Building System For REDCine. Need advice

[Jay A. Kelley]

After a lot of thought, I have decided to start with a PC based system for my REDCine output.

I am putting the following togehter, please review and give me any advice you have.. My goal is to build something that will have some decent render times.

Here it is:

SUPER MICRO Extended ATX Tower Case - Power Provided: 645 Watt. - Black

Super Micro Computer X7DA8+ Motherboard

Processor, Xeon QC E5345 2.33GHz, 8MB L2 Cache, 1333MHz FSB, LGA771, Tray

Processor, Xeon QC E5345 2.33GHz, 8MB L2 Cache, 1333MHz FSB, LGA771, Tray

NVIDIA Quadro FX 4600 768MB PCIe (NOTE: This card runs about $1,500.00... Ouch.. I would love advice on the right card to get. Is there a point of diminshing returns here? At what point will the GPU just not offer much else to things?)

Crucial Technology Ct2kit25672af667 Memory -4gb [2 X 2gb]

Windows XP pro
DVD-R drive

[Jay A. Kelley]

A little more help these are the graphics cards I am looking at, which ones would be the best choice for my REDCine Develope system:

NVIDIA Quadro FX 1500 256MB PCIe Professional Video Edition — Win $499.99

NVIDIA Quadro FX 1700 512MB PCIe — Win $489.99

NVIDIA Quadro FX 3450 256MB PCIe — Win $784.99

NVIDIA Quadro FX 3500 256MB PCIe — Win $809.99

NVIDIA Quadro FX 4500 X2 512MB PCIe — Win $3124.99

NVIDIA Quadro FX 4600 768MB PCIe - Win $1550.99

[Jeff Kilgroe]

Jay,

Do you have any software that will specifically use the Quadro features? I'm seriously doubting that you do, unless you want to also leverage a Quadro with SDI output or something, but most of those models you're listing don't offer that feature anyway.

And to top it all off, all of those Quadro cards you have listed are OLD!

Seriously, get a GeForce 8800GTS, possibly two of them in SLI mode. You'll have a much, much faster GPU capability and at a whole lot less than that dual FX4500 setup. Where are you finding these prices? I haven't checked FX4500 prices lately, but MSRP was $1699 over a year ago, last time I bought one, and I paid $1350 for it then.

[LEON]

Hello, maybe my memory is bad
but it seems Rob Lohman advised to use ATI cards but maybe that was only for Mac ??
Have a nice end of year anyway !

[Kevin Halverson]

Nvidia graphic card for RedCine on PC is the correct choice. GeForce 8600 GTS & 8800 GTS are the best bang for the buck currently.

[Nils Ruinet]

Hello, maybe my memory is bad
but it seems Rob Lohman advised to use ATI cards but maybe that was only for Mac ??
Have a nice end of year anyway !
He said ATI for Macs (because their Nvidia drivers suck)
and Nvidia for PCs...

[number6]

I've already bought so it's too late for me... but do you get the feeling that it might be prudent to wait until the very last moment to spring? Jim just keeps hinting at new things to come, and I for one wish I were in sleep mode until he reveals all.

FWITW, I'm right about 50% of the time and wrong about 60%. (I give 110%):biggrin:

[Jaime Vallés]

Sounds like a badass system, Jay! What are you thinking as far as monitor solutions?

[John Tissavary]

You can pick up a quadro 4500 on ebay for a lot less, and there's absolutely no benefit from running two cards unless you have software that specifically uses both cards, or you have a crapload of monitors.

I bought an fx5500 oem out of a dell system for under $1k... and it works perfectly.

Whatever you do, DO NOT BUY an 8 series geforce. The overlays are completely disabled in that series. Best bet would be a 79xx of some sort, but the drawback with all geForce cards is crippled openGL.

Since Assimilate software relies on openGL gpu performance any geforce is going to be compromised in that area. I don't know if RedCine relies as heavily on openGL as Scratch does, for one thing it deals with a lot less simultaneous operations on the image... perhaps Lucas can enlighten us?

cheers,

jt

[Jay A. Kelley]

This is all great advice, but I am very confused as to the Graphics Card Issue now.. Do I use the 8800 as advised? Some are saying yes and others "no"

Help

Jay

[Jay A. Kelley]

I will be perfectly honest guys, the way I designed this system was to download Assimilate's Brochure on their new RED product, they gave me the system specs of the computer they are using to drive it. It gave me a nice basis for building a system that Scratch (and more importantly REDCine I hope) would like. They are using the
nVidia PNY Quadro FX 5500 SDI PCIe for their system, but that baby is $6,000so I just went with a lesser model in the same family. Perhaps that was a stupid choice.

I feel pretty good about the rest of the system, but as we all know, the graphics card make a HUGE difference in this setup. So please keep talking and whenever possible share any REAL world experience you may have with the cards you are using.

If some of you study the system they have, you will see I picked a different motherboard.. It's not really, I just needed a system with SCSI and the one I chose comes with it.

This system will most likely do double duty for a while, both develop and edit footage.. Eventually, it will just render files and PERHAPS I will move to Final Cut for the editing.

For the record, I hate the fact that I cannot output AVIs. It may be simple to some people, but it's a pain the in the ass to me.

One of you asked which monitor I will use.. I keep hearing nice things about Dell's 30" monitor

Jay

[Kevin Halverson]

For a SCRATCH system we have quoted it included a Quadro FX 5500 SDI card. On the other end of the price spectrum, I have been testing with a GeForce 8600 GTS. There is a massive difference in the price of these two cards so how to best allocate the financial resources is a serious consideration. Besides the graphics card, I would recommend that you look very seriously at the storage bandwidth as this seems to be the other aspect of the solution that will make a big difference in performance. Its all a matter of how much budget you have and where to best spend it. Frankly, I would do some serious bench mark testing before going for an ultra high end graphics card solution. It might be a better use of resources to have multiple machines on the job than one, very expensive one.

Still testing here, so other than giving you some ideas, I can't offer any definitive advice yet.

Kevin Halverson

[Jay A. Kelley]

Kevin I am grateful for your help.. I have some RAID arrays that I am happy with at this time, so that part is covered (And another reason why I am going with PC right now).

I will NOT be getting the 5500 graphics card, but the question is, what's the best solution for me at this time..

I am fully confident you will all be very helpful, and I have a few weeks yet

Jay

[Jeff Kilgroe]

Jay,

Buy the 8800GTS video card. Seriously. Get the EVGA brand one, great support and warranty. It's going to give you the best performance you can get right now, next to that Quadro 5500. All the other lower Quadro models are based on older GPUs. The FX4500 is two GPU generations behind the Quadro FX 5500 and the GeForce 8800. The FX4500 is nearly 3 years old.

Video cards are always something that can be upgraded rather easily too.

Like Kevin says, storage bandwidth is a huge consideration. And don't skimp on the RAM either. What OS are you planning to run? If you're going to run WinXP 32bit, then 3.5~4GB in the system is fine -- the system can't address more than that under that OS. If you're going with XP64 or Vista64, then 8GB minumum, I recommend 12-16GB. But that also depends on what all you want to run on this system. If it's REDCINE only, then 8GB will do you just fine on a 64bit OS since REDCINE is a 32bit application anyway.

[Jay A. Kelley]

Jeff,

What about JT's comments that the overlays are no good and the GL is faulty? Is this going to be a consideration when running something like Premiere CS3?

I have found the card you speak of.. They go up to 768mb of RAM for about $675.. Is this the one you are suggesting? Or is 640mb enough? Please be specific as to the model you are suggesting.

(EDIT) Just looked again.. Would this one work? It's not THE fastest, but it's up there:
e-GeForce 8800GTX 768MB Superclocked
768MB DDR3 Memory
PCI-E 16X
621Mhz GPU Clock Speed
2000Mhz Memory Clock Speed
nVIDIA® SLI™ ready
DirectX® 10/OpenGL® 2.0


Thanks SO MUCH for all the help

Jay

[Roger Singh]

Buy a used Quadro, it'll be cheaper.

Also about the CPUs... There is no point in buying the 5300 cpus when the 5400 cpus are out. they are 45nm, run cooler, and have SSE4.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819117149

Get FB Dimms at 800mhz

and the best motherboard to buy is the Intel Skulltrail.

http://firingsquad.com/hardware/intel_skulltrail_preview/

The skulltrail board is not exactly out yet, but if you just can wait a month or so, Intel will release it.

As of right now, you're building a PC based on year old parts, and be paying the same price for computer parts just recently released.

[galexander]

here's a little system i've built myself,

thermaltake lanbox, modded.

asus p5k-vm
the onboard gigE supports jumbo frames up to 8088bytes
i regularly hammer the adsl and get 1350MB/s, the limit is 1500MB/s averaging a pull of about 130Kb/s continuous over 18 hours, oh yeah

q6400 - overclocked to 3GHz, with stock intel fan

Kingston X OC'ed to 1066Mhz, 4Gb

Win Svr 2003 x86 (it has PAE, so it uses all of 4Gb), lean and stipped of most of the MS bloatware. system tweaked, registry hacked.

HD #1 Raptor 150Gb, OS/apps
HD #2 Raptor 150Gb, capture/data

adaptec FW400/800

external Lacie triple USB/FW400/800 2TB, benchmarked ubCore pro drivers give max out FW800 performance of about ~85Mb/s

PS is HP650W

graphics for now is Nvidia 7300, solid and average workhorse, until i read more reviews but leaning towards 8800GT, i will probably go with something close to whatever the Mac guys put in their high end FCP rigs.

there are hacks around to change the bios on some GeF's to convert to Quadro's. if you want to do lots of pixel number crunching, rendering, etc.,(openGL) quadro is the way to go, no doubt. if you want blistering HD viewing/gaming in the extreme and real time, you can't be the G's.

no internal CD/DVD. the three or four times a year you install stuff isn't worth the weight and power, so i rigged external SATA and power. especially with 8/16Gb usb sticks.

it is small enough to be portable and cost less than $1500. of course, i had an old HP ML 150G3 i pillaged some parts off.

for monitors, current is old viewsonic, but considering building a 15.4" 1080P, a true hi-def monitor that isn't going to break my balls if i want to take it to studio or location.

[Jeff Kilgroe]

Jeff,

What about JT's comments that the overlays are no good and the GL is faulty? Is this going to be a consideration when running something like Premiere CS3?

With the GeForce series, you get one hardware-based overlay plane, with the Quadro cards you get more. Quadro also offers a few other features that specific software may use. Referring back to my earlier post in this thread, I asked if you had any software that will use the Quadro's features. To clarify, most software out there will not take advantage of the extra features a Quadro card offers. If you're not running 3D software like XSI, Maya, SolidWorks, ProEngineer, etc.. Or if you don't need the SDI outputs or the genlock port for synchronizing external video devices (3D shutter glasses, TBC's etc..), then you don't need the Quadro.

The overlays that JT is referring to is something different, but potentially a major issue. With GeForce 8 (and later) series GPUs there is no longer support for full-screen video overlay on multiple monitors. This is a consumer function and an old way of doing things. Unfortunately, software has not caught up with the "new way" that nVidia and Microsoft want it done. And that is using the new DirectX media surfaces rather than crippling output to the old video overlay surface via the GDI module. All GeForce 8 series cards and all cards from here on out will not support the old video overlay function. Same with new cards from ATI and other manufacturers, this functionality has to be dropped in order to gain DirectX 10 certification. So buying an older card may make your system more friendly and compatible with DVD player software for the time being, but you're not gaining anything.

I'm not sure what JT is talking about when he says the OpenGL on the GeForce series is crippled. It's only crippled by the couple high-end features not supported via hardware (still implemented via software in the drivers). Vector and point calculations on a Quadro card *can* be done with higher levels of precision than on GeForce, but once again that is something you usually only see in software like Pro/E, Solidworks, etc..

None of these issues are going to amount to a hill of beans for REDCINE or any of the Adobe software.

Picking up a used Quadro 5500 or 5600 off eBay would be a good option if you find one. ...If using a Quadro helps you sleep better. But I would not buy any older or lower model Quadro. You're just wasting your time. The 4500 is old. I've got two of them, one in a Mac G5 Quad, the other in a quad-core Opteron PC. The card is nothing special... Had to buy one for the Mac (off eBay) because at the time it was the only way to run dual 30" displays on a Mac, but for everything except Maya, it's no faster than the GeForce 7800GT card it replaced. I put one in the PC because at the time it was the best card available for XSI, a software that does use the overlay planes, 3D accelerated point drawing, and hardware stencil buffers provided by the Quadro. And the only reason I spent the money there is because I needed an XSI workstation that would be used solely for that application 60+ hours/week at the time. ...For running REDCINE and any other software, my newer quad-core 2.66GHz Xeon system w/8800GTS (640MB 621MHz superclocked - paied $550 at the time) smokes the system with the FX4500. XSI is a bit clunky on that 8800GTS card vs. the Quadro 4500 for a few things, but faster overall since the 8800GTS can throw around a lot more geometry.


I have found the card you speak of.. They go up to 768mb of RAM for about $675.. Is this the one you are suggesting? Or is 640mb enough? Please be specific as to the model you are suggesting.

They have lots of different models. I see they have a few new ones since the last time I looked. The GTX models are a bit faster and have a few more bells and whistles. IMO, you don't need to spend that much if you're not going to be gaming or using the system for GPU-intensive software (3D animation, etc..). REDCINE uses the GPU, but I wouldn't consider it GPU-intensive. Most of the memory on your video card is going to be for storing texture images and geometry data. If you're not going to be gaming or doing serious 3D design work with this system, then 512MB is plenty. More memory will help you more with 3D-oriented applications and games and will help re-sale value a bit.


(EDIT) Just looked again.. Would this one work? It's not THE fastest, but it's up there:
e-GeForce 8800GTX 768MB Superclocked
768MB DDR3 Memory
PCI-E 16X
621Mhz GPU Clock Speed
2000Mhz Memory Clock Speed
nVIDIA® SLI™ ready
DirectX® 10/OpenGL® 2.0

Yes, it would work just fine.

Right now, the bottleneck with REDCINE is going to be your storage system and CPU. The GPU does help take some of the load, but it's not something that's going to make a huge difference. My Macbook Pro with 2.33GHz C2D mobile CPU and ATI X1600 (crappy slow mobile GPU) renders out of REDCINE about the same speed as a dual-core 2.4GHz AMD system with 7800GTX Ultra 512MB video (the GeForce version of that Quadro FX4500) -- when I have it connected to an external RAID where the drives are no longer the bottleneck for the systems. It's an issue of CPU efficiency.

[Kevin Halverson]

Since the goal of this is pretty application specific, there is no arguing the importance of testing.

I have an episodic project coming up and our needs our pretty damn specific. Namely, we need to get about an hour or more worth of .r3d's through the pipe line daily (starting just after wrap) to editorial overnight, 5 days a week, for as long as the show runs. I am really seriously considering that there is no single machine that will accomplish this fast enough. I am considering putting several (perhaps up to 4) machines on the task. These can be handled by one of the "over night" guys as it won't require much baby sitting. It just has to be done well before everyone arrives the following morning.

Right now, I am testing on the following platform:

3.0 GHz core duo
2 GB RAM
GeForce 8600 GTS (will be going up to the 8800 GTS soon)

The testing criteria is a 4k .r3d output to 1080p DNxHD, process is 'standard' (pulling from the 2k wavelet) minimal color changes. This can process a frame in about 910 ms (.91 second). I am still testing other outputs, but this seems to be a minimum in quality terms for our needs.

One of these machines would take nearly 22 hours to process the shots daily. With 4 on the task, they would finish in about 5 1/2 hours. This seems reasonable considering a 8 1/2 hour shift. All machines will be writing to the same file server/raid stack.

I am still weighing the idea of a smaller number of faster machines versus a larger number of lesser ones. I like the idea that the loss of any one machine would have a smaller impact on the output, so I am leaning toward using a higher number of machines.

I really think that what would be wonderful is to establish a test criteria for several different outputs that would allow everyone to input their results for specific machines. I have been trying to do all my benchmarks on a single machine so that when I change a piece of hardware, I can determine the impact that the changes has without any additional variability.

Would love to learn if anyone else has a similar need and what solutions they are considering.

Kevin Halverson

[Joe Carney]

Here is the base of the system I want to put together....

SuperMicro X7DWA-N (averaging just below 500.00 USD at various online sites). It supports the new 5400 series Xeons ...Harpertown..45nm.
16gigs DDR 667 FBDIMM (It's seems impossible to find DDR 800 FBDIMM above 1 gig per chip).
ATI FireGL 7600 or 2 of the new ATI 3K series boards. I'm leaning toward the new ATI 3K boards, since I can get 2 for under 500 USD and they support OpenGL 2 and DX10.1.
2 QuadCore Intel Xeon E5440 Harpertown @ 2.83GHz (742.00 apiece via NewEgg).
Mobo includes 2 PCIe 2.0 at 16x, several PCIx slots and 2 GigEthernet connections.
Plus slot fo the SuperMicro Universal Interface cards (Fiber, 10g....).
Windows Vista Ultimate 64.

The above for starters.

[Jeff Kilgroe]

Looks good, Zeke.

Although, I'm not sure why you would want the ATI FireGL cards... :) I'm trying to hold off on purchasing any new systems, especially ones with 45nm CPUs until Intel fixes their problems. Probably another month or so...

[galexander]

Since the goal of this is pretty application specific, there is no arguing the importance of testing.

I have an episodic project coming up and our needs our pretty damn specific. Namely, we need to get about an hour or more worth of .r3d's through the pipe line daily (starting just after wrap) to editorial overnight, 5 days a week, for as long as the show runs. I am really seriously considering that there is no single machine that will accomplish this fast enough. I am considering putting several (perhaps up to 4) machines on the task.
Kevin Halverson

it depends on how much you have to spend. of course there are single computer systems that can chew through the data. we used to process spectral hypercubes in flight, in real-time, with a mini-SGI beowulf type cluster.

These can be handled by one of the "over night" guys as it won't require much baby sitting. It just has to be done well before everyone arrives the following morning.

....

The testing criteria is a 4k .r3d output to 1080p DNxHD, process is 'standard' (pulling from the 2k wavelet) minimal color changes. This can process a frame in about 910 ms (.91 second). I am still testing other outputs, but this seems to be a minimum in quality terms for our needs.



One of these machines would take nearly 22 hours to process the shots daily. With 4 on the task, they would finish in about 5 1/2 hours. This seems reasonable considering a 8 1/2 hour shift. All machines will be writing to the same file server/raid stack.
Kevin Halverson

the solution doesn't necessarily scale by throwing more machines at the problem. your software needs to be able to "fork" or parallelize the input. if the solution space is linearly independent, then there won't be too much of a hit at the file server end but there will be some network and processing overhead, i would add about 10 to 15%. if your computations require information from other processed data sets and you screw up your shared memory management, you'll probably arrive in the morning with a big file of garbage.

[Gavin Greenwalt]

Alexander I think Khmuse is planning on sending a frame to each render node which would require a 1.2MB network request and then be completely CPU independent until a ~1.2MB? write after processing so the processing end should be fine like you say as long as you can build a network capable of delivering at least 1Gbps consistantly. That is actually something that is not a simple task and would highly recommend talking to someone like Avid or a specialized network consultant if you don't have something for real-time already. We looked into building it ourself and the difference between our homebuilt option and the Avid solution with 'seemingly' the exact same setup was night and day. The home built introduced an enormous amount of latency in consecutive calls. It did very well in big bursts but very poorly in frame hosting.

