretty key, the rocket is in the Storm/Smoke box.

In an ideal world with multiple rocket support, and now multiple GPU support, I'm a little perplexed on what the right combination is.

My gut tells me one rocket, two GPU cards, plus a good GUI card and a fast raid, plus a SAS HBA for e-sata fan out and LTO connect, but I don't really have a way to test this until I get the PCIe expander.

As this is going to be a dedicated finishing box, I can live without the HBA if another Rocket or GPU helps the mix.

The key question is specifically for Resolve what combo of Rocket / GPU is the best balance.

Thanks for all the input folks, it this kind of information exchange that makes this board super valuable.

Steve
Sure wishing that Apple would bring out a competitive motherboard...

[Steve Johnson]

btw Steve, R3D files are compressed, and then there is the debayer..., which leads to the heart of my question.

Fair point - I think the wine here is flowing too well - it is almost 10pm on a Friday night in Glasgow!



My gut tells me one rocket, two GPU cards, plus a good GUI card and a fast raid, plus a SAS HBA for e-sata fan out and LTO connect, but I don't really have a way to test this until I get the PCIe expander.

As this is going to be a dedicated finishing box, I can live without the HBA if another Rocket or GPU helps the mix.

The key question is specifically for Resolve what combo of Rocket / GPU is the best balance.

This is what I was trying to get the answer too - the other option is to spend $100k on a Quantel Pablo!!!!



Sure wishing that Apple would bring out a competitive motherboard...

Not sure that's going to happen anytime soon ;-)

I think the question should now be, what is the best solution to do a full DI at the highest resolution? Granted, the first question is: 1. What are you delivering too ( see, I did learn something at REDucation!)

But I think where possible you should try and use the best solutions available.

Listening to the latest RED Centre podcast with Mark from OffHollywood, i would agree that for DI work, we need to have the same as a great distribution model for displaying 4K - an affordable 4K display / projectors...

Just my thoughts...

[Dustin Cross]

Stephen,

I put my Cyclone in a new 4u enclosure that allows me to put 13 drives and a half height LTO4 drive. Connect all that to an Atto R30F and everything is great.

That leave three X16 slots and one X8 slot open in the Cyclone.

I am pretty sure Resolve will work great with the Cyclone, but I haven't purchased Resolve yet to verify.


Dusty

[darin wooldridge]

I've been beating this same horse. Here is my take on the situation.

The red debayer process is done by the mac pro cpu. period.. Hit play and monitor you cpu performance.. It kills it.
Faster cpu's paired with a redrocket or two will help for high quality playback. The gpu cards are used for color correction processing.
The resolve works best and is designed around dpx frames.
For red playback the bottleneck is cpu paired with 4k resolution.
To do what you are asking you will need 2 red rockets and 2 gpu cards and may still need to preview at a lower debayer setting. Half or lower.
I believe the linux system will give you real time playback at full quality.

My big question. What is best for the final outcome?

1. Grading from a compressed raw / .r3d file.
2. render at full quality debayer to a fat 10, 12 or even 16bit file to start grading.


Just found this posted by Peter from black magic.. He does a much better job explaining the bottleneck.

http://reduser.net/forum/showthread.php?t=53826&page=2





NOTE: The comments above are strictly mine, and may not necessarily represent those of my employers.




Darin Wooldridge
Colorist / Technical Strategist
818-653-3918-cell
dwooldridge@mac.com
check me out at http://www.facebook.com/pages/Davinci-Resolve-Colorist/117363011609028?ref=....

[Chris Reynolds]

Hi All

Going thought the whole Cubix Expander My self. The interesting thing I found out was the GPU-Xpander Desktop 2 (what Blackmagic recommend). Has only a Maximum throughput of 40Gbps. Where as the Cubix GPU-Xpander Desktop 4 uses the full 16 lanes. Which to me if you a fully populating the expansion box you would want all 16 lanes i.e. 3 Quadro 4000 and a rocket card.

