RedCine slow playback on new 8 core MacPro? [Archive]

Matthew Rogers

01-11-2008, 06:29 PM

Cüneyt Kaya

01-11-2008, 06:35 PM

Hey guys, I was wondering how your all's machines are handling playback in RedCine? At 1/2 Red Medium, it will play a clip fine for a few seconds and then start playing really slowly. If I pause the clip and then restart it will play fine again for a second or two and then play slowly. I was wondering if this has something to do with my new computer, or are 8 processors still not enough to playback the material fast enough? Also, is there any way to get out of RedCine without quitting it?

Matthew

hit H there you have all little goodies....
and asfai-understand redcine works gpu based...means look at your card.
256 mb....512mb...or higher.

but on the mac side of life you will need an ati card.

and i think 1/2 res medium is pretty tough....to check your playback
hit
ctrl f1
and close the histogram while playback

Matthew Rogers

01-11-2008, 07:07 PM

but on the mac side of life you will need an ati card.

and i think 1/2 res medium is pretty tough....to check your playback
hit
ctrl f1
and close the histogram while playback

I've actually got an ATI card. It's the Radeon 2600 XT with 256 MB ram.

I put up the terminal with top running, and while I was playing the clip I was getting about 460% processor. The framerate in RedCine was about 15 frams, with proc at 55 ms, and gfx at 3 (I have no clue what those numbers mean as I have not read the redcine manual.)

Even playing back at 1/4 med, I was only getting 19-20 frames. I am wondering if harddrive speed + only 2 GB's of ram is hurting playback...

Matthew

Cüneyt Kaya

01-11-2008, 07:35 PM

ok i have the same card....just an imac core2 duo, and 4 gb ram

my playback rates are right now:

1) no grading. s-curve
4k @ 1/4 medium.

24 fps for the clips

2k@ 1/4 medium
24 fps or the clips

4k@ 1/4 high
24 fps

2k@ 1/4 high
24 fps

but after switching a couple of times between the two 4k clips i have ( race car & boys play A-Team john j action jackson stuff)....the playback
dropped to 15 fps in both clips....after switching another 4-or 5 times it get to regular 24 fps.....i played the switching game again, and redcine crashed the imac.

4k@ 1/2 medium, i got the same
drop from 24 to 15 fps after 3-5 sec.
2)
with grading, s-curve

2k@ 1/4 medium
24 fps

4k@ 1/4 medium around 22-24 fps

Matthew Rogers

01-11-2008, 08:44 PM

Okay, so obviously something is wrong with RedCine and the new MacPros (unless the extra 2 GB's of RAM makes a difference.) Because if your 2 processors and slower graphics card (it may be the same model, but there are some big differences in the banwidth it can pump) can do 24 frames, then my machine should be able to do it. Grame, what's wrong?...

Matthew

Frank Weeks

01-11-2008, 09:05 PM

Okay, so obviously something is wrong with RedCine and the new MacPros

Matthew

Say it ain't so Mac. Your PMs have me seriously considering the Mac path.

I'm sure the Red Gurus can get you squared away. Good luck.

Frank

Cüneyt Kaya

01-11-2008, 09:22 PM

Poi Boy

01-11-2008, 11:30 PM

I don't know exactly what the problem is but with 8 core you should get more than two gigs of ram. IMO
-A

Irri

01-12-2008, 02:51 AM

The ATI card HD2600XT isn't as good as the old X1900XT according to a lot of benchmarks (even though the benchmarks are DirectX based).

Sanjin Jukic

01-12-2008, 04:30 AM

Everything is perfect with the old octo mac pro and ati x1900xt with REDCINE.

REDCINE 1.0.74 plays perfect 4K RED res 24fps@1/4 res medium on 30" ACD and it's amazing visual experience.

Probably with new octo mac pro you would need also an old ati x1900xt card that has 512 VRAM.

Matthew Rogers

01-12-2008, 06:04 AM

I don't know exactly what the problem is but with 8 core you should get more than two gigs of ram. IMO
-A

I'm planning on it, but waiting until third party ram has been checked.