The only other problem I'm seeing with khmuse's current plan (and I think he knows it based on his Boxx Apexx question earlier) is it's practically impossible to write to quicktime or avi such as DNxHD from multiple systems. You would need to render out to a frame sequence and then have a seperate machine assemble DNxHDs from a debayered, color corrected and rescaled frame sequence. Which could very easily become a bottleneck unless you use a lightning fast system and might end up being slower than a handful of very fast render nodes with 3 or 4-way SLI 8800s churning through their own r3d file.

*Speaking of which has anyone tried REDCine on an SLI setup?

[Mark L. Pederson]

One might want to consider the following:

.r3d files loaded onto single volume on SAN of high speed storage

Four separate 8-core machines each read from the same volume - each runs REDCINE on a 25% selection of the .r3d files and each writes to it's own volume on the SAN.

We have not finished testing - but we are strongly leaning towards dividing up .r3d files over multiple workstations with as many CPU's as possible - each workstation processing independently.

[Deanan]

Overloading the server/san with lots of writes from different machines
can really clog things up. One solution is to render locally to each node
and do a pull from the server instead of pushing simultaneously from many nodes.

deanan (built a 120 processor infiniband debayerfarm in a previous life)

[Kevin Halverson]

Alexander I think Khmuse is planning on sending a frame to each render node which would require a 1.2MB network request and then be completely CPU independent until a ~1.2MB?

Hey Gavin,

Actually, I was going to send a batch of .r3d's to each machine on the 'farm' and let each write to a single server/raid array. Each machine would have its own local smaller raid and would operate independently of the others. Assuming an adequate disc channels to the server, each machine will run at their maximum native speed regardless of the total number machines (up to a reasonable limit). Having 4 $1500 - $2000 machines should beat out a single $6,000 - $8,000 one and the extra reliability is not to be discounted either.

Kevin Halverson

[Mike McCarthy]

This seems to have got a bit off track, but I will offer GPU advice on the original question.
Assuming RedCine is a primary App, you need Nvidia. For Render speed, you want a Geforce 8 series, or Quadro equivalent. They are about 3x more powerful than the best 7 series. The 8800 is the only varient worth using, and from there, the 8800GT is the best bang for the buck, with the NEW GTS512 a good option as well. The 8800GTX as slightly faster, but way louder and power hungry, I have one and am not totally satisfied. The Quadro4600 is hardware equivalent to the 8800GTX, but may have advantages in regards to video overlay and dedicated OpenGL. (And for merely triple the price;)

I recommend the 8800GT for most purposes, including Redcine. The Quadro4600 will have few advantages in RedCine, but may improve your editing experience, depending on your app.

If I was setting up a workflow for serious Red work on PC, I would get a dedicated render system for RedCine/AE renders, with an 8800GT, and an edit system with a 7950GT for proper Premiere overlay.

[John Tissavary]

The biggest argument against the geforce 8 series is total lack of hardware overlay. This has been discussed at length on the cineform forum, where numerous users have had to exchange for 7 series because of this.

And there are some significant openGL operations not available in the geforce line, most noteably openGL logic (end of pipeline) operations, more clip planes, hardware overlay, openGL anti-aliased points & lines, etc...

I'm not sure which of the openGL functions will have a direct effect on RedCine/Scratch... but I do know that a lack of hardware overlay makes the geforce 8 series undesirable for me.


cheers,

jt

[Nathan Buxton]

You can pick up a quadro 4500 on ebay for a lot less, and there's absolutely no benefit from running two cards unless you have software that specifically uses both cards, or you have a crapload of monitors.

I bought an fx5500 oem out of a dell system for under $1k... and it works perfectly.

Whatever you do, DO NOT BUY an 8 series geforce. The overlays are completely disabled in that series. Best bet would be a 79xx of some sort, but the drawback with all geForce cards is crippled openGL.

Since Assimilate software relies on openGL gpu performance any geforce is going to be compromised in that area. I don't know if RedCine relies as heavily on openGL as Scratch does, for one thing it deals with a lot less simultaneous operations on the image... perhaps Lucas can enlighten us?

cheers,

jt

No offence but I don't know how accurate some of this advice is.

There is real benefit in running two video cards in SLI mode for GPU intensive applications. Don't blame me for assuming RedCINE would use the functionality as i think it is a hardware level feature and not a software dependent one (after all, both cards feed into the same monitor essentially).

Please elaborate on what overlays are disabled. Do you mean the funtionality to adjust the preferences for overlays? I think you are incorrect. That is a driver-level issue and features such as that can be added with different versions. Maybe the ones supplied by your OEM card manufacturer were crap. I don't have experience with an 8xxx series GeForce, but i think it is safe to assume that the overlay layer is not completely disabled thus rendering windows media player useless.

Another thing: DirectX was not the standard when GeForce was developed. OpenGL has never been a problem for me on GeForce series cards. Often times it performs better than D3D.


I would highly reccomend a high-end GeForce series card in any video-editing PC.

[Mark L. Pederson]

I think that if you are putting together a system ONLY for processing footage in REDCINE vs. a system you will use for other applications your graphics card choice can vary.

Rob or Deanan can correct me if I am wrong, but last time I checked, in REDCINE, the GPU is processing COLOR. The CPU(s) are processing debayer and transcode. I strongly suspect that most very high-end graphics cards are over-kill if your box is only going to be used for .r3d "processing".

I am just pointing this out to make the point that IMO - CPU(s) + DISC SPEED are really the key here.

[Joe Carney]

Looks good, Zeke.

Although, I'm not sure why you would want the ATI FireGL cards... :) I'm trying to hold off on purchasing any new systems, especially ones with 45nm CPUs until Intel fixes their problems. Probably another month or so...

Latest generation of ATI OpenGL cards(5600, 7600...) are getting great reiviews and are a LOT less expensive than the Quadros.
I didn't know Intel was having problems with their 45nm Xeons. I'm not planning on purchasing till Jan anyway. Could you expand on the problems?
Is it the cpu or the chipsets?

[Jeff Kilgroe]

The biggest argument against the geforce 8 series is total lack of hardware overlay. This has been discussed at length on the cineform forum, where numerous users have had to exchange for 7 series because of this.

And there are some significant openGL operations not available in the geforce line, most noteably openGL logic (end of pipeline) operations, more clip planes, hardware overlay, openGL anti-aliased points & lines, etc...

I'm not sure which of the openGL functions will have a direct effect on RedCine/Scratch... but I do know that a lack of hardware overlay makes the geforce 8 series undesirable for me.


Whoah, there cowboy...

Hardware video overlay is indeed gone. And gone for good. Never coming back, it's a legacy feature and software vendors should have quit using it long ago, but you know... lazy programmers and all that.

I agree, this overlay issue is a serious deal until software catches up. Does Adobe CS3 use video overlay? If so, f**k Adobe, it's not like they didn't know this was coming. What about Cineform? Upcoming cards from ATI aren't going to support this either. It wasn't even supposed to be supported in Windows Vista, but Microsoft still put it in for legacy support because too many beta testers complained. IMO, MS should have left it out... Along with a laundry list of other legacy crap that should have been done away with long ago.

What do you need with more than 2 hardware clipping planes? I don't know of any application that uses more than 2, which the GeForce 8800xxx provides, the 8600 provides 1. Up to 8 planes are offered via software.

Hardware-accelerated points are not there. Never have been in a GeForce card. Only app I have that make use of them is XSI, if I choose to turn it on. Pro/E and SolidWorks use it too. Hardware AA lines are there, not sure what you're talking about, at least they are present in the 8800 line. They've been a part of the GeForce GPUs since the 6800 Ultra was released. Hardware GL overlay (not to be confused with the video overlay that is missing) you are provided one overlay plane on GeForce 5900 and newer. Quadro cards support more. Most GL apps make use of only one, but Maya, XSI and a few others can use more.

Everything else you mention are Quadro-specific functions that no GeForce card has ever had. If you're not running software that uses these functions, then why spend the extra money for the Quadro?

For a system primarily for NLE use and REDCINE, there is no reason what so ever to buy a Quadro card. Now, the video overlay issue with newer cards is a serious concern and I would make sure whatever NLE or other software that will be run in addition to REDCINE will work with the newer cards. If not, get a 7950GTX Ultra 512MB card and save yourself some cash. it's still a very good video card and pushes nearly the same amount of geometry as the 8800GTX. It doesn't have the texture and pipeline abilities, but you won't notice or care if you're not a gamer. I don't think the higher-performance GPUs are doing much for REDCINE... The bottlenecks are going to be your CPU(s) and storage system.

[Jeff Kilgroe]

Latest generation of ATI OpenGL cards(5600, 7600...) are getting great reiviews and are a LOT less expensive than the Quadros.
I didn't know Intel was having problems with their 45nm Xeons. I'm not planning on purchasing till Jan anyway. Could you expand on the problems?
Is it the cpu or the chipsets?

I'll take another look at the ATI FireGL cards to see what's up... They have always had great hardware, but the software/drivers have been terrible. If they cleaned up the software and improved their OpenGL support, then yes, definitely worth a look.

Intel has put a delay on shipping the rest of their 45nm CPU models that were due to ship by the end of this month. They're having some stability issues with the CPUs as well as the new chipsets. That's all we know publicly right now... Oh, and they're probably not in a hurry since AMD's latest offerings have fallen flat on their face, so no direct competition right now and no incentive to hurry to market. Hopefully it's a quick fix and they still can push the new CPUs and chipsets out the door. I need to buy a new Mac Pro, but I can't justify spending the current prices on what Apple is offering right now. Ouch. I'll probably have to pick one up on eBay or something because I'll need a new one within the next 30 days.

[Gavin Greenwalt]

ATI is putting out stable drivers? Has hell frozen over?

[Joe Carney]

ATI is putting out stable drivers? Has hell frozen over?

Why.....yes it has. They even have non beta drivers for Vista 64.

[Rob Lohman]

ATI (X1900) for Mac, NVidia for Windows. You don't really need to get the ultra expensive Quadro just for REDCINE. If you get Scratch then they have a list of graphics cards they advice.

[JustMe]

ATI (X1900) for Mac, NVidia for Windows. You don't really need to get the ultra expensive Quadro just for REDCINE. If you get Scratch then they have a list of graphics cards they advice.

Yet RedCine is Scratch, so it needs what Assimilate wants even at its base...:bleh:

[Mark L. Pederson]

Yet RedCine is Scratch, so it needs what Assimilate wants even at its base...:bleh:
I have both - and I can assure you - RedCine is NOT Scratch. You do NOT need what Scratch needs to run REDCINE at max performance.

[JustMe]

I have both - and I can assure you - RedCine is NOT Scratch. You do NOT need what Scratch needs to run REDCINE at max performance.

We can all see that Redcine is just the core of scratch with the "redcode" node being a modified jpeg2k import.

the same base api's apply.
Scratch has never supported some cards and now has to via the Redcine program.

[JustMe]

but just for giggles a dell m65 with a QFX 350m works

[Mark L. Pederson]

We can all see that Redcine is just the core of scratch with the "redcode" node being a modified jpeg2k import.

the same base api's apply.
Scratch has never supported some cards and now has to via the Redcine program.

well ... I hope "you all" look a little deeper.

[Lucas Wilson]

We can all see that Redcine is just the core of scratch with the "redcode" node being a modified jpeg2k import.

Really? Please tell me exactly how the "redcode" node is just a modified j2k import. Can you elaborate on what pieces of color science are and are not part of "the node?" How are you deriving this opinion?


the same base api's apply.
Scratch has never supported some cards and now has to via the Redcine program.

Do you have the API for REDCINE and/or SCRATCH? (hint: the answer is "no.")

If you've got opinions, that's fine. Label them as opinions, but please don't try to pass stuff like this off as fact that "we all" can see. Because unless you're part of the code team working on REDCINE and/or SCRATCH, your statements are pure conjecture.

Best,

Lucas
-----
ASSIMILATE, Inc.
LA, CA, USA

[Mark L. Pederson]

Here's a bad ass motherboard for $397 that will supports the latest Intel® Core™2 processors in LGA775 package and also can support Intel® next generation 45nm Multi-Core CPU -
http://www.extreme-pc.ca/showproduct.asp?productid=371730&menu1id=12&menu2id=83&menu3id=44

and for 8 cores there is this -

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813182122

[Simon Blackledge]

So whats the fastest processors out there at the moment ? Is it worth waiting ?


Are there certain cases you guys go for ? so many around.. neon lights etc :-/

Are there any that have internal raid bays ?

Cheers

Si

[Mark L. Pederson]

So whats the fastest processors out there at the moment ? Is it worth waiting ?


Are there certain cases you guys go for ? so many around.. neon lights etc :-/

Are there any that have internal raid bays ?

Cheers

Si

you are better off buying one step down from the fastest - the price/performance ratio will always be in your favor if you buy what WAS the latest and greatest but recently got "dethroned" - as far as waiting - well - there will always be a faster chip - so, the answer is - wait as long as you possible can - but when you need - get it - but always buy hardware at the very last possible moment - moments before you pull the trigger - do an extensive internet search

as far as cases go - I like E-ATX rackmount server cases - there are many with hot swap bays - they are heavy and cost $100-$200 more - but they will last forever, tend to have better air circulation and it is easy to upgrade components -

my 2 cents

[Ash Bolland]

Here's a bad ass motherboard for $397 that will supports the latest Intel® Core™2 processors in LGA775 package and also can support Intel® next generation 45nm Multi-Core CPU -
http://www.extreme-pc.ca/showproduct.asp?productid=371730&menu1id=12&menu2id=83&menu3id=44

and for 8 cores there is this -

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813182122

At Umeric we run 16 crossfires with qcore at 3.2ghz - raptors, 8800 gtx x2 sli - water cooled - with 30inch apple's

We downloaded Redcine and some raw files - runs great here... :)
bring on march!

btw Why would you want get such a heavy 3d card for 2d editing or are you thinking 3d compositing also with raw codec?

Thanks

[Simon Blackledge]

But RedCine diesn't support SLI does it? :-/

Mark, yip, totally agree.. will look at the cases..

Though this is tempting!..

http://www.mountainmods.com/u2ufo-opti1203-black-wrinkle-powder-coat-original-top-p-433.html?osCsid=0a7jgmuhjftncb6kpa23uj29m7

[Kevin Halverson]

At Umeric we run 16 crossfires with qcore at 3.2ghz - raptors, 8800 gtx x2 sli - water cooled - with 30inch apple's

We downloaded Redcine and some raw files - runs great here... :)
bring on march!

Hey umeric,

Could you supply a bit of information as to the performance that you achieved? Specifically, could you define a specific .r3d file, the settings you used in RedCine and the performance (frame rate processed per unit time) from that same system? While "...runs great..." gives a hint, it would be very helpful to have some high end bench marks to compare against.

Thanks!

Kevin Halverson

[Mark L. Pederson]

FYI - Cinebench benchmarks - note the 8-core mac

http://www.boxxtech.com/news/Cinebench_World_Record.asp?mtcEmail=Offhollywood@m ac.com&mtcCampaign=3601

[Eddie]

What is wrong with AMD processors?

I have always used them, and prefer them over intel. Is this some kind of roll-over-effect from the fact that high-end macs from yesteryear are already too crappy to run redcine? Or is it a hardware compatibility issue?

[Jeff Kilgroe]

Nothing "wrong" with AMD processors. I'm somewhat of an AMD fan myself. Unfortunately their latest offerings are inferior to what Intel is shipping. AMD's reign of CPU superiority ended with the Core2 Xeon processors and AMD has yet to answer back with a superior offering.


Is this some kind of roll-over-effect from the fact that high-end macs from yesteryear are already too crappy to run redcine?

I have no idea what that is even supposed to mean. Most high-end anything from yesteryear won't run Redcine, including P4 systems and many AMD systems. RED does not support any PowerPC based Macs... It's not an issue of not being powerful enough, it's an issue of concentrating on current and future hardware. I applaud them for that... It gives me one more reason to retire this G5 quad I have.

[Jay A. Kelley]

First, a heart felt thanks to all who have been spending their time on here trying to help me find a direction to go in. It's clear from reading the various posts (And this is troubleing) that there is not a lot of hardware info coming from the top down. Many of you are spending time, and dare I say, MONEY? trying to find what makes this software work best.

I was excited to see a true expect on the matter, Luki, hop on here and post, imagine my dissappointment to find his only reason to come in was not to help, but to correct someone on a bad assumption concerning Scratch.. Luki? That was very sad.. Perhaps he has answered this question in another post and I have missed it, if someone knows where that is, please let me know.

It seems from what I can read that a 8 core PC will do fine. As for what I am using the system for, here it is in the order of importance:

1: REDCine (Render to Quicktime using Cineform 4k or 2k)
2: Adobe Premiere Pro CS3 (Using Cineform as well)
3: Adobe After Effects
4: Color Finesse 2.0 (Very excited about this program, will use After Effects until I can afford it)
5: NewTek Lightwave (Yes I do use Lightwave, but I don't want to base a lot of hardware choices on it if it has any kind of negative impact on REDCine)
6: Porn (Kidding) :)


Ok so there you are. I will NOT build this system until AFTER I get my camera. I am 327 so I am expecting late Jan. I liked Zeke's system but would have to check pricing.

Jeff, Kmuse, etc.. You guys are trying really hard and I love the passion. Jeff it sounds like the 8800 may have trouble where Adobe Premiere is concerned. I need to nail this down.

Right now I am hearing two things: 8800 or in that area.. And there is talk of an SLI mode.

I am also hearing that at some point the GPU will cease to be the "weak link" in the chain. I am also hearing that if you are doing well, the best you can hope for is about .91 sec per frame.... So this hurts.. No doubt about it. Personally I would like to render from a 4k master with minimal color work to a 1080p Quicktime/Cineform file in the order of 1min per hour. 2 min per hour would rule.

I am still not really sure of what to do at this point, but perhaps you can answer me this:

If we are rendering files, and the rate is .91 seconds per frame, why is there a worry about overloading the write speed of the hard drive?

Also, I will rarely go beyond 1080p for my output. I MAY go 4k for a short clip for the purpose of special effects if nessesary.. But it's doubtful.

Thanks again

Jay

[Kevin Halverson]

...I am also hearing that if you are doing well, the best you can hope for is about .91 sec per frame.... So this hurts.. No doubt about it...

Hey Jay,

The .91 seconds / frame was my quotation from a fairly modest machine for extracting a 1080p DNxHD QT from a 4k .r3d file. I would hope that higher performance machines would exceed this level of performance, but as of yet, we don't have a standardized test nor reports back from others that define their throughput from other hardware platforms. I intend to do more testing and will share my findings and would love to learn what others are experiencing.

Kevin

[John Tissavary]

2: Adobe Premiere Pro CS3 (Using Cineform as well)


Jay


You will want check with David Newman from Cineform over at dvinfo forums to make sure which card will work with Prospect HD, which uses hardware overlays. A few months back there was a long thread regarding geforce 8 series, with many owners of that card opting to exchange for 7 series.

cheers,

john t.

