Red Rocket Alternatives

[Peter Cote]

I know that people have talked a lot about building gaming PC's that can do real time 4K/5K editing and transcoding but I don't plan on switching to PC. I plan on getting the PCIe thunderbolt expansion when it becomes available in January. That being said what do you recommend the ramp up the graphics power of the newest iMacs or Macbook Pros to bring it up to par with a Red Rocket. Both computers are fully spec'ed out otherwise.

[Stephen Strangways]

I've never seen a Mac system without a Red Rocket card able to get realtime playback at anything better than 1/4 res, or realtime transcodes at anything better than 1/8 res. With a Red Rocket card it will do full-res realtime playback and transcodes.

[Ruff]

I just ordered a 27" iMac and 16GB Ram.

I am waiting and hoping for Red to release a Thunderbolt / eSata only version 2 of the Rocket. My clients would snap it up.

[Antonio Ribeiro]

Hi folks,

The whole thread makes for very interesting reading (while waiting for things to render on my timeline). I have bought a Scarlet X with quite a few other items so I can function, but I am worried about working with the files on post. That being said, I was the editor of a feature film shot entirely on the Red 1 using my current system (MacPro Quad Core Intel Xeon 3Ghz / 8GB RAM / Nvidea GeForce 8800 GT) and had no problem whatsoever, using Prores HQ at 2K in the first instance and then reconfirming the footage back to the red original files, for the grading in Australia. I didn't even have to use Redcine for this, instead, used the Red plug-in available for FCP 7, when you use the Log and Transfer option.

The issue here is I simply cannot afford a Red Rocket and fear the workflow from the Epic/Scarlet isn't as straight forward. Can somebody hopefully clarify this issue for me?

Thanks.

[Chad_Smith]

Hey Antonio

I recently started work on a short shot on Epic with HDR. I am unclear as if Epic shoots in two different modes, an HDR mode and Non HDR mode. However I found that FCP 7 would not bring in the R3D's shot in HDR. Had to go to RedCine-X to do the transcodes and then bring those into FCP. So just a little tweek to workflow.

[Bob Gruen]

A video card is not an alternative to a Red Rocket card as they do not do the same function. If you watch your process list while rendering R3Ds you will see one or more ImporterREDServer processes if you do not have a Red Rocket card or if you are working with more files than your RR card(s) can handle. This process does on the CPU what the Red Rocket does, only no where near as fast. As far as I know this process does not leverage OpenGL or CUDA.

To make a workstation process ImporterREDServer faster required CPU power, which means overclocking on a PC. If you are doing simple edits you might actually get better performance by turning off hyperthreading and trying to crank up the clock cycles. If you are doing a lot of compositing then leave hyperthreading on.

Bob