I'm actually guessing that there's something wrong with the current version of OSX and these new processors. I've tried installing both Parallels and Crossover this week with no luck--and there's alot of little quirks that I'm seeing in other software that I don't see on my wife's intel iMac.

I'll wait until Tuesday when hopefully 10.5.2 will be release to see if I still have the issues.

Matthew

Alex Carr

01-13-2008, 01:13 PM

your choking that 8 core with only 2 GB of RAM... big time. If it can hold 8GB then why get any less? Your doing serious Transcodes from REDCODE to Quicktime, the RAM will speed up the process,

RAM for 8 core Mac are cheap... Really cheap:

2GB kit for $106, the PPC G5's RAM costs $85-100 for 1 GB, so you can get twice as much for the same price.

I just looked in the 10-07 Service manual for Intel 8 core MAC and this RAM matches ALL specifications. Fully Buffered and ECC, and the service manual doesn't specify any certain Voltage either.

There is no such thing as MAC only RAM. There are specifications nothing else... There is Only people wanting to profit off saying there is a difference. All of teh DDR2 memory is extremely cheap, FB-DIMM is a few dollars more but still affordable.
From manual:

DIMMs for Mac Pro (8x) must fit these specifications:
667 MHz, FB-DIMMs
•
72-bit wide, 240-pin modules
•
36 devices maximum per DIMM
•
Error-correcting code (ECC)
•
Memory from older Macintosh computers is not compatible with Mac Pro (8x).

Get some RAM./

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820134330

Antoine Baumann

01-14-2008, 08:39 AM

The ATI card HD2600XT isn't as good as the old X1900XT according to a lot of benchmarks (even though the benchmarks are DirectX based).

Probably with new octo mac pro you would need also an old ati x1900xt card that has 512 VRAM.

Yeah that's conerning. Is somebody has had good experience pluging a X1900XT to those new Mac Pro?

REDCINE 1.0.74 plays perfect 4K RED res 24fps@1/4 res medium

what about 1/4 res high?

ciao,
antoine.

Alexander Christ

01-14-2008, 09:26 AM

Is somebody has had good experience pluging a X1900XT to those new Mac Pro?

According to Apple the X1900XT won't work in the new Mac Pro: http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=305346. Nevertheless the new HD2600XT will work with the older Mac Pros, so the X1900XT has to be tested in the new Mac Pro.

Matthew Rogers

01-14-2008, 11:06 AM

2GB kit for $106, the PPC G5's RAM costs $85-100 for 1 GB, so you can get twice as much for the same price.

I just looked in the 10-07 Service manual for Intel 8 core MAC and this RAM matches ALL specifications. Fully Buffered and ECC, and the service manual doesn't specify any certain Voltage either.

The only problem is I have the NEW MacPro and it requires 800 MHz ram instead of 667 for the old MacPro. I just ordered 4 GB's for right now, so by the end of the week I should have 6 GB. I'll let you know how the performance in RedCine goes.

BTW, I bought the ram for 18004Memory.com. It was $199 for 4 GB's.

Matthew

BASSAM MSSALATIE

01-14-2008, 11:44 AM

you would need also an old ati x1900xt card that has 512 VRAM.

thanks Sanjin : the question is it iwll work on (as hardware ) copatibility ?:mellow:

BASSAM MSSALATIE

01-14-2008, 11:46 AM

so by the end of the week I should have 6 GB. I'll let you know how the performance in RedCine goes.

Matthew

so please we are waiting your experience with it. good luck:bye2:

Rob Lohman

01-15-2008, 11:15 AM

have you tried playback from different drives? Still waiting on a new mac pro here...

Lexicon

01-15-2008, 12:58 PM

The only problem is I have the NEW MacPro and it requires 800 MHz ram instead of 667 for the old MacPro. I just ordered 4 GB's for right now, so by the end of the week I should have 6 GB. I'll let you know how the performance in RedCine goes.

BTW, I bought the ram for 18004Memory.com. It was $199 for 4 GB's.

Matthew

Unless Apple or Intel locked down the memory speeds, you should be able to swap out the memory from an existing Intel MacPro workstation and have it work fine though obviously at a slower speed than you'd have otherwise. The chipset the new MacPros are based on supports the same memory speeds that the previous model did.