[Jeff Kilgroe]

1: REDCine (Render to Quicktime using Cineform 4k or 2k)
2: Adobe Premiere Pro CS3 (Using Cineform as well)
3: Adobe After Effects
4: Color Finesse 2.0 (Very excited about this program, will use After Effects until I can afford it)
5: NewTek Lightwave (Yes I do use Lightwave, but I don't want to base a lot of hardware choices on it if it has any kind of negative impact on REDCine)
6: Porn (Kidding) :)

Jay, I think you're on the right track... Do as John says and check if the overlay problem is going to be an issue for you. If it is, go with the GeForce 7800GTX or something similar. Saves you some money and is still very good. I'd like to recommend an SLI configuration, but you don't really have any software listed that will benefit.

You still have a few weeks until you need a new system, I would recommend going for the new 45nm Intel CPUs. Waiting until your camera is out should give enough time for those new CPUs and chipsets to be tested on the open market. As of now, there are some stability concerns.

As for your software list...

1: Any current nVidia GPU is going to be fine. Perhaps REDCINE will make better use of more powerful GPU functions in the future.

2 & 3: Not GPU dependent. Some motion effects can be GPU accelerated, IIRC, but your consideration here should be if the overlay issue is going to affect you or not.

4: I've never used Color Finesse, can't comment...

5: Don't get me started ranting on NewTek and their inability to make decent use of OpenGL. But as a long-time Lightwaver, I'll just say that any modern GeForce card works great. Quadro or FireGL cards are extra money wasted on this application. Too bad, really...

6: It's OK, you can admit this is really #1.

From the looks of your list, I would recommend the best GeForce series card you want to pay for. As long as the overlay issue isn't going to be a problem. But I guess that's what I've been saying...

[galexander]

So whats the fastest processors out there at the moment ? Is it worth waiting ?
Are there certain cases you guys go for ? so many around.. neon lights etc :-
Are there any that have internal raid bays ?
Cheers

Si

Fastest depends on how much overclocking your motherboard supports and how much cooling you want to have. i've OC'ed a quad 2.4GHz to ~3GHz, with stock cpu cooler, i pushed it to 3.3GHz but it was slightly unstable. also have big hi-perf HP case fans hot wired to the PWM of the cpu fan, so if the cpu gets hot the fan crank up.

absolute stock, out of the box, balls to the wall fastest would be that intel QX9650. if you can find a motherboard that supports two of these cpus and you can overclock and add some watercooling you would have about the fastest system outside of that monster that does the nuclear blast simulations. your issues would be getting Ram to run at 1333MHz++.

i wouldn't buy a 1333MHz system because of the ram issue. it's a waste to have a massive FSB that the Ram can't support, if your solution space fits inside the cache of the CPU then you're sweet. why i have the kingston X, i can OC it.

the server boards have the edge in that you can throw more cpus on the motherboard but most do not have a PCIE x16 slot, they have lame onboard VGA video and most do not support hi-performance Ram. they use the expensive ECC flavor with slower clocks and no overclocking ability.

for raid i would throw in a 3Ware sata controller, fastest on the planet, i've had two a PCI version and PCI-X, screamers. you don't need much of a raid bay these days with 4x750GB sata in raid 0,5,or 6, you'll have more data and speed then you'll need

cases, most are a waste of space these days. if you want something not going to move too often get an HP server case, bullet proof power supplies, great air flow, built like a tank but tool-less for mods. forget about all of the lights and LED bullshit. priorities, 1. stable and clean power supply >650W and 2. airflow. there are some great heatpipe coolers around that support up to 130W, check out thermalright U120. dump the idea of floppy drive and permanent CD/DVD. with current USB sticks you can boot to XP or linux.

[galexander]

Alexander I think Khmuse is planning on sending a frame to each render node which would require a 1.2MB network ... stuff deleted... We looked into building it ourself and the difference between our homebuilt option and the Avid solution with 'seemingly' the exact same setup was night and day. The home built introduced an enormous amount of latency in consecutive calls. It did very well in big bursts but very poorly in frame hosting.



when we did our processing we had to tune the network packets and protocols, UDP sound familiar, far less collisions and dropped packets. we also had a "atomic clock" running sync for timestamping. these days with the 'jumbo' packets, intel's offloading, and boot strapping, i'm surprised that still an issue. Avid must do similar with tuned drivers.

my simple homebuilt rig today, i pull hard on the adsl connection 18hr x 7day (internet providers throttles me during the day ha ha), @1350kb/s, but i've tuned the OS and drivers. i will hit the bus limit before the NIC.

[galexander]

Hey Jay,

stuff deleted....


, we don't have a standardized test nor reports back from others that define their throughput from other hardware platforms. I intend to do more testing and will share my findings and would love to learn what others are experiencing.

Kevin

why don't you throw IOmeter at it and see what the benchmarks are? my .02

[Mark L. Pederson]

Fastest depends on how much overclocking your motherboard supports and how much cooling you want to have. i've OC'ed a quad 2.4GHz to ~3GHz, with stock cpu cooler, i pushed it to 3.3GHz but it was slightly unstable. also have big hi-perf HP case fans hot wired to the PWM of the cpu fan, so if the cpu gets hot the fan crank up.

absolute stock, out of the box, balls to the wall fastest would be that intel QX9650. if you can find a motherboard that supports two of these cpus and you can overclock and add some watercooling you would have about the fastest system outside of that monster that does the nuclear blast simulations. your issues would be getting Ram to run at 1333MHz++.

i wouldn't buy a 1333MHz system because of the ram issue. it's a waste to have a massive FSB that the Ram can't support, if your solution space fits inside the cache of the CPU then you're sweet. why i have the kingston X, i can OC it.

the server boards have the edge in that you can throw more cpus on the motherboard but most do not have a PCIE x16 slot, they have lame onboard VGA video and most do not support hi-performance Ram. they use the expensive ECC flavor with slower clocks and no overclocking ability.

for raid i would throw in a 3Ware sata controller, fastest on the planet, i've had two a PCI version and PCI-X, screamers. you don't need much of a raid bay these days with 4x750GB sata in raid 0,5,or 6, you'll have more data and speed then you'll need

cases, most are a waste of space these days. if you want something not going to move too often get an HP server case, bullet proof power supplies, great air flow, built like a tank but tool-less for mods. forget about all of the lights and LED bullshit. priorities, 1. stable and clean power supply >650W and 2. airflow. there are some great heatpipe coolers around that support up to 130W, check out thermalright U120. dump the idea of floppy drive and permanent CD/DVD. with current USB sticks you can boot to XP or linux.

galexander

This is good stuff. What is your favorite 8-core motherboard at the moment? Best "Bang for your buck" in your opinion - just crunching REDCODE from REDCINE - not running any other apps at all?

[Ash Bolland]

Hey umeric,

Could you supply a bit of information as to the performance that you achieved? Specifically, could you define a specific .r3d file, the settings you used in RedCine and the performance (frame rate processed per unit time) from that same system? While "...runs great..." gives a hint, it would be very helpful to have some high end bench marks to compare against.

Thanks!

Kevin Halverson

Sure - away fom the studio for the next few days though - I'll get on to it when im back...

[Ash Bolland]

But RedCine diesn't support SLI does it? :-/

Mark, yip, totally agree.. will look at the cases..

Though this is tempting!..

http://www.mountainmods.com/u2ufo-opti1203-black-wrinkle-powder-coat-original-top-p-433.html?osCsid=0a7jgmuhjftncb6kpa23uj29m7

Yes - I dont think redcine supports SLI - not sure why it ever would....

Seems best to have a few raptors or even 20k drives not sure the name
running as raid for play back?

Of course rendering out - for broadcast/film transfer etc needs a cpu as fast as possable - but we have a small render farm for that - render out shots - while working on others....

But we will see how it all goes in March - when we gets ours -4k is hugh! I cant believe my 30inch screen won't be big enough! I'm very excited.

We have booked one for jan though as we got a nu project for MTV
that might allow for 12 days of Red Hire - but depends on the DP - so might go with super16.

[galexander]

galexander

This is good stuff. What is your favorite 8-core motherboard at the moment? Best "Bang for your buck" in your opinion - just crunching REDCODE from REDCINE - not running any other apps at all?

to me the most badass motherboard you can buy right now would be the SuperMicro X7DWA and not wait for the intel skullf_cker, $1500x2=$3000 for cpu's? wtf??

to be honest, i wouldn't buy a dual 8-core, the price vs performance of a single OC 1x quad board with extremely fast FSB versus a 2x quad with mediocre FSB doesn't justify the expense. i would buy two single 1x quad computer boards with 10Gig fiber or w 2 GigE on each and boot strap them for a lot less money and more than double the performance.

the dual quad is like a old big V-8, you need to get it out on the 'road' and let it breath, great for long complex, number crunching, computing massively parallel problems.

the single, extremely fast quad will do a 'quarter-mile' under 3 sec. fast FSB let's say you push it to 1400MHz, your graphics clock is running somewhere around 1800MHz+, your cpu is 3.8GHz+ for about $1000?

compared with 2 x quad running stock at 3GHz, FSB 667MHz(800 if you're lucky) , graphics card running at 1600MHz for about $3500?? the FSB alone difference will nearly triple the amount of data per cycle that is getting shoved around on the bus for the 1x quad.

the 1x quad will basically be crunching at max, the only choke points are the amount of ram on graphics card and on motherboard.

the 2x quad bottlenecks will be SMPing, takes overhead with communication, scheduling (scheduling in winDoZe is damn nightmare and is NOT very deterministic unless you are running some real-time extensions). each cpu slot will be feeding the graphics processor, allocating/malloc ram (probably fragmenting the shit out of it wasting more clock cycles). the 1x quad is similar to FIFO, simple and extremely fast.

for stock, no OC'ing, money no object, most likely supermicro X7QCE, fastest FSB of any server board i've seen WITH 3 PCIe slots, 192gb ram max, quad x 4, you can throw so many processor at that much ram, it more than makes up for the slow Ram clock. it's the old Russian mentality, if you can't beat them with superior technology, throw shitloads of everything you can at them as fast as you can (Bagdad defense ha ha)

[Gavin Greenwalt]

FYI - Cinebench benchmarks - note the 8-core mac

http://www.boxxtech.com/news/Cinebench_World_Record.asp?mtcEmail=Offhollywood@m ac.com&mtcCampaign=3601

HAHAHA my home system scored somewhere between a 0 and 1000 making it at least 23-40 times slower than the new Boxx system. I don't really use it for anything.. but honestly that's just getting embarassing.

[Simon Blackledge]

I'm lost! lol..

So galexander what your saying is a single cpu (quad core) overclocked is the way to go for a workstation ?

The server side I get..

All very confusing for a mac head :-/ lol

TBH I'm more looking to build a rack mounted machine for our Scratch setup. Probably going to get a rack case that has 24 drives internally with a 3ware card. Lots of research to do yet.. :)

Loads of great info in this thread.. thanks guys..

s

[Mark L. Pederson]

to me the most badass motherboard you can buy right now would be the SuperMicro X7DWA and not wait for the intel skullf_cker, $1500x2=$3000 for cpu's? wtf??

to be honest, i wouldn't buy a dual 8-core, the price vs performance of a single OC 1x quad board with extremely fast FSB versus a 2x quad with mediocre FSB doesn't justify the expense. i would buy two single 1x quad computer boards with 10Gig fiber or w 2 GigE on each and boot strap them for a lot less money and more than double the performance.

the dual quad is like a old big V-8, you need to get it out on the 'road' and let it breath, great for long complex, number crunching, computing massively parallel problems.

the single, extremely fast quad will do a 'quarter-mile' under 3 sec. fast FSB let's say you push it to 1400MHz, your graphics clock is running somewhere around 1800MHz+, your cpu is 3.8GHz+ for about $1000?

compared with 2 x quad running stock at 3GHz, FSB 667MHz(800 if you're lucky) , graphics card running at 1600MHz for about $3500?? the FSB alone difference will nearly triple the amount of data per cycle that is getting shoved around on the bus for the 1x quad.

the 1x quad will basically be crunching at max, the only choke points are the amount of ram on graphics card and on motherboard.

the 2x quad bottlenecks will be SMPing, takes overhead with communication, scheduling (scheduling in winDoZe is damn nightmare and is NOT very deterministic unless you are running some real-time extensions). each cpu slot will be feeding the graphics processor, allocating/malloc ram (probably fragmenting the shit out of it wasting more clock cycles). the 1x quad is similar to FIFO, simple and extremely fast.

for stock, no OC'ing, money no object, most likely supermicro X7QCE, fastest FSB of any server board i've seen WITH 3 PCIe slots, 192gb ram max, quad x 4, you can throw so many processor at that much ram, it more than makes up for the slow Ram clock. it's the old Russian mentality, if you can't beat them with superior technology, throw shitloads of everything you can at them as fast as you can (Bagdad defense ha ha)

Massive thanks galexander -

This helps me a lot -

I love all the "free consulting" one can get on this forum!!!

This thread rocks hard!!

Make this puppy a sticky!!

[Jay A. Kelley]

Mark you will learn that I have a talent for starting good threads. :)

Why? You ask? Simple, because I am an idiot on a universal level. That which confuses the shit out of me, mildy interests everyone else!

:)

Jay

[Mark L. Pederson]

Mark you will learn that I have a talent for starting good threads. :)

Why? You ask? Simple, because I am an idiot on a universal level. That which confuses the shit out of me, mildy interests everyone else!

:)

Jay

You will do just fine Jay.

The smartest guys ask the most questions.

[Mark L. Pederson]

the 1x quad will basically be crunching at max, the only choke points are the amount of ram on graphics card and on motherboard.



okay galexander -

last question (well ... maybe) ...

what's your favorite "bang for the buck" single QUAD motherboard?

and again, thanks for sharing -

[galexander]

I'm lost! lol..

So galexander what your saying is a single cpu (quad core) overclocked is the way to go for a workstation ?

The server side I get..

All very confusing for a mac head :-/ lol

TBH I'm more looking to build a rack mounted machine for our Scratch setup. Probably going to get a rack case that has 24 drives internally with a 3ware card. Lots of research to do yet.. :)

Loads of great info in this thread.. thanks guys..

s

yes for price vs performance, you can't beat an OC'ed board.

in a 12/15 months or so when the system probably craps out because you've stressed out the components, you upgrade to the latest and greatest and you haven't spent a ton of money on a server which by then technology will have at least doubled.

instead of being stuck with an expensive and outdated dinosaur of a server, you upgrade to latest and greatest, some kind of water cooled, quad x quad x dual SLI machine.

24 drives, shit, that's going to cost you at least 380Watts at power on and under full load. cooling it will sound like f18 about jump off the deck...

[Simon Blackledge]

lol... yeah.. currently have 38 tabs in safari just on PSU's! :)

Unsure to go fibre attached or a full case with sata internal onto an HBA.

Can get a 950w psu.. the price jump from 16 > 24 disk enclosures is pretty steep though. Plus all that heat :-/ lots more research needed!

option A
5U Rackmount Server Chassis - 24 Hot-Swap Bays - N+1 950W PSU
£1800

option B
4U Rackmount Server Chassis - 16 SATA/SAS Hot-Swap - No PSU
£450 +PSU

Also options for sata/sas or sata ML .. though sas drives are still expensive as hell.. and its more storage space than needing 1200MBs for us currently.

[galexander]

okay galexander -

last question (well ... maybe) ...

what's your favorite "bang for the buck" single QUAD motherboard?

and again, thanks for sharing -

i would humbly suggest any of the gigabyte motherboards, like ga-X38, those heatpipes are there for a reason ha ha. you don't need to buy the latest and greatest cpu's for big $$, these boards are made to OC. ram fastest you can afford and still OC.

if you troll around the gaming sites everyone will have different opinions, i have asus p5k-vm running win2k3, as i wanted a microATX format.

[Simon Blackledge]

soo many options :-)

http://uk.asus.com/products.aspx?l1=3&l2=11

[galexander]

lol... yeah.. currently have 38 tabs in safari just on PSU's! :)

Unsure to go fibre attached or a full case with sata internal onto an HBA.

Can get a 950w psu.. the price jump from 16 > 24 disk enclosures is pretty steep though. Plus all that heat :-/ lots more research needed!

option A
5U Rackmount Server Chassis - 24 Hot-Swap Bays - N+1 950W PSU
£1800

option B
4U Rackmount Server Chassis - 16 SATA/SAS Hot-Swap - No PSU
£450 +PSU

Also options for sata/sas or sata ML .. though sas drives are still expensive as hell.. and its more storage space than needing 1200MBs for us currently.

i'd avoid SAS like the plague. with the correct raid array, your MTBF won't be impacted too much. you're going to do with 16x 1TB sata drives? are you archiving the history of the universe part 1? ha ha

[Simon Blackledge]

Lol.. might be!! :-p

Prob use 500gig enterprise as the cost is alot less and no.. we wont need 16TB! yet.. Depends if were working with R3d files or a shed load of dpx/tiffs :-/

One will be used as a workstation another will be server for 3D/comp

Here's the case..
http://www.chenbro.com/corporatesite/products_detail.php?serno=41

[galexander]

Lol.. might be!! :-p

Prob use 500gig enterprise as the cost is alot less and no.. we wont need 16TB! yet.. Depends if were working with R3d files or a shed load of dpx/tiffs :-/

One will be used as a workstation another will be server for 3D/comp

Here's the case..
http://www.chenbro.com/corporatesite/products_detail.php?serno=41

wow, that's going to be loud ha ha..

Seagate makes good set of drives
SATA 3.0Gb/s 160GB ST3160815SV
SATA 3.0Gb/s 250GB ST3250820SV
SATA 3.0Gb/s 320GB ST3320620SV
SATA 3.0Gb/s 500GB ST3500630SV
SATA 3.0Gb/s 750GB ST3750640SV

which i've read are just as good as the enterprise and these are made for 24x7 video acquisition, multiple streams but not quite as expensive.

[Simon Blackledge]

Oh, interesting on the drive front there! thanks.. shall look into that..

Yes.. v noisy ! :-/ we have a 8bay raid and its pretty silent.. have to look into what fan's its using in the back..

will post up any more findings!

cheers

S

[Radoslav Karapetkov]

wow, that's going to be loud ha ha..

Seagate makes good set of drives
SATA 3.0Gb/s 160GB ST3160815SV
SATA 3.0Gb/s 250GB ST3250820SV
SATA 3.0Gb/s 320GB ST3320620SV
SATA 3.0Gb/s 500GB ST3500630SV
SATA 3.0Gb/s 750GB ST3750640SV

which i've read are just as good as the enterprise and these are made for 24x7 video acquisition, multiple streams but not quite as expensive.

I was just going to ask about Seagate.

Can they be considered a serious\reliable long-term option? They are priced nicely and this 5 year warranty option looks impressive.

I mean, all drives on my home PC are Seagate and I never had any problems with them (knocking on wood).

A lot of professional studios here are also using Seagate.

But I guess that a REDCine\processing station would have to sustain a much heavier traffic and load, so... how many of you are planning to choose Seagate?

And I also heard that the higher the HDD's capacity, the more unstable it is. 320GB is currently considered stable enough but what about the bigger models?