Cheers, Chris

[Tim Sutherland]

Cubix is also coming out with a GPU xpander 2 rackmount version, which will use the full 80Gbps with the 16 lane host card, and allows 2 double height or 4 single height 16 lane cards. I think this is the route I might go because I already have rackmount space for it on my cart.

Tim

[Jeff Kilgroe]

For the Cubix Xpanders, the only two that appear to uspport the full PCIe 2.0 X16 bandwidth are the Pro 2 model and the Xpander 80 model. The Desktop 80 model appears to be available now. I think the Xpander 80 would be the best choice as it gives four slots. Then you could install 2 GPUs and a Rocket card into it. That might be a bit much, though. Maybe two GPUs and the Decklink card? I don't know... I'm debating between that and the Cyclone. But will hold off a bit. Going to get the new Epic cameras here and hopefully by the time Intel gets closer to shipping the new workstation chipsets and CPUs (May / June release it seems), we should have a better idea of what to expect from an updated Mac Pro. All I can say is that I don't see how Apple can only put 4 slots in the next Mac Pro. They would be seriously crippling the system and bandwidth afforded by the upcoming chipset. As it is now, at least all 40 lanes are accounted for, even though they didn't expand to 64 via the dual chipset cascade option.

I guess we'll see...

[Mark Pedersen]

So I am about to pull the trigger on an overall editorial system upgrade for 3 FCP edit bays that will include a DaVinci Resolve panel and a cubic expander for our grading suite.

We're moving from direct-attached XRAIDS to a StorNext SAN, with a 20 port 4GB Fiber Channel Switch and 2 Rorke Galaxy HDX3 32 TB RAIDS with SAS dual controllers.

The Resolve room will be run on a new 12 core MacPro with 24G of RAM, and the ATI HD 5770 as the GUI card for Resolve.

We are going with the CUBIX Expander Rackmount 6 which can add six to twelve PCI Express (PCIe) slots to one, two or three computers. This allows us to configure it as three independent Xpander units order to provide flexibility for expanding either our Resolve suite and/or the other bays.

For Resolve we are going to start with two nVidia 4000's, a rocket and Kona 3G card in one of the expansion units, leaving us two open expansion units to either add more 4000's or say, make edit B a Smoke suite, or add a Rocket for dailies using RedCine.

For monitoring we are using a Panasonic V25 54" panel with our existing 14" Ikegami color critical CRTs as a secondary reference (which we may or may not keep).

Our understanding from our system integrator and BMD is that they have tested the Rackmount 6 configuration with two 4000's and we should be able to do 4K real time grading (at least in a half-debayer), but I can't yet get a clear picture on how many nodes etc...

But for color correction, color depth is far more important than resolution, so if we are grading 4K or 5K r3d's at half debayer we should be good.

Backup will be via a Quantum LTO-5 superloader.

Any feedback, comments or suggestions welcome.

Mark

[Shane Betts]

My first reaction Mark is why 4Gb FC? 8Gig is the current standard and I wouldn't aim any lower than that. When we began our upgrades a bit over a year ago, 8Gig was very new and difficult to get but I went with an 8Gig switch and, eventually, upgraded the Atto cards to 8Gig as well. Right now our old Xserve RAID is reaching EOL at 2Gb and, whilst our two Infortrends are doing fine with 4Gb backplanes, the XRAID will be replaced with a Sonnet or an Infortrend with 8Gb. The performance out of these units will be perfect for EXR or DPX.

You might also look at your choice of LTO loader, depending on your software. I replaced our Quantum LTO4 with a Quantum LTO5 only to discover that Bru was no longer offering support for Quantum products due to Quantum's "lack of support for the Mac" according to Bru. This meant a rather expensive upgrade to PresSTORE and, even though it's a great product, I'd found Bru was great and a bargain and, quite frankly, changing packages has been a PITA. Careful the domino effect!

BTW, have BMD implemented support for the KONA card as yet? I know they said they were planning on it but I've seen nothing yet - might have missed it though.