Matthew Rogers

01-15-2008, 01:39 PM

have you tried playback from different drives? Still waiting on a new mac pro here...

I tried it on the the internal 320 GB HD with no luck (not that I'm sure the drive is fast enough.) However, I did try it with a Firewire 800 Raid 0 that I know is fast enough to support 25 MB's a second (normally get around 40 MB's a second transfer with it), but it still dropped frames (which makes me think it's the software/non disk hardware--especially when people are reporting playing files fine off MBP's.)

Ram should be here by the end of the week, so we'll see if that helps any.

Matthew

Videoteque73

01-17-2008, 12:20 AM

25 MB

The internal hard drive should give you at least 50MB/s...

Rob Lohman

01-17-2008, 11:24 AM

Not sustained it won't.... the RAID should do a lot better than 25 though!

Matthew Rogers

01-17-2008, 05:20 PM

Not sustained it won't.... the RAID should do a lot better than 25 though!

Okay, just did a test with the AJA speed test program. Off my internal HD (a Western Digital 320 GB stock drive from Apple) I got read speeds as high as 65 MB's a second. On a 4 GB read and write, by the time it was done reading, it was down to 49 MB's--which really is pretty good. On the 1 TB Firewire 800 Raid 0, the highest read speed of the RD3 file I've been trying to play (a 500 MB file) was 83.5 MB's a second. That should be plenty of speed to play the dang file. It makes me think that the memory is the issue. An extra 4 GB's of ram is supposed to arrive tomorrow, so we'll see if it makes any difference (I sure hope so!)

Matthew

Rob Lohman

01-17-2008, 05:29 PM

Okay, just did a test with the AJA speed test program. Off my internal HD (a Western Digital 320 GB stock drive from Apple) I got read speeds as high as 65 MB's a second. On a 4 GB read and write, by the time it was done reading, it was down to 49 MB's-

So you agree it's not 50+ sustained (since you already dropped below that with a simple 4 GB test file). There's also additional overhead.

What I'm getting at is that there's theory, test results and the real world. I've seen great playback from the internal drives and I've also seen it stutter on the same system (fragmentation, other stuff going on, etc.).

Definitely don't realy on it with a laptop system.

BASSAM MSSALATIE

01-18-2008, 03:22 AM

So Rob what is the best adviced setting we should get .some minimum
Recommendation please .from hard drives to graphics cards.please will you help doing your tests. with best and give us the best system ideas.:sarcasm:

Matthew Rogers

01-18-2008, 11:57 AM

Okay, so the RAM came in today and I got it installed. First off, I found out why I was getting bad playback in RedCine. While doing some tests before I installed the ram I noticed that the framerate in RedCine was set to 18 FPS instead of 23.976. When I changed it to the correct setting I had no problems playing back at 1/4 med or high. 1/2 high is choppy, 1/2 med plays well for a second or two then is choppy until I pause it and hit play again. What's interesting is I had the Terminal open with top on my other monitor. Each time I take it "up" a level in quality, RedCine uses more processor time. So 1/4 med is around 250-300%, while full quality is at 700% proc. time. That makes me think that the choppy playback at 1/2 high quality has more to do with disk speed than amount of processors or memory (There is plenty of memory as I've yet to have any pageouts and currently have 5155 MB's free ram.)

In general, the computer has speed up a TON. Startup used to be about 1 minute. It's not about 15-30 seconds (I don't think I even see the grey apple screen and no "startup bar" screen either.) AfterEffects is almost realtime with 3D layers and effects rendering. In fact, it's not even as fast as it can be. AE only uses 3 GB's of ram max, so I can only get 5 processors running at one time. However, disk speed does affect how fast it will go. My 1 TB firewire 800 raid 0 was struggling to keep up trying to provide all the data to AE for rendering. I am thinking that the new RAID 5 system will help alot in general computer speed.

I can't wait to get compressor working with all 8 processors. Too bad it doesn't support more exporting formats.