[galexander]

I was just going to ask about Seagate.

Can they be considered a serious\reliable long-term option? They are priced nicely and this 5 year warranty option looks impressive.

I mean, all drives on my home PC are Seagate and I never had any problems with them (knocking on wood).

A lot of professional studios here are also using Seagate.

But I guess that a REDCine\processing station would have to sustain a much heavier traffic and load, so... how many of you are planning to choose Seagate?

And I also heard that the higher the HDD's capacity, the more unstable it is. 320GB is currently considered stable enough but what about the bigger models?

i've used seagate, quantum, maxtor, wd, for consumer level stuff, they usually run in cycles, current trends seems to be towards WD. they don't have a SAS line of drives to protect like Seagate. Seagate could have long ago made a 10k rpm sata or ide drive with their cheetah technology but wouldn't bring it to market as it would drive down the over-priced 15k rpm drives. with SAS and SATA merging, maybe the price will eventually come down on the high-end 10k/15k rpm drives.

currently ones are raptors, i'd highly reccommend anyone getting these, small ~150GB but damn they are blazingly fast! achtung, schnell, schnell, raus, raus...

these seagate look to be more for an "industrial" video application, hard, consistent reads/writes streaming with huge AV data. if you're running a security operation in vegas recording huge amounts of digital data for storage/people ID/scans, you'd get probably get these. they would write the streams fairly sequentially without the spindle lifting too often between reads or writes.

the "enterprise" versions are most likely built more for file-servers, database oracle/SAP, tons of access by many people pulling big and small files, lots of random access. they are basically used 'hard' 10 hours a day. if many people pulled huge files at once, these would slow down to a crawl, the "industrial" would keep pumping.

i don't think stability is a factor for drives bigger than 320Gb. to me, it would be more of access time. bigger drives, more platters or denser platter that's a lot of 'real-estate' to randomly spray data. you would have to seriously start ramping up the spindle arm speed on the big Tb drives or the seek time goes up. i like the drives that have a minimum number of platters and quick access time. all else being the same, any manufacturer that says the random seek time on a 200Gb drive is the same as a monster .75/1Tb drive is FOS IMHO. ha ha

so depends on your application really.

just my 0.02

[Jay A. Kelley]

Galexalder,

I would like to go back to what you were saying to Mark. I am interested in this concept of running 1 quad chip at 98% efficieny vs. 2 quad chips at less.

If I pay double the price, I would want double the speed, and from what you are saying that may not be the case.

Also you speak a LOT about over-clocking. I am very interested in this, but do not know how it's done.

Given what you have been reading on here, please give your recommendations on a 1 quad chip system overclocked. Money is a consideration, and if I could keep it in the $2,500 range that would be great. If not thats cool too, but any advice in this area would be good.

As for overclocking, is this a very difficult thing to do?

Jay

[Jay A. Kelley]

How about this one:

GA-X38-DQ6
Intel Bx80569qx9650a Core 2 Extreme Qx9650 (Only One.. All I can afford, but can add another later)
Kingston HyperX 2GB DDR2 SDRAM Memory Module - 2GB - 1200MHz DDR2-1200/PC2-9600 - Non-ECC - DDR2 (4gb total)
Black Ultra Grid ATX Mid-Tower Computer Chassis ULT33137, w/ 500W V-Series Power Supply & 120mm Fans

Now this system is based on a 1 chip setup since those processors are over 1k a piece. But perhaps I don't need this?

Look at this list and tell me what you would change on it.

Thanks

Jay

[Mark L. Pederson]

Given what you have been reading on here, please give your recommendations on a 1 quad chip system overclocked. Money is a consideration, and if I could keep it in the $2,500 range that would be great.

Jay, one thing to note here is that we are seeing an almost 2X speed increase on an 8-core mac x1900 VS 4-core mac x1900 - so, yeah, I know it's NOT $2500 - but it IS a MAC and a PC (bootcamp) - handles REDCODE QT wrapper workflows (which you can't do on a PC right now) and with applecare it's a three year warranty.

I am exploring the whole custom pc box thing because I am curious if it is cheaper (and better) for us to just build four or five dedicated REDCINE CRUNCH BOXES as opposed to buying more 8-core macs.

I am not yet convinced - but this is all interesting stuff.

[Jonathan Cruz]

Jay, one thing to note here is that we are seeing an almost 2X speed increase on an 8-core mac x1900 VS 4-core mac x1900 - so, yeah, I know it's NOT $2500 - but it IS a MAC and a PC (bootcamp) - handles REDCODE QT wrapper workflows (which you can't do on a PC right now) and with applecare it's a three year warranty.

I am exploring the whole custom pc box thing because I am curious if it is cheaper (and better) for us to just build four or five dedicated REDCINE CRUNCH BOXES as opposed to buying more 8-core macs.

I am not yet convinced - but this is all interesting stuff.

Interesting indeed, im also holding out on buying perhaps a new mac pro if its released in the macworld of january with the intel 45nm chips or custom building a highly OCed pc im also curios about when apple will release ZFS filesystem read/write capability if we will benefit for a more faster and reliable storage solutions

[Mark L. Pederson]

im also curios about when apple will release ZFS filesystem read/write capability if we will benefit for a more faster and reliable storage solutions

ZFS is coming. 100% sure on that one. That's NAB most likely.

[Anders Holck]

Leopard ZFS is already in beta.
Apple offers a developers preview at: https://connect.apple.com/cgi-bin/WebObjects/MemberSite.woa/wa/getSoftware?bundleID=19884
So I'm pretty sure as well :-)

[galexander]

How about this one:

GA-X38-DQ6
Intel Bx80569qx9650a Core 2 Extreme Qx9650 (Only One.. All I can afford, but can add another later)
Kingston HyperX 2GB DDR2 SDRAM Memory Module - 2GB - 1200MHz DDR2-1200/PC2-9600 - Non-ECC - DDR2 (4gb total)
Black Ultra Grid ATX Mid-Tower Computer Chassis ULT33137, w/ 500W V-Series Power Supply & 120mm Fans

Now this system is based on a 1 chip setup since those processors are over 1k a piece. But perhaps I don't need this?

Look at this list and tell me what you would change on it.

Thanks

Jay

looks sweet, i wouldn't buy that cpu though, i would step down to something more cost effective. either a q6700 or q6600, save your extra $700 for a killer graphics card and getting a copy of win2003 svr. make sure you get and read the latest manual to verify ram compatibility.

OC these days is much easier than the 'good old days' of tweaking voltages, digging through chipset manuals and changing jumpers on the motherboard. the bios will have the mods setup to vary parameters and even if you screw up and it gets unstable, winDoZe blue screens or won't boot you can easily recover when you reboot and switch back to default settings without opening the case or taking out the cmos battery.

[galexander]

Leopard ZFS is already in beta.
Apple offers a developers preview at: https://connect.apple.com/cgi-bin/WebObjects/MemberSite.woa/wa/getSoftware?bundleID=19884
So I'm pretty sure as well :-)

ah the mac guys are always entertaining ha ha. no offense.. :)

we're talking about brute force, numbering crunching, screaming video, processing monster NOT something that when you delete a file, a clown appears and juggles it over to the trash can with all of the pretentiousness of a linux/bsd clone at which point it plays the 1812 overture.. ha ha ha i just want to delete a file thank you and like 2 minutes ago.

if you strip out most of the mac bloat ware, you'll get close to a linux/bsd kernel. don't even get me started on why apple won't release the FCP codecs. if it was worth the time and effort, someone would hack the codecs. if not for FCP, why would anyone bother to buy a mac?

i do like some mac products, that macbook pro is unstoppable in the field, built to take punishment of the environmental kind and keep going. i recently bought an airport extreme base station, sweet 802.11G, but i'm going to mod the crappy antennas so i can extend the range from 20meters to about 900m.. anyway i digress.

mac must have an agreement to get the latest intel chips at least 6 months or so before the rest of the market can release them, it's too bad they don't push the envelope more for the price you are paying.

[galexander]

Interesting indeed, im also holding out on buying perhaps a new mac pro if its released in the macworld of january with the intel 45nm chips or custom building a highly OCed pc im also curios about when apple will release ZFS filesystem read/write capability if we will benefit for a more faster and reliable storage solutions

rarely is the FS the bottleneck. if you want the absolute fastest byte per byte, you can't beat good old FAT16. if fact when i need a small swp drive, i format it this way. no it doesn't support long names, less than 2 gb, blah blah blah but what it does do, is simple and extremely fast with almost no overhead.

[galexander]

Galexalder,

I would like to go back to what you were saying to Mark. I am interested in this concept of running 1 quad chip at 98% efficieny vs. 2 quad chips at less.

If I pay double the price, I would want double the speed, and from what you are saying that may not be the case.

stuff deleted...

Jay

if the system specs were similar you would get nearly double the speed for double the money but they're not.

if take the single quad system with the faster clock, you get an IO throughput of R , which is a function of CPU(quantity, clock, L1/L2 cache), ram(quantity,clock,timing), graphics(clock, ram), motherboard bus(clock)

the fastest you can move useful information around on the system is limited by the slowest component. for the server, the fastest ECC ram is about 667MHz or maybe 800 if you can afford it. also ECC ram takes a performance hit because it does internal error checking. ok that's good if you're calculating the PI to the 1 millionth decimal point.

the single system will push information around at a bus speed of 1333MHz, you are already twice as fast as the server system for less than half the cost. so if you double a single system, your effect throughput would essentialy double, yes there would be some processing at the end to combine if necessary.

performance cost
4cpu@1333MHz =~8cpu@667MHz 4cpu@1333 <<< 8cpu@667
2x4cpu@1333MHz>>8cpu@667MHz 2x4cpu@1333 < 8cpu@667

[number6]

Jay, have hesitated to jump in because for one, I haven't even set up this system yet. But anyway, here's what I bought a month or more ago:

PowerEdge SC 1430
Quad Core Intel® Xeon® E5310; 2X4MB Cache, 1.6GHz, 1066MHZ FSB, No Operating System
PowerEdge SC1430 Quad Core Intel® Xeon® E5310; 2X4MB Cache, 1.6GHz, 1066MHZ FSB
[222-6813]
2nd Processor DISCOUNTED UPGRADE! Quad Core Xeon E5310, 2x4MB Cache, 1.60GHz
[467-0378]
Memory 2GB 667MHz (2x1GB), Dual Ranked Fully Buffered DIMMs
[311-6152]
Keyboard Keyboard, USB, Black
[310-8170]
Monitor No Monitor Option
[320-0058]
Primary Hard Drive 160GB 7.2K RPM Serial ATA 3Gbps 3.5-in Cabled Hard Drive, Primary
[341-3758]
Hard Drive Controller SAS 5IR SAS internal RAID adapter, PCI-Express
[341-3756]
Floppy Drive No Floppy Drive
[341-4035]
Operating System No Operating System
[420-6320]
Mouse Optical Two-Button Mouse, USB, Black
[310-8172]
Network Adapter On-Board Single Gigabit Network Adapter
[430-0488]
CD/DVD Drive No CD/DVD Drive
[313-4389]
System Documentation Electronic Documentation and OpenManage CD Kit
[310-8146]
2nd Hard Drive 160GB 7.2K RPM Serial ATA 3Gbps 3.5-in Cabled Hard Drive, Additional
[341-3754]
Hard Drive Configuration Add-in SAS5iR (SATA/SAS Controller) which supports 2 Hard Drives-RAID 0
[310-8117]
Hardware Support Services 1Yr BASIC SUPPORT: 5x10 HW-Only, 5x10 NBD Onsite
[980-2470]
[985-0857]
[985-9057]
Installation Support Services No Installation Assessment
[900-9997

I bought this system because as luck would have it, Dell had sent out a promotional email the day before that would give me, as a loyal customer, a nice discount on whatever unit I was interested in purchasing from them. That cut the cost doun to about a thousand dollars or so, before tax and with free shipping.

I have bought, but not installed, an OEM copy of Windows Vista 64 bit.

Unlike the true professionals on this thread, I am not concerned with time. I will render for weeks if necessary to get my (eventual) movie outputted to something I can go to festivals with, so a render farm isn't my goal or desire. i just need a grinder.

As for graphics card, I will choose this one: PNY Quadro FX370 256MB DDR2 PCI Express x16 Video Card with Dual DVI, Dual VGA, TV-Out, OpenGL 2.1, DirectX 10.0: VCQFX5500-PCIE-PB (Retail)
Features:
256MB GDDR2 frame buffer
64-bit memory interface
6.4GB/sec memory bandwidth
Twin DVI-I display connectors (one dual-link, one single-link)
PCI Express x16 bus interface
38W maximum power consumption
No auxiliary power required
Active fansink thermal management
ATX form factor, 4.38 (H) x 6.6 (L)
Product Specification:
Requirements PC compatible with Intel Pentium 4/Xeon or AMD Opteron class processor or higher
Open PCI Express x16 lane slot
Microsoft Windows Vista, XP, 2000, or Linux
512MB system memory
50MB of available disk space for full installation
CD-ROM or DVD-ROM drive
VGA or DVI-I compatible display
450W power supply
Package Contains NVIDIA Quadro FX 370 by PNY graphics board
Two DVI-I to VGA adapters
Drivers for Windows Vista and XP
Detailed Installation Guide
Quickstart Installation Guide
Quadro Application Utilities on CD-ROM (MAXtreme, POWERdraft)
Warranty 1 Year Manufacture
Current price of this card is about $122 bucks + shipping at XPCGear.com. A little higher at Newegg.

PROBLEMS: One known issue before I even start setting up this gear is 1. this is a server and I'm trying to teach it to be a workstation. It's still a relatively new dog so maybe I can teach it that new trick. 2. The motherboard only has two pci-e slots, and they are 8 lane slots (running at only 4x speeds each) One of those slots has the Hard Drive Controller SAS 5IR SAS internal RAID adapter, PCI-Express in it. That means I have to purchase an "adapter", or "riser", if you will, to adapt the 16 lane pci-e card to the remaining 8 lane pci-e slot. 3. This may very well mean taking a dremel tool and carving out a piece of the case so the card on the riser can be fitted in the machine. I have looked into putting a PCI card into one of the available PCI slots (also PCI-X slots are available for... whatever) but they aren't DirectX 10 compatible, so I decided to go with the PCI-e, although it be only 4x speed on this motherboard. Still probably more throughput than parallel PCI card slot would provide.

This computer was brought to my attention on this forum, and I also bought a 20" Dell display that was touted on this forum. All in all, after buying the card and riser, I will probably have something over $1700 in this machine, including Vista 64 bit software as well. I expect it to handle anything I can throw at it for awhile, and it should have a long and useful life as a secondary machine when I upgrade in a year or two. But, I must say that I probably couldn't get this total package for much less than $2000 at present, but I could be wrong.

[Mark L. Pederson]

here's your case -

http://www.istarusa.com/rackmount_chassis/storage_server/1.3u/v-13-m4sa.aspx

[galexander]

if i wanted an ultimate cluster cruncher, i would use BartPE on USB sticks, run what apps are needed from the stick and use all of the hardware for processing. one configuration for each node, keep a locked reference image of the OS. if something happens or you need to upgrade, all nodes get the same patches/mods.

[Mark L. Pederson]

http://www.hothardware.com/News/Intel_Skulltrail_Motherboard_Sneak_Peek/

[Jeff Kilgroe]

http://www.hothardware.com/News/Intel_Skulltrail_Motherboard_Sneak_Peek/

Almost... Almost got it right. Would be nice if it had FW800 (one PCIe slot lost to that now) and more RAM sockets, adding more than 8GB is going to be a pain [expensive].

[Jay A. Kelley]

Jay, one thing to note here is that we are seeing an almost 2X speed increase on an 8-core mac x1900 VS 4-core mac x1900 - so, yeah, I know it's NOT $2500 - but it IS a MAC and a PC (bootcamp) - handles REDCODE QT wrapper workflows (which you can't do on a PC right now) and with applecare it's a three year warranty.

I am exploring the whole custom pc box thing because I am curious if it is cheaper (and better) for us to just build four or five dedicated REDCINE CRUNCH BOXES as opposed to buying more 8-core macs.

I am not yet convinced - but this is all interesting stuff.

Hey my friend,

I hear ya.. And for feature rich editing, I am pretty sold on FCP. But right now money is a major concern and I need to get up and running.. I also have to say I am very impressed with Cineform. Because I cannot afford Scratch, I am looking for ways to maintain flexibility in the post chain, and Cineform seems to offer this quite well. While I don't love Premiere, it has improved, and I DO love After Effects and some other aspects of the Adobe Suite.

To switch to a MAC system right now will have numerous charges that I am not even thinking about, and you, being a business owner, are only to aware that it's those small $100 - $200 items that seem to nickel and dime you to death.

GA (My nickname for him since I cannot remember how to spell the name) has been giving us advice worth hundreds of dollars and I am SO GRATEFUL for that. Now it's simply a matter of taking this one step at a time.

You remember that rule? I think it went: Good, Fast, Cheap... Pick two but never three. Well I need Good, and Cheap... So I have to make my peace that when my RED comes, it will not be up with the same speed you all did.

This is ok.. I'm going to take my time... Learn what I need to learn, and in the mean time, spend a lot of time with my DSLR and get very familiar with RAW images!

See ya

Jay

[Mark L. Pederson]

Hey my friend,

I hear ya.. And for feature rich editing, I am pretty sold on FCP. But right now money is a major concern and I need to get up and running.. I also have to say I am very impressed with Cineform. Because I cannot afford Scratch, I am looking for ways to maintain flexibility in the post chain, and Cineform seems to offer this quite well. While I don't love Premiere, it has improved, and I DO love After Effects and some other aspects of the Adobe Suite.

To switch to a MAC system right now will have numerous charges that I am not even thinking about, and you, being a business owner, are only to aware that it's those small $100 - $200 items that seem to nickel and dime you to death.

GA (My nickname for him since I cannot remember how to spell the name) has been giving us advice worth hundreds of dollars and I am SO GRATEFUL for that. Now it's simply a matter of taking this one step at a time.

You remember that rule? I think it went: Good, Fast, Cheap... Pick two but never three. Well I need Good, and Cheap... So I have to make my peace that when my RED comes, it will not be up with the same speed you all did.

This is ok.. I'm going to take my time... Learn what I need to learn, and in the mean time, spend a lot of time with my DSLR and get very familiar with RAW images!

See ya

Jay

Jay -

Most important thing is to buy AT THE LAST MOMENT. This world moves fast. We are going to fight like dogs not to buy more hardware (with the exception of some additional Red camera accessories) until NAB.

Premiere is going to get better. FCP is going to get better. REDCODE QT is going to get better. CPUs and motherboards get cheaper practically every month.

You should remember that you are actually lucky, because when your Red arrives, there will be more answers than questions. So many great folks sharing info on this site -it's crazy. When we got ours cameras, there were mostly questions.

My business partner Aldey and I often reflect on the fact that as painful as it is to be a "bootstrapped" company - (we have no investors - we have to purchase and/or finance equipment directly out of cash-flow) - it has worked in our favor many times, when we were sure we wanted to purchase one piece of hardware - and by the time we had the funds set aside - there was a better, cheaper solution.