Also, you might want to ensure StoreNext will support you with possible future solutions such as Avid ... If you feel there may be a possibility down the road. We went MetaSAN and, although it certainly has it's ... how can I say this - personality traits:-) ... we run it with FCP, Avid and everything else we use.

[Dave Blackham]

We went MetaSAN and, although it certainly has it's ... how can I say this - personality traits:-) ... we run it with FCP, Avid and everything else we use.

It certainly has and its got sharp teeth, Im not sure id go there again......

[Jason H]

yes, is there support for kona coming soon? do you know something we don't mark. hehehe....

j

[Dave Blackham]

So I am about to pull the trigger on an overall editorial system upgrade for 3 FCP edit bays that will include a DaVinci Resolve panel and a cubic expander for our grading suite.

We're moving from direct-attached XRAIDS to a StorNext SAN, with a 20 port 4GB Fiber Channel Switch and 2 Rorke Galaxy HDX3 32 TB RAIDS with SAS dual controllers.

The Resolve room will be run on a new 12 core MacPro with 24G of RAM, and the ATI HD 5770 as the GUI card for Resolve.

We are going with the CUBIX Expander Rackmount 6 which can add six to twelve PCI Express (PCIe) slots to one, two or three computers. This allows us to configure it as three independent Xpander units order to provide flexibility for expanding either our Resolve suite and/or the other bays.

For Resolve we are going to start with two nVidia 4000's, a rocket and Kona 3G card in one of the expansion units, leaving us two open expansion units to either add more 4000's or say, make edit B a Smoke suite, or add a Rocket for dailies using RedCine.

For monitoring we are using a Panasonic V25 54" panel with our existing 14" Ikegami color critical CRTs as a secondary reference (which we may or may not keep).

Our understanding from our system integrator and BMD is that they have tested the Rackmount 6 configuration with two 4000's and we should be able to do 4K real time grading (at least in a half-debayer), but I can't yet get a clear picture on how many nodes etc...

But for color correction, color depth is far more important than resolution, so if we are grading 4K or 5K r3d's at half debayer we should be good.

Backup will be via a Quantum LTO-5 superloader.

Any feedback, comments or suggestions welcome.

Mark

Is the AJA card supported for Resolve yet, so far as I know the guys at Da Vinci say they hope to support it soon....I have a card (works fine) but not in resolve. Note the HDMI only works in DVI mode at the moment but passes for hooking up to the V25. Id also use a BM HD Link to insert the LUT in to the V25. Also if your switching 3D modes on either the HD link or AJA ie Onionskin/mux to SbS or whatever. The V25 (V20 in our case) monitor swicthes to an odd display. So it only really works when the source is locked down properly top SbS. As of today so far as I know few apps support dual link via HDMI so in practice either via AJA and BM are both SbS. But it seems to work OK though.

Also consider catDV for your content management on the SAN. BRU works well with the Tandberg T40 auto loader, apparently reported some where on this board BRU were not supporting Quantum for some reason.

Make sure the SAN has dual metadata controlers and the metadata store is raid 1 and the whole issue has a UPS behind it. We used the D link switches for the metadata LAN, can't recall the model number.

What tech monitoring do you propose ?

Id be interested to know how the Cubix works out and how many node you get, we have Resolve with one 4800 and hope to add Cubix and another 4800 or pair of 4000 cards to it. A Great grading system though.

[Shane Betts]

It certainly has and its got sharp teeth, Im not sure id go there again......

He he. Yeah, me neither. It does support Avid though ...:blushing:

[Mark Pedersen]

My first reaction Mark is why 4Gb FC? 8Gig is the current standard and I wouldn't aim any lower than that. When we began our upgrades a bit over a year ago, 8Gig was very new and difficult to get but I went with an 8Gig switch and, eventually, upgraded the Atto cards to 8Gig as well. Right now our old Xserve RAID is reaching EOL at 2Gb and, whilst our two Infortrends are doing fine with 4Gb backplanes, the XRAID will be replaced with a Sonnet or an Infortrend with 8Gb. The performance out of these units will be perfect for EXR or DPX.