I think you are wise to "get up and running" as fast and cheaply as you can. Get a project or two under your belt. Bag a new client or two - by then, various solutions that are not even apparent right now will emerge.

[Jay A. Kelley]

Ok I swapped the processor to the Q6700.. Did some reading and it would seem that we're cool up to 3.2Ghz OCing that processor with no real problem.

I am going to go with the Gigabyte Motherboard you suggested.. But here's my question:

I can only get one processor as you suggest and then OC the hell out of it (Not really, they got that processor up to 4.8ghz but it was with liquid nitro!!)

The question / Trick is this: Another quad processor is only $500.00.. So it may not be double the speed, but if it's 1.5x the speed for only $500 more.. That seems to still be a good deal.. I am guessing you can still OC a dual system.. So we're looking at a 8 core system running at 3.2...

Now if we're looking at a 1.2x increase in speed, then I don't think that will go anywhere.

Also please explain "teaming" computers. Is this helpful? How does it work?

Also: Why Windows server 2003?

Jay

I love the Gigabyte Motherboad.. Just wish it had 1394b instead of a

[David Birdy]

Jay -

Most important thing is to buy AT THE LAST MOMENT. This world moves fast. We are going to fight like dogs not to buy more hardware (with the exception of some additional Red camera accessories) until NAB.

Premiere is going to get better. FCP is going to get better. REDCODE QT is going to get better. CPUs and motherboards get cheaper practically every month.

You should remember that you are actually lucky, because when your Red arrives, there will be more answers than questions. So many great folks sharing info on this site -it's crazy. When we got ours cameras, there were mostly questions.

My business partner Aldey and I often reflect on the fact that as painful as it is to be a "bootstrapped" company - (we have no investors - we have to purchase and/or finance equipment directly out of cash-flow) - it has worked in our favor many times, when we were sure we wanted to purchase one piece of hardware - and by the time we had the funds set aside - there was a better, cheaper solution.

I think you are wise to "get up and running" as fast and cheaply as you can. Get a project or two under your belt. Bag a new client or two - by then, various solutions that are not even apparent right now will emerge.

Mark, Great points
Many of us with “Middle” or late reservations will benefit from lower CPU pricing and better Codec software updates. Wavelet based compression is very efficient at preserving image quality to the eye, but very processor intensive to convert. Your point about Technology cost reducing by waiting a few mouths is very valid, we could not shoot 4K at this price point Six months ago……….
Will you be at Sundance?
If so I’d like to get together with other RED enthusiasts for a tech talk happy hour..

[galexander]

1. for the two macs with 2x quad vs 1x quad, naturally you would see close to doubling in computational power, you are comparing apples to apples. i was comparing servers boards to single cpu slot boards. apples and oranges. the oranges are better.

that gigabyte board with a much faster clock and bus will beat that 2x quad mac with the right video card for far less $$. this system will also leave that Dell system in dust for about half the cost.

2. 2 out of 3... relatively speaking these boards and components are not cheap for the average consumer. they are actually expensive for a home system but compared with the hugely expensive and lower performing server systems, they are still cheap. you can't really build a decent 2k/4k editing machine with the standard consumer grade stuff. well you can but it will be ssSSlllLLLlllooOOowwWWww gaming gear is the most expensive, high-performing consumer level you can get. so yes it is 2 of 3, good and fast but not cheap.

3. i would say do NOT buy at the last moment but to get your system about two months before you get a red. build-it or have it built, debug all of the software drivers, video codecs, whatever is needed. go shoot something and start editing, something anything and get going on the learning curve.

IMHO it is far easier to edit some footage of people standing around eating White Castle or Ted Drewes for free than wasting people's time and your money on a production, then start uploading, get feedback. you want to focus on the issues of the Red and not others.

i would suggest that when you get the Red you want to hit the ground running, so all you need do is unpack and shoot. to me, that is one very, expensive piece of gear to not have filming or being rented, whatever your business plan is.

4. i'm still waiting to see what results you get for the video card and codecs, to me that will be the critical issue. as i still slog it out with a 7300gt.. ha ha the people over at silicon imaging with a 2k camera are using cineform, supposedly the codec will work at 4k?? it is also is a wavelet based compression system with raw available.

5. 3.2GHz OC is easy :) mine currently runs just under 3GHz with a 2.4GHz cpu, stock cooler, 1200MHz FSB.

6. look for an Adaptec 1394B PCI-X controller, it has two FW800 ports and one USB. don't get one of those knock-off el-cheapos no-name adapters. adaptecs are cheap if you can find them, mine was $9 off Ebay. more importantly get the ubCore Pro drivers, they are free but much better performance than the stock crappy WinDoZe/TI/adaptec drivers. these drivers will actually allow you to push 1394 to 3.2Gb/s if you have any devices that would go that fast ha ha.

7. most consumer level board don't have dual CPU sockets besides the next intel one. 90% of games are not threaded enough to use more cpu cores, so throwing more cpus at gaming doesn't get much performance increase.

the only normal applications that are really hyper-threaded, that will gobble up all of your cpu horsepower are, anything by Adobe, premiere, photoshop, etc. so when you launch premiere you will see all of you cpus get hammered and of course my fav POV-ray.

after intel releases their next gaming board, asus, msi, gigabyte will release real hard-core gaming machines a few months later and those would be the ones to get. intel has no experience with gaming boards, i wouldn't buy from them.

8. Win Server, is one of the only 32bit OSes i know that will support more ram that the 32bit limit of 2Gb. if you use standard XP, it will use ~3Gb or so the rest isn't used at all but Server has a extensions to use up to 32Gb or 64Gb depending on which version of Server you get.

WinDoZe will gobble up about 300/450Mb while running, so that ram is unavailable for processing.

so Server supports ram >2Gb while being 32-bit OS. Most codecs I've seen and tried aren't ready for 64-bit. if they run they were very flaky. another year x64 might be ready for prime time. also Server is much more stable than XP, better networking support, still supports all of DirectX, etc.

if you do the calculations and find that you can do all of your processing with <= ~2.4Gb, then get standard XP pro, save a few bucks. don't go anywhere near Vista... i don't let windows use a pagefile so it gobbles up close to 600Gb, but it is much faster.

with server i easily set a process like matlab an affinity to particular processor and make it 'high' priority, meaning it screams along number crunching, which another processor set to play the latest episode of Top Gear. ha ha. you can do these with XP just not as easily or quickly.

9. with 'teaming' or boot strapping, if you have a computer with two GiGe ports. you are basically using software to combine two 1GiGe ports into one big 2GiGE port, doubling your network bandwidth without the $$$ of a 10GigE port.

if you built-two of these and boot strapped, you can double the processing power as a single entity. as far as processing data, you can have independent processing, editing and display of data. this is a case of linear cost vs performance, double cost=double performance.

[Jay A. Kelley]

Mark,

You are thinking what I am thinking. I am trying to put together a system that will allow some growth, but not kill me.

I am seriously looking at the DELL 30" monitor. To many good things said about it. Aside from that.. I'll be getting a quad core2.66 system and leave it open to accept another processor in the future. A LOT of what GA has said makes sense to me, and I believe I can squeeze some dollars out of a new system if I play my cards right.

Graphics cards are still the fly in the ointment for me. At this point I am looking to get something that will "just work" because there is not enough agreement on the issue. I will really take my time on this one.

I am thinking the quadro FX 1700 for now.

based on the way things have gone for the 100-200 group, I am expecting to see my RED in the next 3-4 weeks (I am 327). Jim will be far more reluctant to issue anymore recalls with 300 cameras out there (But he'll do it if nessesary!).

There is so much stuff on the way.. It's both exciting and frightening!
Jay

[Mark L. Pederson]

Will you be at Sundance?
If so I’d like to get together with other RED enthusiasts for a tech talk happy hour..

sadly, I don't think I can actually make it this year - due to building the new facility - and we hope to have another TWO features shooting RED in NYC before mid-Feb- there is just so much to do - NAB I will go a few days ahead and stay for the entire time and do some socializing and celebrating for sure!!

[Mark L. Pederson]

3. i would say do NOT buy at the last moment but to get your system about two months before you get a red. build-it or have it built, debug all of the software drivers, video codecs, whatever is needed. go shoot something and start editing, something anything and get going on the learning curve.

IMHO it is far easier to edit some footage of people standing around eating White Castle or Ted Drewes for free than wasting people's time and your money on a production, then start uploading, get feedback. you want to focus on the issues of the Red and not others.

i would suggest that when you get the Red you want to hit the ground running, so all you need do is unpack and shoot. to me, that is one very, expensive piece of gear to not have filming or being rented, whatever your business plan is.

Jay this is a really important point. I didn't know your camera was coming in 3-4 weeks-ish - so, yeah, time to get movin ....

PS - galexander rocks!

[Jay A. Kelley]

Re-reading Jeff's posts on Graphics cards... Thinking the Nvidia 8800 model is the way to go.. But I need some education here.. Let me sit at my desk while you brainiacs go to the black board and explain this:

There was talk that the 8800 no longer supports OVERLAYS. Jeff says "GOOD!" and a lot of Cineform users said BUMMER GIVE ME BACK MY OLD CARD.

Help me understand "Overlays" By this do they mean that one video port on the older cards would drive a computer monitor, and turn the 2nd video port into some sort of live video out type situation?

If I am right, and that's what they mean, Would I still see Premiere's "preview monitor" on my computer screen? If the answer is YES to this question, then would I not prefer any type of "output video" out to be to an actual broadcast monitor or even an LCD powered by my CAPTURE card? (Currently leaning towards BlackMagic Designs Multi-Link Pro).

If I am in fact understanding this, then it is NOT important there is no overlay on the 8800.. If I have completely missed the boat here, then tell me what I did wrong before sending me to the corner.

Also, Jeff said the 8800 is the best for porn... That should make this a no-brainer right there.... :)

Jay

Ok, he didn't say that.. But I bet he thought it.

[Jay A. Kelley]

Mark, you are fast with the replies.. You must be sitting there reading these things like I am.. We seriously need to get a life dude..

Just kidding.. We're am having fun.. I love learning

Jay

[Laco Zamba]

It would be usefull to have R3D benchmark.
Or special function in REDCINE which will show R3D index with your current HW configuration.

[Mark L. Pederson]

NVIDIA GeForce 8800 Ultra looks like the move. What kinda price you seein?

[Jay A. Kelley]

Actually,

According to Jeff, REDCine does not make much use of the RAM onboard the Graphics Card.. That's more 3d application type stuff. So I am not going with the Ultra.

(For the first time I get to say this.. Hope I'm right)

"I" would recommend you reconsider the ultra as you are only paying for that additional RAM. The speed of the card GPU seems to be the same. Since you are building RENDER machines, you can save the additional $300 for something else (like a nice birthday present for me!!).

Check this out.. An 8800GTS that's OVERCLOCKED.. So there's more speed where you need it.. RAM is 512mb so that should be enough to drive the monitors just fine. Warning, they say you need a HONKING power supply for this puppy. Price is in the 350 range

http://www.beachaudio.com/Msi/Nx8800gts-T2d512eoc-p-131651.html?utm_campaign=froogle&utm_content=AD_ID&utm_term=nx8800gts-t2d512eoc&utm_medium=cpc&utm_source=froogle&GTKW=nx8800gts-t2d512eoc&GCID=C12585x003

Jay

[Anders Holck]

A less than 4% frequency increase shouldnt give that much more performance :-(

[Jim Arthurs]

Check this out.. An 8800GTS that's OVERCLOCKED.. So there's more speed where you need it.. RAM is 512mb so that should be enough to drive the monitors just fine. Warning, they say you need a HONKING power supply for this puppy.
Jay

Jay, last Monday I built a new PC from parts from Mwave.com for $900 US.

2.4gig quadcore, 4 gigs of ram, 500 gig system drive, Sony dual layer burner, case, etc. everything minus XP OS in that cost. My video card is an 8600 GT....

I'll do specific REDCINE tests this weekend and report back after I throw a couple 500 gig drives together as a RAID 0 data drive set for it. My gut feeling is that the 8600 will be as fast as anything else in the system test thread that Rob set up.

It's sure a nice render box and runs all my 3D and 2D apps very nicely.

Regards,

[Jay A. Kelley]

I gotta tell ya, I am having more fun with this thread than any other!! Jim I would love to see those results since you are somewhat close to what I am working on.

It's going to be in the $2,000 range, but if you look at it, it's an amazing piece of equipment that, if works, will scream.

Let me know.

Jay

Cooler Master CM Stacker 830 ATX Full-Tower Aluminum Case with Vented Side and 1000-Watt Power Supply

Intel Core 2 Quad Q6700 Kentsfield 2.66GHz 2 x 4MB L2 Cache LGA 775 95W Quad-Core Processor (Only 1)

GIGABYTE GA-X38-DQ6 intel x38 chipset ATX form factor

Kingston HyperX 2GB DDR2 SDRAM Memory Module -x2

Western Digital Caviar SE16 WD2500KS 250GB 7200 RPM 16MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive - OEM

Bfg Bfge88512gtse Geforce 8800 Gts OverClocked 512mb

So there you have it.. There will be a few more little things, but this is the main gist of it.

Let me know

Jay

Unless someone freaks out about something on this list, I will most likely start building this system later this week

[number6]

Jay, if the motherboard you've chosen has one of those old PCI-X slots, you may want to consider one of these http://www.siliconimage.com/products/product.aspx?id=27 for about a hundred bucks. Pretty good throughput if you setup as a RAID 0 and its a way to utilize the parallel channel for SOMETHING.

[galexander]

Mark,

I am seriously looking at the DELL 30" monitor. stuff deleted...

now my turn to ask questions :)

did you do a comparison with others? i was sort of looking at that samsung 305T. why did you pick the dell?

[galexander]

Jay, if the motherboard you've chosen has one of those old PCI-X slots, you may want to consider one of these http://www.siliconimage.com/products/product.aspx?id=27 for about a hundred bucks. Pretty good throughput if you setup as a RAID 0 and its a way to utilize the parallel channel for SOMETHING.

the adaptec firewire isn't because of the PCI-X directly. the chipset on the board is stable and supports massive jumbo type frames. mine is set at 3.Gb/s with 1Gb buffer, and semi-jumbo frames of 4096 (your normal MTU/MTR of ADSL is 1400/1492)

so i push huge AV files to/from Lacie 2TB as fast as possible ~80Mb/s+ continously. i'm basically limited by the chipset that Lacie is using. the PCI-X built hardware is meant to be driven at 133Mhz bus, usual el-cheapo PCI hardware is built towards 66MHz bus.

[Mark L. Pederson]

now my turn to ask questions :)

did you do a comparison with others? i was sort of looking at that samsung 305T. why did you pick the dell?

we use Dell and Apple.

the Dell is priced nice - it is VERY bright IMO. which is good and bad - depending on what you are trying to do with it.

I have not yet tested the Samsung - but I hear only good things - there are a few web comparisons out there like this one - which is HP/DELL/APPLE

http://www.techified.com/30-lcd-shootout-dell-vs-apple-vs-hp-part-1.htm

[galexander]

I gotta tell ya, I am having more fun with this thread than any other!! Jim I would love to see those results since you are somewhat close to what I am working on.

It's going to be in the $2,000 range, but if you look at it, it's an amazing piece of equipment that, if works, will scream.

Let me know.

Jay

Cooler Master CM Stacker 830 ATX Full-Tower Aluminum Case with Vented Side and 1000-Watt Power Supply

Intel Core 2 Quad Q6700 Kentsfield 2.66GHz 2 x 4MB L2 Cache LGA 775 95W Quad-Core Processor (Only 1)

GIGABYTE GA-X38-DQ6 intel x38 chipset ATX form factor

Kingston HyperX 2GB DDR2 SDRAM Memory Module -x2

Western Digital Caviar SE16 WD2500KS 250GB 7200 RPM 16MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive - OEM

Bfg Bfge88512gtse Geforce 8800 Gts OverClocked 512mb

So there you have it.. There will be a few more little things, but this is the main gist of it.

Let me know

Jay

Unless someone freaks out about something on this list, I will most likely start building this system later this week

looks sweet, i would suggest one ever slight tweak, get a small, fast 7200rpm, sata, cheap hard drive for the OS and apps, and have your big, fast drive, raid or single, exclusively for capture and grinding data.

did you find a good deal on the video card? newegg had them backordered for ages. you might be able to save a few $$. i will probably getting something similar but the basic 512MB model and then tweak clocks, OC again :) why the BFG? and not XFX? or EVGA? price? available? specs?

what does your process flow look like now?

[galexander]

stuff deleted...

I'll do specific REDCINE tests this weekend and report back after I throw a couple 500 gig drives together as a RAID 0 data drive set for it. My gut feeling is that the 8600 will be as fast as anything else in the system test thread that Rob set up.
stuff deleted...
Regards,

can you benchmark your system with IOmeter?

http://www.iometer.org/doc/downloads.html

i'd like to see what kind of horsepower you have... heh heh heh..

post your settings and then i'll run on my system, no raid, just a 150Gb raptor... simulate as close as possible the filesize and chunksize that Red will use to be realistic. we're not trying to simulate a database.

[Jonathan Cruz]

There is a new Dell 30 inch display that has a lot more connectivity options than the one before also has the new DisplayPort

Dell 3008WFP UltraSharp
"The screen packs a 2560 x 1600 resolution, 370 nits of brightness, 8ms response times, a 3000:1 contrast ratio, and DVI-D (with HDCP), HDMI, S-Video, component and composite plugs"

Talking about graphic cards how would a FireGL v8600 work with apps like redcine and scratch or whatever being a high end card with a very powerful GPU, openGL 2.1, Direct x10, Shader model 4 stuff, im saying all this because there A FireGl v8600 is really a Ati 2900xt and there are modified drivers that turn it into such, similar to what the where doing in the 7 series Geforce> Quadro.
i would for sure be interested in trying this out.

http://ati.amd.com/products/fireglv8600/index.html

BTW: Ati 2900xt 1 GB 450€, Ati FireGL v8600 1900€

[galexander]

has anyone done the math with the video processing?

what processing to the codecs support? in-line/vector?

do the codecs and graphics drivers support DMA?

what is the relationship between how much work the GPU is doing to the CPU for the codecs?

[Jim Arthurs]

can you benchmark your system with IOmeter?

Sure, will do some tests today!

[galexander]

this little equation might help

performance

for that dual quad Dell specs

(0.85*2)*4*(667/1333)*(1.6/3.2)*(0.95)*(16/64)*(256/512)*(4/4)=~0.2

for the dual quad Macs

(0.85*2)*4*(667/1333)*(3/3.2)*(0.95)*(32/64)*(512/512)*(4/4)=~1.5

for the Jay set up

(1)*4*(1300/1333)*(3/3.2)*(1)*(64/64)*(512/512)*(2/4)= ~1.8

my current system
(1)*4*(1300/1333)*(2.95/3.2)*(1)*(16/64)*(256/512)*4/4 = ~0.45 (the video card is the choke point)

mine with new video card
(1)*4*(1300/1333)*(2.95/3.2)*(1)*(64/64)*512/512*4/4 =~3.6

larger numbers are better, Jay setup should be equivalent to the mac, (i guessed at the mac video setup) and 9X faster than the Dell.

explanation of equation
(efficiency of shared memory*No of CPUs)*(No of Cores)
*(Slowest Clock/ Maximum Bus Reference)
*(CPU Clock/ CPU Clock Maximum Reference)
*Efficiency Factor of Ram
*(Video GPU Crunching/ Video Maximum Crunching Reference)
*(Video Ram/Video Ram Max)
*(System ram/System Ram Max)

Efficiency factor of ram is ECC vs. Non-ECC, it really depends of quality and is subjective but quality Non-ECC will ALWAYS be faster than ECC at the same frequency.

these don't include any codec issues and just 'ballpark' number to compare systems. the mac OS will have an edge with 64-bit and better memory management.

you could also multiply by a factor for the storage if you wanted to compare a raid versus non-raid.

cost

dell $2k
mac ~$5 ??
Jay build ~$2k
my build ~$1.2k +video($300)( i have previous parts from a ML150G3 i pillaged)

so now the finale, CVP, :) cost vs. performance

dell = $10k/Processing Unit
mac= $3.3k/Processing unit
Jay= $1.1k/Processing Unit
me(current)=$2.67k/Processing Unit
me(+video)=$0.42k/Processing Unit

now you know why Dell makes a shitload of money, as does Mac and why the people build their own.... :) and it's always good to reuse parts from previous rigs.

[Jim Arthurs]

post your settings and then i'll run on my system, no raid, just a 150Gb raptor... simulate as close as possible the filesize and chunksize that Red will use to be realistic. we're not trying to simulate a database.

I Downloaded Iometer and see that there's a lot of complexity in the choices and I have no reason to learn up on it all. Feel free to feed me a set of parameters that make sense from your end and I'll run them.

I use a nice utility I learned about from Axel years ago made by Matrox called filexfer. It can test your drives using very realistic video editing settings for file I/O, and can even read/write multiple streams at once.

For instance, the raw WD 500 gig SATA's I have on hand will do approx 84 MB/sec read/writes when empty when tested on a single video stream. Run two streams and the performance degrades down to the lower 30's. In comparison, my 4 WD 250 gig RAID 0 will still read/write over 200 MB/sec with only 9 gigs free space!

I've been doing some tests with REDCINE and my system. Using JJ's 4K 235 frame funny car clip for testing and reading from one nearly empty SATA and saving to another. My project settings are 1080p, the shot is scaled to fit height and an s-curve applied for grading. Processing output is set to "standard" and scaling is cubic, and the results when saving to a DPX stream is 2.4 frames/sec. Increasing the processing to "full", which then scales from the full 4K information, the result is 2.46 seconds per frame.

Yikes! I'm pretty sure I've got all REDCINE settings optimized, the window is the lowest quality setting and I'm careful not to rescale in output.

[galexander]

I Downloaded Iometer and see that there's a lot of complexity in the choices and I have no reason to learn up on it all. Feel free to feed me a set of parameters that make sense from your end and I'll run them.

I use a nice utility I learned about from Axel years ago made by Matrox called filexfer. It can test your drives using very realistic video editing settings for file I/O, and can even read/write multiple streams at once.

For instance, the raw WD 500 gig SATA's I have on hand will do approx 84 MB/sec read/writes when empty when tested on a single video stream. Run two streams and the performance degrades down to the lower 30's. In comparison, my 4 WD 250 gig RAID 0 will still read/write over 200 MB/sec with only 9 gigs free space!

I've been doing some tests with REDCINE and my system. Using JJ's 4K 235 frame funny car clip for testing and reading from one nearly empty SATA and saving to another. My project settings are 1080p, the shot is scaled to fit height and an s-curve applied for grading. Processing output is set to "standard" and scaling is cubic, and the results when saving to a DPX stream is 2.4 frames/sec. Increasing the processing to "full", which then scales from the full 4K information, the result is 2.46 seconds per frame.

Yikes! I'm pretty sure I've got all REDCINE settings optimized, the window is the lowest quality setting and I'm careful not to rescale in output.

please, take this in the most positive manner you can.

these numbers to me are really not much use. what codec is it simulating? are you simulating a stream directly from the camera so the whole file is buffered initially?

excuse me but what the hell is "standard" processing or "full"? does this simulate rendering? or color corrections? pixel masking? noise removal? dark current calibration? calculating motion vectors? are you simulating a log or linear? gamma corrections? or somewhere in the post workflow?

why are you scaling the image? why aren't you working directly on a 2k or 4k frame? i don't have a redcine so i don't have an understanding of what you are doing but i have Flaskmpeg, Avisynth, and VirtualDub which are brutually and exceedingly fast.

does this simulate a convert to a raw footage first? use it compressed?

IOmeter doesn't care about any of this, you can benchmark ANY system, it is a tool worth knowing how to use IMHO. i'd rather have the old swiss army knife than a specialized tool.

all i need to know is the following,

what is the biggest byte size (jumbo frame) of the data that Red supports over the coppper GiGe? if it's intel chipset it might be around 9k, broadcom maybe 7/8k.

why are you seeing such a significant drop when you switch to a 4k frame? a 4k frame(4096x2160) is 4.3 times a 1080p (1900x1080) frame, but your processing decreased by a factor nearly 6 from 2.4 fps to .406 fps. whatever you did has a ton of overhead.

[number6]

this little equation might help

performance

for that dual quad Dell specs

(0.85*2)*4*(667/1333)*(1.6/3.2)*(0.95)*(16/64)*(256/512)*(4/4)=~0.2

for the dual quad Macs

(0.85*2)*4*(667/1333)*(3/3.2)*(0.95)*(32/64)*(512/512)*(4/4)=~1.5

for the Jay set up

(1)*4*(1300/1333)*(3/3.2)*(1)*(64/64)*(512/512)*(2/4)= ~1.8

my current system
(1)*4*(1300/1333)*(2.95/3.2)*(1)*(16/64)*(256/512)*4/4 = ~0.45 (the video card is the choke point)

mine with new video card
(1)*4*(1300/1333)*(2.95/3.2)*(1)*(64/64)*512/512*4/4 =~3.6

larger numbers are better, Jay setup should be equivalent to the mac, (i guessed at the mac video setup) and 9X faster than the Dell.

explanation of equation
(efficiency of shared memory*No of CPUs)*(No of Cores)
*(Slowest Clock/ Maximum Bus Reference)
*(CPU Clock/ CPU Clock Maximum Reference)
*Efficiency Factor of Ram
*(Video GPU Crunching/ Video Maximum Crunching Reference)
*(Video Ram/Video Ram Max)
*(System ram/System Ram Max)

Efficiency factor of ram is ECC vs. Non-ECC, it really depends of quality and is subjective but quality Non-ECC will ALWAYS be faster than ECC at the same frequency.

these don't include any codec issues and just 'ballpark' number to compare systems. the mac OS will have an edge with 64-bit and better memory management.

you could also multiply by a factor for the storage if you wanted to compare a raid versus non-raid.

cost

dell $2k
mac ~$5 ??
Jay build ~$2k
my build ~$1.2k +video($300)( i have previous parts from a ML150G3 i pillaged)

so now the finale, CVP, :) cost vs. performance

dell = $10k/Processing Unit
mac= $3.3k/Processing unit
Jay= $1.1k/Processing Unit
me(current)=$2.67k/Processing Unit
me(+video)=$0.42k/Processing Unit

now you know why Dell makes a shitload of money, as does Mac and why the people build their own.... :) and it's always good to reuse parts from previous rigs.

galexander, I feel I've mislead you and in fairness to Dell, I should explain that the computer itself only cost $1,015 and the card is like $122. The rest was for operating system (Vista Ultimate 64 bit) and for a Dell 20" monitor.

And while I do not doubt your benchmarks, nor am I concerned that the (grinder) system I will be using came in last, I just wonder if they are completely relevant due to the fact that some apps work better depending on number of cores while others are more dependent on graphic card gpus? Also, maybe the time required to search for the different parts for a homebuilt, plus the time consumed putting it all together shouldn't be factored in? For some, time is money.

[Jay A. Kelley]

now my turn to ask questions :)

did you do a comparison with others? i was sort of looking at that samsung 305T. why did you pick the dell?

GA.. The current 30" monitor is a wonderful beast (Best of the breed for cool additions as well) and it's diving in price due to the release of a NEW Dell 30".

Right now the 2007 is #$1,100.00

I am pretty sure I will go this way since I don't need a lot of the add ons people are looking at right now.

Jay

[galexander]

galexander, I feel I've mislead you and in fairness to Dell, I should explain that the computer itself only cost $1,015 and the card is like $122. The rest was for operating system (Vista Ultimate 64 bit) and for a Dell 20" monitor.

And while I do not doubt your benchmarks, nor am I concerned that the (grinder) system I will be using came in last, I just wonder if they are completely relevant due to the fact that some apps work better depending on number of cores while others are more dependent on graphic card gpus? Also, maybe the time required to search for the different parts for a homebuilt, plus the time consumed putting it all together shouldn't be factored in? For some, time is money.

for including Vista, they should have paid you. :) i would install win2000 or NT4 before Vista anyday

the numbers are relevant for brute hardware numbers because of the failings or benefits of each OS that number is too hard to quantify as well as the applications. this represents an absolute maximum performance from your hardware. a professional will be able to tune the system to these sort of benchmark numbers. whether you run WinDoZe or some flavor of linux/bsd or a bad ass, professional, real-time OS like QNX or the SGI. the derating factors for software configuration is just too much of a fuzzy logic headache to contemplate. not to mention bad graphic drivers, memory leaks, crappy codecs. yadda, yadda, yadda...

the time required to search for homebuilt is fairly easy as you aren't looking for a generic global solution, you want a blistering, screaming, fire-breathing monster that you can afford, only solution is a gaming rig. this market tends to be small but not as niche as people think. eventually i see them as taking over the high performance server market. the days of the poor performing and overpriced server hardware will be extinct, mainly i think due to the quad cores. you don't need multiple slot board anymore for performance. even if you did have a need for 32-cores, the amount of applications that would actually be beneficial is low. unless like me you hack your own with PGI or intel OpenSMP compilers. heh heh heh

[number6]

for including Vista, they should have paid you. :) i would install win2000 or NT4 before Vista anyday

the numbers are relevant for brute hardware numbers because of the failings or benefits of each OS that number is too hard to quantify as well as the applications. this represents an absolute maximum performance from your hardware. a professional will be able to tune the system to these sort of benchmark numbers. whether you run WinDoZe or some flavor of linux/bsd or a bad ass, professional, real-time OS like QNX or the SGI. the derating factors for software configuration is just too much of a fuzzy logic headache to contemplate. not to mention bad graphic drivers, memory leaks, crappy codecs. yadda, yadda, yadda...

the time required to search for homebuilt is fairly easy as you aren't looking for a generic global solution, you want a blistering, screaming, fire-breathing monster that you can afford, only solution is a gaming rig. this market tends to be small but not as niche as people think. eventually i see them as taking over the high performance server market. the days of the poor performing and overpriced server hardware will be extinct, mainly i think due to the quad cores. you don't need multiple slot board anymore for performance. even if you did have a need for 32-cores, the amount of applications that would actually be beneficial is low. unless like me you hack your own with PGI or intel OpenSMP compilers. heh heh heh

Hope I didn't sound overly critical, and from your response I don't think you took it that way. I find your posts informative and, though generally above my (unpaid) pay grade, interesting.

But I think what we have here is a ferrari computer advocate (you), and a VW computer user (me, but I would prefer the ferrari).:cold:

edit: "for including Vista, they should have paid you. :)" Hah! spot on... but eventually I figure it will evolve to being as stable as XP is now, so a couple of years from now... BINGO!!!:love:

[Jay A. Kelley]

Ok so you all know I purchased the parts for the computer today. Total price: $2068.00. This does NOT include monitor, keyboard, or mouse.

Over all I am pretty excited!

Thanks to everyone for the great advice. If all goes well I will have a 3.2GHZ QUAD system for under $2,100.00. That's pretty major.

Jay

[Jay A. Kelley]

Can anyone point me to the most powerful wireless router that is out there? I am looking for range, range, range. If anyone has some advice I would be grateful.

Thanks
Jay

[Miguel "Macgregor" De Olaso]

Ok so you all know I purchased the parts for the computer today. Total price: $2068.00. This does NOT include monitor, keyboard, or mouse.

Over all I am pretty excited!

Thanks to everyone for the great advice. If all goes well I will have a 3.2GHZ QUAD system for under $2,100.00. That's pretty major.

Jay

What did you build?

[Mark L. Pederson]

Ok so you all know I purchased the parts for the computer today. Total price: $2068.00. This does NOT include monitor, keyboard, or mouse.

Over all I am pretty excited!

Thanks to everyone for the great advice. If all goes well I will have a 3.2GHZ QUAD system for under $2,100.00. That's pretty major.

Jay

Jay - this is too much fun. We want pics and benchmarks!

[Jay A. Kelley]

No problem! I ordered it today, and expect it to arrive by Friday, then let the building begin!!

I will say Mark, it's been quite an education. Quotes to have the system built were anywhere from $300 - $1,200 more expensive.

Now, being a safe sort of guy, I have a back up plan (A computer type that can build systems in his sleep). But if this whole concept of over-clocking (reasonably, not pushing like the pro's do) really works, then I will have learned something that can save THOUSANDS of dollars in PC equipment.

At this point, my intention is to do this:

Build PC, make sure it works with REDCine.
Purchase Cineform 2k (I'm not living in the 4k post world right now)
Adobe Products (Which I already own)
Color Finesse for post finish work.

A lot has to go right for this to all work well, but I have faith. As for speed, I expect to get the system to 3.2ghz safely, and the 8800 gts is already overclocked.

My RED order is a confusing beast to me right now. Bascially what I have is NOT a working camera at this point. But I decided to promise myself I would not buy with emotion and speed, but rather with thought and patience. I.E. I am sold on the EVF but it's not ready. As for a camera monitor, I am interested in the Panasonic On Camera HD monitor.. I hear nothing but good things about it. It's a little more than twice the price, but allows me to use it on various cameras. That's important. I think it's a little larger too.

Lenses: I don't know enough about 35mm lenses to be paying $6,500 for a short zoom. So I decided to go the still lens route. However, right now no one has managed to make a still lens adaptor.. So right now, I cannot shoot on my RED until it's Nikon mount, or the Birger mount comes out.

The camera has a steep learning curve, there are many things to get a handle on before you can call yourself a pro. Not that it's a complicated technical piece of hardware, but more that it's a tool with lots of potential, and you have to have experience working with it to unlock it.

The best examples I can come up with are:
Photoshop
Lightwave
After Effects

You can get up and running on these things pretty quick if needed, but to be an ARTIST on them, takes time and study. Hopefully RED won't be THIS bad, but expect it to take a little time.

This is a tough way to go for me. I would LOVE to shoot the day I get it, but that decision could cost me thousands down the road, so if nessesary, RED will sit, and I will wait.


Jay

[Jay A. Kelley]

What did you build?

It's all on this thread Mac, just go back a couple of pages

Jay

[sbaechler]

Hi Galexander


here's a little system i've built myself,
thermaltake lanbox, modded.
asus p5k-vm
the onboard gigE supports jumbo frames up to 8088bytes
i regularly hammer the adsl and get 1350MB/s, the limit is 1500MB/s averaging a pull of about 130Kb/s continuous over 18 hours, oh yeah

q6400 - overclocked to 3GHz, with stock intel fan
Kingston X OC'ed to 1066Mhz, 4Gb
Win Svr 2003 x86 (it has PAE, so it uses all of 4Gb), lean and stipped of most of the MS bloatware. system tweaked, registry hacked.


for monitors, current is old viewsonic, but considering building a 15.4" 1080P, a true hi-def monitor that isn't going to break my balls if i want to take it to studio or location.

I'm planning to build a system to have on set in a portable rugged housing with integrated LCD and keyboard and external portable RAID. http://www.mh-service.de/Portable-pc/ATLAS-A5.html

How noisy is your system? Ok, it's overclocked. Would you be able to make it almost silent?

What playback framerate do you get when playing a clip in Redcine at 1/4 resolution?

Have you tried running OSx86 on it?

Regards
Simon

[galexander]

Hi Galexander

I'm planning to build a system to have on set in a portable rugged housing with integrated LCD and keyboard and external portable RAID. http://www.mh-service.de/Portable-pc/ATLAS-A5.html

How noisy is your system? Ok, it's overclocked. Would you be able to make it almost silent?

What playback framerate do you get when playing a clip in Redcine at 1/4 resolution?

Have you tried running OSx86 on it?

Regards
Simon

hi simon,

ah you are going with the 'lunchbox' solution i see. i've lugged a few of those around in my day. they are great rugged, tough systems but can be a bit expensive and the technology isn't always the latest and greatest. the type of ram, FSB and CPU are usually 4 to 6 months behind the consumer market but they have to guarantee field work and not someone's desk.

with this system, the airflow looks to be constrained somewhat, it is difficult to see where the CPU would be, there is a big block in front of the MB. so you need to be careful to see how much room you have for cooling. when i get time i'll post some pics of what i've built.

for an external raid, you need to figure out how much data and what type and for how long. depends on your shooting schedule, etc. if you go with a SATA/SAS/SCSI solution you will get great I/O performance but limited cabling, i.e., the raid will have to be close to the 'lunchbox'. depending on how many drives you have the fans cooling the raid can be loud as well.

if you go with a SAN over GiGE/fiber, you can put the raid ~50meters or so away but performance will be slower. you might go with a combination of both with a smaller faster raid in the lunchbox and during breaks in shooting connect up the external raid and dump the data off.

right now mine gets noisy when it is under a hard full-load. i have tied the case cooling fans to the PMW, pulse modulated wave, so that the output of the CPU fan control lines are tied to case cooling fans. most of the times, it is not noticeable.

also the case acts as a huge heat sink as i've thermally connected the hard drives via a 2mm brass plate to the case but still under full load, yeah it's definetly loud.

definetly, i can make it quiet but i was waiting to see what the results of jay's graphic card analysis first. to make it very quiet, there are at least two solutions. one is to use heat pipes, i would use a thermalright U120 or similar for the cpu, they are made to handle about 130Watts. they also do make a smaller more compact version. the only sounds would then be from your graphics card and hard drives. the second method would be to go with a water cooling solution, this cost is ~ 3X's the heat pipe.

i haven't bought the video card yet so i can't comment on the frame rates but i'm hoping to get a good deal off of ebay at the moment. :)

i've tested my system with XP SP2 both x86 & x64 and Win Server 2003 R1 and R2 x86 and x64.

in other threads, systems with a limited amount of ram are having problems with a 4k workflow. cineform has just released their latest codec btw. i'm benchmarking my raptor raid0 at the moment with XP sp2, x86.

i haven't tried OSx86, but i've just downloaded an iso from QNX. QNX is a real-time professional unix based OS so it doesn't have the latest and greatest graphic drivers(it might be easy to hack one or port a linux or OSx driver to it), but QNX is exceedingly fast and stable. we used it for real-time radar processing, detection, and imaging, it is sweet.

[galexander]

Hop
... stuff deleted...