You might also look at your choice of LTO loader, depending on your software. I replaced our Quantum LTO4 with a Quantum LTO5 only to discover that Bru was no longer offering support for Quantum products due to Quantum's "lack of support for the Mac" according to Bru. This meant a rather expensive upgrade to PresSTORE and, even though it's a great product, I'd found Bru was great and a bargain and, quite frankly, changing packages has been a PITA. Careful the domino effect!

BTW, have BMD implemented support for the KONA card as yet? I know they said they were planning on it but I've seen nothing yet - might have missed it though.

Also, you might want to ensure StoreNext will support you with possible future solutions such as Avid ... If you feel there may be a possibility down the road. We went MetaSAN and, although it certainly has it's ... how can I say this - personality traits:-) ... we run it with FCP, Avid and everything else we use.

Hey Shane,

Thanks for the feedback!
Turns out we are going with an 8G switch (bad copy over from an old quote).
We are selling our XRAIDS so will only be running the Rorkes.

Also, thanks for the heads up on BRU support for the LTO5. We are currently running BRU, on a DLT machine, but it seems weird that BRU wouldn't support LTO 5, but seeing the other threads on Reduser, particularly by Jeff Kilgore, that seems to be the case. I'll have my team check out the alternatives. Seems going with an HP LTO-5 drive and sticking with BRU would be the best bet. Retrospect sucks.

Cheers,

M

[Albert Frates]

Talk to Torrey Loomis from Silverado Systems (http://www.silverado.cc)
He's also here on Reduser.net he deals with this kinda stuff, I believe he was testing one out.

[Shane Betts]

From what I understand Mark, Bru utilises more of the Mac OS tools for communicating with the library, where others like PresSTORE seem to write their own tools. This means that, when a company like Quantum decides to let Mac systems fix their own problems (only my assumption from what Bru have published), this leaves Bru a little more exposed to incompatibilities. Of course, I could be totally off base here but that's how I understand it. It's a shame because, for us here in Australia, the support for Quantum hardware is AMAZING and I really like Bru. Damn!

[Stephen Lovett]

Hi Mark,

I'm traveling and have a crap connection or I'd check, but I'm pretty sure Shane is speaking specifically about Quantum, not LTO-5 in general. I got a quote with my maintenance license for BRU for a stand alone LTO-5 HP unit so I know they support some brands. I'm ignorant about tape loaders because I don't need one.

One more thing to consider is the sound level of the enclosure. Rack mount enclosures typically assume data room / datacenter deployment, and thus can be pretty loud.

The low noise level was one of the things that attracted me to the soon to be released JMR solution you let me know about in December.

Unfortunately that product will require purchasing integrated storage which isn't a good fit for me.

Steve

[Mark Pedersen]

All of our gear (macs, servers, backup, and RAIDS, etc.) are located our machine/data room, so noise isn't an issue. We like our rooms quiet :)

Sorry, I didn't mean to imply that BRU wasn't supporting LTO-5 in general. I meant Quantum specifically.

I think we may end up going with the HP LTO-5 based on the fact that BRU seems to support HP machines with an ATTO controller.

Plus I feel better about HP reliability and support than Quantum.

Which HP unit are you looking at? I'm looking at the HP StorageWorks MSL2024 1 LTO-5 Ultrium 3280 FC Tape Library BL531A.

A little more than the Quantum unit, but not much...

M

[Dave Blackham]

We are using a Tandberg T40 library which has an HP drive in it, it can accept a second LTO5 drive and run double headed if needed. Bru server runs the back ups. Also we use DAX archive from catDV to link media to the media catalog which helps automate the archive and restore. What this means is you can retrieve a shot in the middle of a clip rather like a doing a data conform.