But I think what we have here is a ferrari computer advocate (you), and a VW computer user (me, but I would prefer the ferrari).:cold:



ha ha i like this analogy but maybesomething more like "Shelby" taking a old classic 65 'Stang with an stock 289 and converting it to a GT550. :)

[galexander]

...stuff deleted....

Lenses: I don't know enough about 35mm lenses to be paying $6,500 for a short zoom. So I decided to go the still lens route. However, right now no one has managed to make a still lens adaptor.. So right now, I cannot shoot on my RED until it's Nikon mount, or the Birger mount comes out.

...stuff deleted ...

Jay

why don't you rent PL mount lenses try them out?

[sbaechler]

hi simon,

ah you are going with the 'lunchbox' solution i see. i've lugged a few of those around in my day. they are great rugged, tough systems but can be a bit expensive and the technology isn't always the latest and greatest. the type of ram, FSB and CPU are usually 4 to 6 months behind the consumer market but they have to guarantee field work and not someone's desk.


thanks for you quick response.

I'm looking into different systems right now but the lunchbox with separate Raid is my favourite right now. The other options are:
- A bigger portable rugged ATX case with 20" screen and the Raid built-in with hot-swap drives and SATA Raid controller. The only downside to this is that the thing is rather big and heavy. I assume about 60 lbs with all drives and back-up battery.
- A flight case with a 19" rack style computer and Raid. The problem there is that you would either need an external monitor or one that is built into the rack. I don't like either.

The system must be able to playback footage in real time. 24 or 25 fps in Redcine or better - once the PC Quicktime codec is out - in Quicktime Player.

I would also like to have a small software that takes care of the data copy and verification process. If anyone who is reading here can write shell scripts and program a GUI please write this software!

I've seen QNX. Long time ago there was talks that it would be the base for the next Amiga OS. They distributed a demo of the OS that was a live image of the OS with a GUI and working web browser on a single floppy disk!
So what does it have to do with Red?

I think for now it is more important that all the Red software runs well on Windows since this is a very widely used OS around here. How about support for Windows 64bit for a start, RED? When apple switched to 64 bit processors within a year almost all the software was 64 bit.

[Eddie]

Thank you all for this great thread.
I am also looking into different systems for redcine and will propably end up copying one of the systems posted here.
However I would like to know, if it would make sense to buy a small 32GB ssd for os and aps, and then use fast hard drives for the big red-files?

[galexander]

here is where i get my bus (PCI,PCIe, etc) adapters when i need them

http://www.adexelec.com/pci32.htm

no i don't work for them, but they build and customize whatever i need as well.

[galexander]

Thank you all for this great thread.
I am also looking into different systems for redcine and will propably end up copying one of the systems posted here.
However I would like to know, if it would make sense to buy a small 32GB ssd for os and aps, and then use fast hard drives for the big red-files?

hi,

if the have cash sure with the good configuration this would be the fastest system possible but affordable?

the cost versus performance, i.e., 'bang for the buck' probably isn't too great but you will get a system that can be more compact with greater stability. make sure the ssd is FAST and doesn't clog up the bus. it's no use have an FSB of 1333MHz and you put a crappy 667MHz component on the bus, everything slows to the weakest link.

boot it with a very minimum OS install, do NOT use a swap or pagefile on your fast drive, force the OS and apps to be resident in the memory. this is extremely fast. i have 4Gb and this is standard procedure for my systems.

the last time i looked the cost of a small 32GB ssd was >>> than a small, fast, 200Gb 7.2k rpm drive and it only support FSB of 667MHz but the Moore curve still holds so check it out and see what the latest specs are. just my .02

[galexander]

thanks for you quick response.
- A bigger portable rugged ATX case with 20" screen

if you're going portable why are you going bigger? especially with an external raid there's no reason to carry around a monster ATX case and 20" screen. if you have the $$, a nice 2U or 3U rackmount case is much easier in the field.

those nice big 20" screens look great in the studio but in the field with all of the natural sunlight flooding around, limited viewing angles, weight, etc., a smaller LCD that you can shield works much better.



and the Raid built-in with hot-swap drives and SATA Raid controller. The only downside to this is that the thing is rather big and heavy. I assume about 60 lbs with all drives and back-up battery.

do the numbers for your application and usage, don't just build a "mini-fridge" of a raid array. that is a waste of time and resources IMHO. estimate your current shooting time and then storage requirements , then double the amount storage required. you can always buy cheaper non-raid SANs, firewire, or bulk SATA hard drives to transfer data.




The system must be able to playback footage in real time. 24 or 25 fps in Redcine or better - once the PC Quicktime codec is out - in Quicktime Player.


i don't see any problems with obtaining this, but you haven't specified 4k, 2k or 1080p. you will need a bad ass system like the one in this thread.



I would also like to have a small software that takes care of the data copy and verification process. If anyone who is reading here can write shell scripts and program a GUI please write this software!


look around sourceforge.net, there might be something there. depending on the platform, just use perl and hook into md5, it has good CRC.



I've seen QNX. Long time ago there was talks that it would be the base for the next Amiga OS. They distributed a demo of the OS that was a live image of the OS with a GUI and working web browser on a single floppy disk!
So what does it have to do with Red?

why don't you ponder that one yourself?

as the cineform codec, QT, and FCP run native on Mac platforms. OSx is a bastardized version of linux/bsd. QNX is unix, small, light, fast, non-bloated.



I think for now it is more important that all the Red software runs well on Windows since this is a very widely used OS around here. How about support for Windows 64bit for a start, RED? When apple switched to 64 bit processors within a year almost all the software was 64 bit.

switched? mac PPC's were 32bit OS with 64bit architecture, so they had a good idea of what to port to 64bit on the intel platform.

the processors that apple use are 32bit/64bit, they are NOT exclusively 64bit. if you check under the hood of a Mac, i doubt very much if EVERYTHING is running at 64bit. they have to maintain compatibility with 32bit apps.

it is already possible that you can run XP x64 today with the 32bit codecs. whether the codecs will be stable??? i experimented with xvid, ffdshow x64 with limited success. drivers are not stable at this point.

it runs "best" or maybe easiest or least painful, it seems so far on Mac platforms at the moment.

[galexander]

Asus p5k-vm, stock
thermaltake lanbox, highly modified, chopped and channeled
intel q6600 stock, OC-ed to ~3ghz, stock 2.4ghz
Kinston X, 4Gb, stock
3Ware 8006-2LP,stock
150Gb WD Raptors x2 with modified heat sinks
300GB Seagate 7400.10, stock
Nvidia 7300GT, OC-ed (yes i know its lame)
HP server case fan x2, stock
HP Server 650W universal power supply,stock

[sbaechler]

if you're going portable why are you going bigger? especially with an external raid there's no reason to carry around a monster ATX case and 20" screen. if you have the $$, a nice 2U or 3U rackmount case is much easier in the field.

those nice big 20" screens look great in the studio but in the field with all of the natural sunlight flooding around, limited viewing angles, weight, etc., a smaller LCD that you can shield works much better.

The case has the screen built-in. It's a flip-out. And it could hold all the drives of the raid and the upc and maybe even the LTO drive all in one case. One heavy case.
I think I'm going to the place that builds the systems to have a look myself. It's a three hour train ride (one way) but then I know what is more usable.




i don't see any problems with obtaining this, but you haven't specified 4k, 2k or 1080p. you will need a bad ass system like the one in this thread.


It must be able to play back a 4K clip in 1/4 medium or high resolution or a 1K proxy with 25fps.



look around sourceforge.net, there might be something there. depending on the platform, just use perl and hook into md5, it has good CRC.

I was looking into Perl and Python today. Maybe I do write it myself. This language seems quite easy. I'm starting an open source project. Anyone interested in helping out???



it is already possible that you can run XP x64 today with the 32bit codecs. whether the codecs will be stable??? i experimented with xvid, ffdshow x64 with limited success. drivers are not stable at this point.

it runs "best" or maybe easiest or least painful, it seems so far on Mac platforms at the moment.

I'm definitely going to install a 32 bit Windows. Except if Red releases a 64 bit version of their software this month. I was looking into Windows 2003 Server. Its so expensive! I hope I can get it cheap from ebay. I don't know if it's worth the extra 500$ compared to Windows XP Pro just to have 4GB of Ram instead of 3.something.
And there is always the alternative with the Ramdisk trick:
http://www.computerbase.de/forum/showthread.php?t=305236 (german)

[Stacey Spears]

Jay,

Here is the machine I just built:

1. Supermicro XDW7A-N motherboard
2. 16 GB RAM (8 x 2GB 1.5v FB-DIMM (DDR2 800 MHz))
3. nVidia Quadro FX 4600 (SDI daughter card on order)
4. Xtore (XJ-SA12-316R-B)16-way drive enclosure
5. 16 x Seagate 7200.11 750 GB HDD (32 MB cache) for Xtore. (RAID 50)
6. 1 x Seagate 7200.11 750 GB for OS/Apps.
7. 3ware 9690 (about to toss and replace with either LSI 888 or Adaptec 3085)
8. Gateway XHD3000 30" LCD (2560x1600) (Has both DVI and HDMI in, with Silicon Optix Realta for HDMI input) It also offers picture controls, unlike other 30" LCDs. (Apple, Gateway and HP were all tested)
9. 2 x E5462 (2.8 GHz Quad Core) CPUs (Just shipped)
10. HP Ultrium 960 LTO3 drive
11. Adaptec SCSI for HP drive
12. Firewire 800 card (unibrain)
13. Sony BD burner
14. Sandisk Extreme Firewire 800 reader
15. Samsung SP-A800B 1080p FP DLP.
16. DVDO VP50 Pro
17. Stewart Grayhawk RS screen (72" wide)

I have been waiting on the CPUs to turn it on. They should be here by the end of the week. I am also waiting on the Xtore. I had started with a Supermicro 16-way, but it turned out to only support SAS drives. No SATA at all. I have been running tests with an 8-way using the 3ware and the card has been nothing but problems. Their support is also lacking. I had posted #s with the 8-way and 9690 in RAID 0 and 5. I will run new tests with the Xtore and RAID 0, 5 and 50 when it is up and running.

I will run tests with both Server 2003 and Vista 64-bit. Given the driver situation, I will probably have to ruff it with Vista.

I managed to pickup a new-in-the-box APC 2200XL UPS on eBay for half price. I also picked up the HP tape ($1k) and FX 4600 ($1k) on eBay as well.

The 30" will be for desktop UI. The 1080p DLP will be for color grading. It offers SMPTE-C and BT.709 primaries along with BVM gamma. It was designed to replace a BVM for color grading of HD. The workflow will be FX 4600 (HD-SDI) -> Tek WFM700 (HD-SDI) -> VP50 Pro (HDMI) -> Samsung FP DLP. The plan is to use SCRATCH for on-line. I will pickup a Macbook Pro when the camera ships for off-line.

[JustMe]

(unibrain) good luck

[number6]

ha ha i like this analogy but maybesomething more like "Shelby" taking a old classic 65 'Stang with an stock 289 and converting it to a GT550. :)

Yeah, I think the Carrol Shelby reference IS more appropriate. I actually ouned a 1964 Mustang. It was maroon with a white interior. Only had a 6 cylinder engine and three-in-the-floor, but it looked nice. (Sigh, even my cars were slow)

[galexander]

Jay,

Here is the machine I just built:

1. Supermicro XDW7A-N motherboard
2. 16 GB RAM (8 x 2GB 1.5v FB-DIMM (DDR2 800 MHz))
3. nVidia Quadro FX 4600 (SDI daughter card on order)
4. Xtore (XJ-SA12-316R-B)16-way drive enclosure
5. 16 x Seagate 7200.11 750 GB HDD (32 MB cache) for Xtore. (RAID 50)
6. 1 x Seagate 7200.11 750 GB for OS/Apps.
7. 3ware 9690 (about to toss and replace with either LSI 888 or Adaptec 3085)
8. Gateway XHD3000 30" LCD (2560x1600) (Has both DVI and HDMI in, with Silicon Optix Realta for HDMI input) It also offers picture controls, unlike other 30" LCDs. (Apple, Gateway and HP were all tested)
9. 2 x E5462 (2.8 GHz Quad Core) CPUs (Just shipped)
10. HP Ultrium 960 LTO3 drive
11. Adaptec SCSI for HP drive
12. Firewire 800 card (unibrain)
13. Sony BD burner
14. Sandisk Extreme Firewire 800 reader
15. Samsung SPH-800A 1080p FP DLP.
16. DVDO VP50 Pro
17. Stewart Grayhawk RS screen (72" wide)


...stuff deleted.....


and the cost please?

if you're having issues with the 3ware card, i seriously doubt it is 3ware card. my current, 8006 and previous 7000, and 9550, run and have run under WinNT4, 2k, Xp, both x86,x64, as well as server 2k3, x86,x64, RH linux, SUSE linux. i've swapped the raid arrays in different hardware/software configurations HP ML150G3, Intel boards, Asus, the card always recognized the array and the system always recognized the board, i.e., system independent.

you most likely have a IRQ conflict or bad chipset drivers from SM. the unibrain will also be 'recognized' as a 'SCSI' type device. here's what i'd do, remove all cards except the 3ware, use the onboard video. install 3ware HW/SW first, get it running, then install 1394 HW/SW. clean out all of the drivers or reinstall OS. since you have very limited options in a SM bios for IRQ, you should be banging on SM door.

supermicro boards, meh, mediocre at best, their support for non-traditional server configurations is lacking. Sata, PCIe are all 'new' to SM, they are used to SCSI/SAS big legacy type machines.

if you're looking to 'dump' that 3ware card, how much do you want for it?

[galexander]

The case has the screen built-in. It's a flip-out. And it could hold all the drives of the raid and the upc and maybe even the LTO drive all in one case.

they should easy be able to swap out the monitor and save a few Euro. i've lugged heavy scheisse around the death valley, zugspitze, the outback, a volcano.... if you're locations are fairly tame, ja ok du bist fertig in meiner meinung.



I was looking into Perl and Python today. Maybe I do write it myself.

perl and python, good choices for the discerning hacker. :) i've hacked a fair of perl, for some simple straight forward operations, you could code this in about 100 lines, much less if you hook into md5, CRC, or use quickpar and winrar. i might have a batch file laying around somewhere.



I'm definitely going to install a 32 bit Windows. Except if Red releases a 64 bit version of their software this month. I was looking into Windows 2003 Server. Its so expensive! I hope I can get it cheap from ebay. I don't know if it's worth the extra 500$ compared to Windows XP Pro just to have 4GB of Ram instead of 3.something.

i booted over to Xp x86, you will get about 3.4Gb of ram Max, see jpg. i can tune the starting memory footprint down to ~130Mb if i really tried. even if x64 drivers are released i wouldn't jump on the wagon. i get tired of being an alpha tester for commercial products.

Win Server has other options as well, you can fairly easily stream multimedia and create a Mac volume on your system for those people who want was to pull off data for FCP. you can set up the stream to go over copper or setup a really cool WiFi network. although WiFi streaming 4k would be tough, even broadcasters are only dishing out ~720p/1080i.

Server tends to be more 'hardened' out of the box than XP. you could set up two configurations, one for data acquisition, which runs lean and mean. second configuration, open up the server for file processing, serving or streaming. M$ treats Server customers different, you have much more control on security, control, processes whereas with XP, just install and reboot, everything will be.. ok ... sort of... we hope... ha ha.

Configuring Server is not for the weak in the knees but once you master it, it's really cool. a few days ago i configured Svr with a network config of HTC Touch, which has Bluetooth and WiFi, and an Apple Airport Extreme Base Station. I could see lots of unsecured networks and could route net traffic wherever i wanted.




And there is always the alternative with the Ramdisk trick:
http://www.computerbase.de/forum/showthread.php?t=305236 (german)

i like 'new' ram hack, it's similar to the old 'DOS' days, ha ha ha, sehr lustig. i would add these hacks to the boot.ini /timer=21000 /intaffinity

[Stacey Spears]

The 3ware card problems have been with a Tyan 2895 MB. Once the CPUs arrive, I will see how it behaves with the SM MB.

There were problems with 3ware under XP SP2 and Vista 32-bit. Even booting from DOS floppy and using their eval tool failed. Drives keep dropping (reported as inoperable). They even have a kb article on the 3ware site, but the tool they provide just locks up.


and the cost please?

1. $515 - Supermicro XDW7A-N motherboard
2. $1080 - 16 GB RAM (8 x 2GB 1.5v FB-DIMM (DDR2 800 MHz))
3. $1000 - nVidia Quadro FX 4600 (SDI daughter card on order)
4. $1575 - Xtore (XJ-SA12-316R-B)16-way drive enclosure
5. $2944 - 16 x Seagate 7200.11 750 GB HDD (32 MB cache) for Xtore. (RAID 50)
6. $184 - 1 x Seagate 7200.11 750 GB for OS/Apps.
7. $615 - 3ware 9690 (about to toss and replace with either LSI 888 or Adaptec 3085)
8. $1699 - Gateway XHD3000 30" LCD (2560x1600) (Has both DVI and HDMI in, with Silicon Optix Realta for HDMI input) It also offers picture controls, unlike other 30" LCDs. (Apple, Gateway and HP were all tested)
9. $1734 - 2 x E5462 (2.8 GHz Quad Core) CPUs (Just shipped)
10. $1000 - HP Ultrium 960 LTO3 drive
11. Adaptec SCSI for HP drive
12. $59 - Firewire 800 card (unibrain)
13. $599 - Sony BD burner
14. $60 - Sandisk Extreme Firewire 800 reader
15. Samsung SP-A800B 1080p FP DLP.
16. DVDO VP50 Pro
17. Stewart Grayhawk RS screen (72" wide)

[galexander]

The 3ware card problems have been with a Tyan 2895 MB. Once the CPUs arrive, I will see how it behaves with the SM MB.

There were problems with 3ware under XP SP2 and Vista 32-bit. Even booting from DOS floppy and using their eval tool failed. Drives keep dropping (reported as inoperable). They even have a kb article on the 3ware site, but the tool they provide just locks up.

...stuff deleted...

ah a Tyan, i've haven't used them in 5 years and i wouldn't recommend them to be honest. their opteron boards were good but i had a tiger x2, and thunder. nothing but problems.

check the tyan bios, see if there are any security settings that are preventing you from doing anything.

[galexander]

Yeah, I think the Carrol Shelby reference IS more appropriate. I actually ouned a 1964 Mustang. It was maroon with a white interior. Only had a 6 cylinder engine and three-in-the-floor, but it looked nice. (Sigh, even my cars were slow)

Arrr, arrr, arrrr, everyone would like an Elanor.... :) too bad she's a bit pricey for me as well. ha ha

for your Dell, cheapest, easiest, CVP is to upgrade the cpus. those 1.6GHz are killing your system. there are hardware hacks to bump up the 2.4GHz to 3GHz(w/correct CPU) but i don't recommend that unless you've done it before or are prepared to toast a cpu if you screw up. the next best, bang for the buck is your video card.

[galexander]

Can anyone point me to the most powerful wireless router that is out there? I am looking for range, range, range. If anyone has some advice I would be grateful.

Thanks
Jay

i'm toying around with Mac Airport Express Base Station. it supports all 802.11, a/b/g and most important N.

haven't tested the range but i'm designing and building my own high gain, patch antennas and should be able to push the range to about 5 km, which is not government approved.

[Jay A. Kelley]

GA

I need a router that can reach between two houses that are about 1/4 mile apart.

Any products out there that would do this in your opinion?

Jay

Any Linksys? Or how about that new router by bountiful?

[galexander]

GA

I need a router that can reach between two houses that are about 1/4 mile apart.

Any products out there that would do this in your opinion?

Jay

Any Linksys? Or how about that new router by bountiful?

depends on following answers.

environmental.
what type of buildings in the way? residental wooden house? concrete and steel skyscrapers? is the terrain flat?

specs.
how much bandwidth do you need? chatting? sharing desktop? streaming SD? HD? DiVx? a P2P net? MSN?

if terrain is fairly flat, mainly low single story houses, then critical factor is your content. if you live in an urban jungle, i would suggest alternate solutions.

generally
get the router with the highest output power and maximum gain you can afford. if the gain specs are dBi on one and dB on a different one, dB=dBi+2.14.

400 meters is a pretty good hop with the anything off the shelf and standard antennas. i don't know of anything off the shelf will give you any decent speed at that distance. you really need line of sight, LOS, antenna system for this application but you might be able to find something high power down in the 900MHz band that will connect but depending on where you live and how cluttered the frequency spectrum, your performance may not be that good.

however, if you really want a good cheap solution. find a small 2.4GHz parabolic mesh antenna, about the same size as directTV dishes but mesh. each person mounts them on the roof, make sure the router is designed to accept an external antenna connection. usually these connectors will be SMA or N-type. usually these antennas are about $100??

once you sort out your requirements and environment, i'll give you the system design so it will work.

[galexander]

jay,

where did you end up buying your card from? newegg has them one moment, then they're gone.

thanks
GA

[Jay A. Kelley]

Ummm (looking) I got a BFG from beach audio.. It came fast too. Tiger direct and Beach audio were both very quick. I made the order Friday morning, selected cheapest shipping, and both showed up on my doorstep today. MWave is not as fast, but they shipped out today.

[galexander]

everyone in Australia gets a shortened nickname, it's an Aussie thing. mine is 'Chaos'.

not only do i design and build hardware and software, i also test. my own as well as competitor's products. i am the ultimate QA in that aspect, if it does not meet MFG (manufactured guaranteed) specs, i will break it, if there is a bug, i find them. these include network analyzers, radar processors, Matlab, Intel Compilers, Linux kernels, yadda, yadda, yadda...

so while there is the old saying 'you get what you pay for', that doesn't hold in this case. i 'give' this advice and post because one of my truths is that what you give away is much more important than what you keep. i do actually get monetarily payment at the moment to build and design satellite communication systems, antennas, and phased arrays. in the past i have engineered from military specifications, real-time, in-flight, hyperspectral (300nm to 700nm) optical acquisition, detection, and identification systems.

if it seems like i'm breaking your balls and asking tough questions, it's because they are necessary and required. if you want amateur solutions, there is AskJeeeves. :)

my goal is to hopefully soon leave most of this behind, move to Paris, to do independent films.

Chaos

[Paolo Tinari]

Chaos...
Are you ok?

[galexander]

Chaos...
Are you ok?

Always :)

just getting some emails from people, so time to clear air so to speak.

[Paolo Tinari]

Wild.
Have fun in Paris. :red_bandana:

[galexander]

Has anyone looked using a HUD device like this instead of an LCD?

http://www.leadtek.com.tw/eng/hmd/overview.asp?lineid=20&pronameid=167

[galexander]

...stuff deleted ........
I was looking into Perl and Python today. Maybe I do write it myself. This language seems quite easy. I'm starting an open source project. Anyone interested in helping out???


here is some old code i had laying around. this is how to take a bunch of files in a directory and process them. the original files had headers before compressed data, so this removes the header and decodes the files. so the original files would be something like bigfile.001, bigfile.002,... the result would be bigfile. you can easily modify the headers/footers.

this runs under linux/solaris/qnx/irix/cygwin

#!/bin/csh

# Very good when you have a bunch of file appended into one file
# and don't want to go through the boring procedure of deleting
# all the headers and footers.

foreach fil ($argv)
echo "Extracting data..."
echo -n $fil
grep ^begin $fil | nawk '{print " => "$3}'
nawk '{\
if ($0~"^begin") {print ; goon = 1};\
if ($0~"^end") {print ; exit};\
if (goon == 1) {\
if (($0 !~ "[a-z]") && ((length > 4) && (length < 62))||(length==1)) print}\
}' $fil > $fil.make
echo "Decoding info..."
uudecode $fil.make <---here is where you need to put in your command
echo ""
end

[Cail Young]

Has anyone looked using a HUD device like this instead of an LCD?

You see the occasional jib/crane op using them, but I'd never wear one for handheld or dolly work - you lose peripheral vision and can't see where you're stepping.

[Jay A. Kelley]

Ok well I put together the system... I was amazed at how easily it all went together!

No real issues to speak of, I did install REDCine and the UI works perfectly, however I am sad to report that I when I render a QT file, only the first frame plays back.

I cannot do any overclocking or speed measurements until I get this worked out. Of course if anyone has any advice as to why it's not working, I am all ears!

JAy

[Frank Weeks]

Thanks Jay. I hope you can get it working. I am about to build or buy and cs3 is my choice at the moment. I am following your progress closely. Good luck.

Frank

[galexander]

Ok well I put together the system... I was amazed at how easily it all went together!

No real issues to speak of, I did install REDCine and the UI works perfectly, however I am sad to report that I when I render a QT file, only the first frame plays back.
JAy

there is another thread, someone with a similar problem, so it's not directly hardware related.

it sounds like there is a driver/codec issue, conflict or something isn't registered with the system properly, other codecs can work with smaller frames but not the big boy 4k. the compressor bombs.

see if you can render something out at 720p, 1080p, 2k, 4k. use small file. a few seconds.

grab Gspot 2.7a http://gspot.headbands.com/
or avicodec http://avicodec.duby.info/
i use these to see what codecs each file is using, when something craps out. usually during install the regsvr doesn't install the codec or it is a lower priority so windows doesn't use it.

have you installed the M$ latest DirectX SDK? it's always a good idea to have bit of bloat ware installed.

have you installed the latest QT player? just having the QT libs on your system may force windows not to use the default codecs.

when you install QT, check the MIME settings, make everything is checked and the one where you are notified if anything changes.

you do have Sp2 right?

can you encode to an mpeg? or asf? wmv? i've noticed windoze media player >10, is always trying to grab all of the playable media for encoding and decoding. especially that new codec VC-1.

you're using the drivers from the nvidia website? NOT the ones on the cd..?

if none of these simple solutions work, then get these utilities from
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/default.aspx

regmon and procmon

just before you launch the encode process, begin the capture process and dump EVERYTHING to a log file. the regmon will show you exactly what and when what's going on.

[galexander]

is anyone going to be submitting anything for this?

http://www.ecufilmfestival.com

[galexander]

Wild.
Have fun in Paris. :red_bandana:

going to it go :)

do you have insight on european indie scene?

i'd like to get hooked into making a short film on Red if possible. i need one very good actress, Red, very small crew and ... "three chords and the truth"

for productions in and around Europe, i'm willing step up and do what i can.

[Gavin Greenwalt]

I need a router that can reach between two houses that are about 1/4 mile apart.
Jay


I've used Breezecom equipment it's about $500 per end but I had it setup for a 6 mile run @ 3Mbps.

You can also use a laser setup but contrary to the advertisements if you get some heavy rain or dense fog it will screw up the signal.

[galexander]

I've used Breezecom equipment it's about $500 per end but I had it setup for a 6 mile run @ 3Mbps.

You can also use a laser setup but contrary to the advertisements if you get some heavy rain or dense fog it will screw up the signal.

cool, i like it. :) i had something more along the lines of using the 802.11b range and sucking up about 400Mbps of bandwidth but only for 100 meters or so just for on location stuff for about $200 both ends. that's why i'm chopping up that airport extreme he he he.

[galexander]

Jay,

now you know why i suggested getting your computer hardware asap instead of waiting for your Red to arrive. :)

these things always happen with new hardware/software configs. it's fun and exciting but i don't have $17k worth of Red hardware i can't use either.

[galexander]

Yeah, I think the Carrol Shelby reference IS more appropriate. I actually ouned a 1964 Mustang. It was maroon with a white interior. Only had a 6 cylinder engine and three-in-the-floor, but it looked nice. (Sigh, even my cars were slow)

were you still looking for a PCIe lane adapter to go from 8x to 16x?

i found some more parts from the ML150 G3, one was this lane adapter. you'll have to add a bolt or something to lock your video card to the chassis as the riser will add about 3/8" of height but no biggie.

i also found a 3.3V to 5V PCI adapter, you might find useful. most of those server boards won't support the older PCI 32-bit cards.

i'll ship them to you for nothing if you donate something to the local SPCA or local animal shelter. send me a PM, if you're still in need

[Radoslav Karapetkov]

What about AMD processors?

I've been a AMD fan for years and now the new Phenom quad-cores are coming out. I'm curious of what they can offer.

If I'm not mistaken, the RED team recommends Intel based machines, but does this mean that AMD chips are incompatible and\or might cause problems.

Any other AMD guerillas out there? :gun:

[galexander]

What about AMD processors?

I've been a AMD fan for years and now the new Phenom quad-cores are coming out. I'm curious of what they can offer.

If I'm not mistaken, the RED team recommends Intel based machines, but does this mean that AMD chips are incompatible and\or might cause problems.

Any other AMD guerillas out there? :gun:

guerillas... hmm.. ask around i'm more of a tsunami... :)

i've toggled back and forth between both currently have AMD 3.8GHz+ and quad intel. i have no problems at all running AMD, in fact, Intel actually licenses the AMD's x32/x64 IP so there should be no problems with any of SSE extensions or other libs.

i like AMD, usually cheaper with bigger L1/L2-cache, faster clocks, and better cpu/memory I/O but IMHO they really missed the boat by not getting their quad or tri chips out sooner. Intel is eating them up alive with the quads.

the Operton x8 config was one of the best, brutual number crunching, Linux beasts we had. it ran circles around the Itanium in any scientific benchmark.

problems i've had is with non-operton motherboards, Tyan sucked with bad drivers, always having to hack something to get it to work.

my current Asus MB with 3.8GHz+ AMD purrs along with no worries at all.

once AMD gets rolling, if Intel doesn't get off its ass, that bigger, faster L3 cache is some serious horsepower... my .02

if someone other than Tyan came out with an OC motherboard, like Asus, Gigabyte, MSI, i wouldn't hesitate to use AMD. they have a great, tuned library, just link in the libacml again any intel lapack libs and benchmark it.

check it out

http://developer.amd.com/assets/CART2007-Barcelona.pdf

just my .02

[galexander]

Thanks Jay. I hope you can get it working. I am about to build or buy and cs3 is my choice at the moment. I am following your progress closely. Good luck.

Frank

is this thread dead???

if you're still following along, you should probably check out the 10-bit threads, 16-bit/noise, and cineform threads.

[Radoslav Karapetkov]

guerillas... hmm.. ask around i'm more of a tsunami... :)

i've toggled back and forth between both currently have AMD 3.8GHz+ and quad intel. i have no problems at all running AMD, in fact, Intel actually licenses the AMD's x32/x64 IP so there should be no problems with any of SSE extensions or other libs.

i like AMD, usually cheaper with bigger L1/L2-cache, faster clocks, and better cpu/memory I/O but IMHO they really missed the boat by not getting their quad or tri chips out sooner. Intel is eating them up alive with the quads.

the Operton x8 config was one of the best, brutual number crunching, Linux beasts we had. it ran circles around the Itanium in any scientific benchmark.

problems i've had is with non-operton motherboards, Tyan sucked with bad drivers, always having to hack something to get it to work.

if someone other than Tyan came out with an OC motherboard, like Asus, Gigabyte, MSI, i wouldn't hesitate to use AMD. they have a great, tuned library, just link in the libacml again any intel lapack libs and benchmark it.

just my .02

Wow, gotta check those out, 10x.

[Frank Weeks]

is this thread dead???

if you're still following along, you should probably check out the 10-bit threads, 16-bit/noise, and cineform threads.

I'm still reading and trying to learn. I'm clearly not in your league but thanks for the input.

Frank

[bakopeti]

I don't know exactly where to post my questions, but maybe here. We will order a Mac Pro in this month. We would like to use redcine, fcp, and in the future maybe scratch. Bootcamp and xp for scratch of course. But he videocard is a big question for us. We know that nvidia is a bit slower on Mac, but what about bootcamp? Is it possible to run redcine on bootcamp, and get very good render times? But i've red on the assimilate webpage, that scratch supports only nvidia cards. But Ati is faster on Mac.
What do you recommend? Please enlighten me!

Thanks

[Laco Zamba]

Try PM to Luki

[Sean]

What do you guys think of this processor (on a budget):

Intel Core 2 Extreme QX6850 Processor BX80562QX6850 - 3.0GHz, 8MB Cache, 1333MHz FSB, Kentsfield XE, Quad-Core, Retail, Socket 775

[Antoine Baumann]

I don't know exactly where to post my questions, but maybe here. We will order a Mac Pro in this month. We would like to use redcine, fcp, and in the future maybe scratch. Bootcamp and xp for scratch of course. But he videocard is a big question for us. We know that nvidia is a bit slower on Mac, but what about bootcamp? Is it possible to run redcine on bootcamp, and get very good render times? But i've red on the assimilate webpage, that scratch supports only nvidia cards. But Ati is faster on Mac.
What do you recommend? Please enlighten me!

Thanks

Scratch is only certified to work with nvidia quadro card, not the geforce and NOT the ATI.
I've heard that Redcine works fine on bootcamp, but should work best with nvidia card because you are running microsoft xp.

Apple MacPro are the cheapest 8 cores computer out there, so I understand the interest of running bootcamp on it. But with the price of a Scratch license seat, I would recommend to buy an Assimilate Scratch certified computer and Raid array and use your MacPro for fcp.

ciao,
antoine.

[number6]

were you still looking for a PCIe lane adapter to go from 8x to 16x?

i found some more parts from the ML150 G3, one was this lane adapter. you'll have to add a bolt or something to lock your video card to the chassis as the riser will add about 3/8" of height but no biggie.

i also found a 3.3V to 5V PCI adapter, you might find useful. most of those server boards won't support the older PCI 32-bit cards.

i'll ship them to you for nothing if you donate something to the local SPCA or local animal shelter. send me a PM, if you're still in need

Hey GA! Sorry to be so long responding... this and that, you know. Actually I was just today clearing off a table to begin putting new hardware into my computer when I checked REDuser and found this thread bumped. Installed OS long ago but then shelved everything until more available time.

I ordered the PCIe lane adapter when I ordered the video card and have them both on hand. By my calculations, if I remember correctly, I can dremel off a piece of the plastic hold-doun that Dell uses and still get the lid to close over it and hold it in place. Will find out if true later.

Have checked often on ebay for PCI cards that might work with a Vista 64 bit OS (I know, I know... Vista is junk... but you know what they say... one man's junk is another man's headache, or something:tongue: )

I'm thinking of adding a PCI eSATA card for peripherals (like a SATA DVD etc.) and possibly for an external RAID 0 as well. What do you think? Is this a workable, though I'm sure not optimal, optior?

edit: My bitch just had pups yesterday, so by feeding her and their hungry little mouths, I feel I am doing my part helping the SPCA by not taking them to the animal shelter. :-() But thanks for the offer of the parts. Very neighborly of you.

[Fireflyfilms]

Hey guys,

I'm curious about, in the future, purchasing a RED ONE, or Scarlet (once the suspense is relieved) and curious whether or not my current system specs are up to the job...

Intel Q6600 (2.8 Quad)
Corsair DDR2 800MHz (4GB)
nVidia 8800GT 512mb (650mhz)
980GB HDD (160GB 7200, 320gb usb external, 500gb 7200)

Cheers :D

[Radoslav Karapetkov]

(slight offtopic)

Is there a way to get Windows XP\32 bit to work with all of 4GB RAM?

[Jay A. Kelley]

it does.. you just can't go beyond that
Jay

[Radoslav Karapetkov]

it does.. you just can't go beyond that
Jay


Does it work with your system?

I'm trying to assemble a decent quadcore system for RedCine.

For start, I'll bet on 4GB DDR2 1066 RAM.

Maybe upgrade that to DDR3 1333, next year.

But I read here that processor power, HDD speed + a decent video card are decisive, not RAM. :detective2:

[sbaechler]

I currently have a dual-boot system with Vista and OSx86 Leopard. Leopard is super fast and stable. I just cannot get RedCine to run and SATA hotplug doesn't work. (Unfortunately all my CF readers and the Red drive connector are SATA.)
All of this works under Vista but this OS is weird. The first ten minutes it is really slow. I think it is indexing something. I can only run Redcine in Administrator mode. And this user control feature is just a joke.

But I'm still going Vista as soon as the Quicktime component comes out because of compatibility and licence issues.

I have a Intel QX9650 4x3Ghz CPU and it barely plays back the M-Proxies smoothly. Hard drives is a RAID1 (for now) and 4GB RAM.

[laguun]

All of this works under Vista but this OS is weird. The first ten minutes it is really slow. I think it is indexing something.

You can disable indexing.



I can only run Redcine in Administrator mode. And this user control feature is just a joke.

You can switch off the user control feature.

[sbaechler]

You can disable indexing.


You can switch off the user control feature.

I did disable both. But it still seems to be indexing something after startup. And I cannot start redcine via the shortcut on the desktop.

[laguun]

I did disable both. But it still seems to be indexing something after startup. And I cannot start redcine via the shortcut on the desktop.
sadly cant tell you more - our vista/osx systems (quads with G8800) start vista fast and redcine as user.... must be something different than i would know.

[Mark L. Pederson]

Does it work with your system?

I'm trying to assemble a decent quadcore system for RedCine.

For start, I'll bet on 4GB DDR2 1066 RAM.

Maybe upgrade that to DDR3 1333, next year.

But I read here that processor power, HDD speed + a decent video card are decisive, not RAM. :detective2:

I'm not sure about REDCINE - but we get much better performance out of Scratch with Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition than XP.

[conrad gaunt]

I did disable both. But it still seems to be indexing something after startup. And I cannot start redcine via the shortcut on the desktop.

Thats the beauty of using Microsh@t Windows (tm) operating systems :)

[number6]

I did disable both. But it still seems to be indexing something after startup. And I cannot start redcine via the shortcut on the desktop.
Do you have Windows Defender installed? Try disabling that if you do. Sometimes it runs a check when you start up.

[Scott Roberts]

I have a 7900 GS, 7200rpm hd's, core 2 duo, 3gb ram, win xp, which lags a little when working with 4k full res footage in RedCine. My partner has a Quadro 4500 (i think it's a 4500), 10k hard drives and dual xeon processors, and he flies right through the footage on the timeline, etc. Another partner of mine uses a Quadro FX1300 and has no issues. On occasion I have issues playing back 720p quicktime movies . . . i'm not happy about that. My partner with the FX 1300 has no issues, so I'm thinking of going the quadro route.

[Radoslav Karapetkov]

Cool, so the quadro route generally gives decent results.