The only set up point is the LTO drive needs direct connect if its via FC to the host BRU server. Im told SAS is a better bet as it removes the FC layer of code. Its not been problematic so far. When the system has been optimised i.e. block size and write cache set up, with fast storage the LOT5 is very fast.

[Peter Chamberlain]

Hi, just to clarify. We have tested and certify the Cubix chassis as defined in the config guide. Others may work, may even likely to work but we have certified one.
Peter

[Mark Pedersen]

Hi Peter,

So what exactly does certification mean? Does it mean BMD won't support any product other than what is listed?

Seems there are some big holes there with current generation 12 core Macs, SAN solutions other than XSAN, no 8GB FC HBAs, no rack mount solutions for PCI expansion, other monitors, etc...

Is BMD planning to ramp up its testing and certification program to allow for more flexible configurations?

M

[Peter Chamberlain]

Hi, 'certification' means we have tested the item and verified its operation. If vendors send us other items we can schedule those for test. In many cases non certified items will work equally well, we just haven't tested nor will test every variation. We could not say we support every non-tested device nor would we say, 'its not certified so don't call me'. We would consider the specific situation but bear in mind, the non certified items would raise suspicion first. The idea of certification is to provide a known and tested standard so you can be confident in operation. Like everything in our industry, it's a moving target so you can expect new items and changes to the list from time to time.
Peter

[Mark Pedersen]

Guys,

Update on our final config. With Resolve 7.1 update, you need to have a DeckLink HD Extreme 3D+ card, since reference monitoring comes off that card, not the GUI card as the configuration manual states. So no go on the Kona card. Fortunately we can migrate it to another room.

We are going with the Rackmount 6 expander as we have been assured by Blackmagic that it will work just fine. In fact, they have apparently done a lot of testing on it (even though it is not officially "certified.") In our world, rackmounting is the only way to go.

The SAN and all devices will have 8G FC cards with the exception of the Quantum LTO-5 i40 scalar, which only needs to be 4G. To keep that happy with BRU, we are using an ATTO controller.

Can't wait!

M

[Dave Blackham]

Guys,

you need to have a DeckLink HD Extreme 3D+ card, since reference monitoring comes off that card, not the GUI card as the configuration manual states.

M

So are you using an HDSDI out on the 3D+ card with external monitoring or is there a means of using the internal scopes via an out output on the 3D+ card ?

[craigjkharris]

yes, is there support for kona coming soon? do you know something we don't mark. hehehe....

j

I know that AJA makes great cards, but why would anyone expect BMD to support a direct competitors product?

[Dave Blackham]

I know that AJA makes great cards, but why would anyone expect BMD to support a direct competitors product?

BM told me other cards would be supported, however we have a BM in our Resolve. My guess is they will support other cards but new releases of features will lead on BM card configured systems.

[jake blackstone]

I know that AJA makes great cards, but why would anyone expect BMD to support a direct competitors product?

Because at NAB BM specifically mentioned AJA card as the one they were planning to support...

[Jeff Kilgroe]

I went with the BM 3D+ card. All is well so far. My only complaint is the location of the two HDMI connectors. IMO, they really should have worked them into the rear plate or the breakout cable system. Having to route them out of a Mac Pro is nearly impossible without modding the case (and voiding AppleCare warranty). The slot-filler plate is pointless when we only have 4 slots to work with and the one double-width slot is typically occupied by a double-width video card.

I think from a software sales point of view, they really can't afford to not support the AJA cards. But I'm sure it's not a top priority. I was told the same thing at NAB last year, that support for other cards would happen eventually. They also told me then that they had started work on supporting the Rocket and that obviously happened.

I still haven't seen an AJA Kona 3G in the wild yet, so...

[Stephen Lovett]

Hi Jeff,

I heard exactly the same thing at NAB last year.

I too have the 3D+ in the Resolve box and agree about the pita of the HDMI out, I also have the new AJA 3G in a new Smoke box I'm just setting up, I got it a month or so back, so they are available and in the wild.

Mine came from B&H FWIW

Cheers,

Steve