Matthew

BASSAM MSSALATIE

01-18-2008, 01:03 PM

Matthew Rogers

01-18-2008, 01:27 PM

it is very good that you noticed that the problem in first place coming from redcine settings . and happy for you cause things going better with the new mac pro
don't you think changing

will imporve your workstation performance..:unsure:

Probably, but for right now (next 6 months) I will probably stick with that card. Unless you are viewing the footage unscaled, 1/4 rez high looks as good as full res when you are scaling down to fit in a 720P monitor. I'm sure AE would also be a bit speedier with the NVIDIA card also.

BTW, if anyone else wants to benchmark their systems, here are my Cinebench scores:

8x processors: 18422
1x processor: 3179
OpenGL Graphics: 5892

Would love to see graphics score with the other cards.

Matthew

Adrian T.

01-18-2008, 03:37 PM

BTW, if anyone else wants to benchmark their systems, here are my Cinebench scores:

8x processors: 18422
1x processor: 3179
OpenGL Graphics: 5892

I also have the ATI Radeon 2600 but I get quite a bit higher scores:

8x processors: 21208
1x processor: 3644
OpenGL Graphics: 6976

I have the 3.2 GHz procs. Which ones do you have?

Matthew Rogers

01-18-2008, 03:43 PM

I also have the ATI Radeon 2600 but I get quite a bit higher scores:

8x processors: 21208
1x processor: 3644
OpenGL Graphics: 6976

I have the 3.2 GHz procs. Which ones do you have?

I have the 2.8 processors. Strange, the speed increase for the processors makes sense, but the graphics, I believe, should pretty much be the same--unless cinebench is testing the processors at the same time.

Matthew

BASSAM MSSALATIE

01-18-2008, 04:17 PM

BTW, if anyone else wants to benchmark their systems, here are my Cinebench scores:

8x processors: 18422
1x processor: 3179
OpenGL Graphics: 5892

SOORY what is that mean ?? those rates about processors ..:unsure:

Adrian T.

01-18-2008, 05:15 PM

SOORY what is that mean ?? those rates about processors ..:unsure:

the higher the better.

sceneeast

01-19-2008, 06:58 AM

Matthew Rogers

01-19-2008, 07:37 AM

I going to order a new Mac Pro 3.2GHZ Quad-core with minium 2GB (2 x 1GB)

Two questions.

From third party souce I want to add Ram. How much more?

If I add 8 GB more (4 x 2G) do I need to remove the 2GB (2 x 1GB) that came with machine (since they are not the same) or not?

I am personally going to add 8 GB total to the factory installed 2 GB's. Unless you want to go over 12 GB's, you won't need to take out the already installed 2 GB's. What IS interesting (at least when compared to how my G5 did ram in pairs) is that the ram pairs go together on the same card. Currently I have the 2 1GB chips on the top card, and the 2 2GB chips on the bottom card. The manual that came with the computer is written in very confusing language about this:(

Matthew

sceneeast

01-19-2008, 09:19 AM

Thanks

Bob

Curran Giddens

01-20-2008, 06:51 AM

Currently I have the 2 1GB chips on the top card, and the 2 2GB chips on the bottom card. The manual that came with the computer is written in very confusing language about this:(

Matthew

Matthew,

I would keep them in this order:

Top slot 1 & 2 (2GB)
Bottom 1 & 2 (2GB)
Top slot 3 & 4 (1GB)

But maybe it doesn't matter?

Matthew Rogers

01-20-2008, 12:50 PM

Matthew,

I would keep them in this order:

Top slot 1 & 2 (2GB)
Bottom 1 & 2 (2GB)
Top slot 3 & 4 (1GB)

But maybe it doesn't matter?

Actually you are correct. 2 dimms, one on each card, 4 dimms, 2 on top card and 2 on bottom card (which is what I have right now, 2 1GB on top and 2 2 GB on bottom) 6 dimms, 4 on top and 2 on bottom. When I buy 2 more 2GB chips I will put them on top where the 1 GB chips are and slide those chips over to slots 3&4.

Btw, the ram is working pretty well. After the first restart I was having all sorts of wonky issues with things crashing and crap. However, after another restart everything is working smoothly. It makes me think that it was a OS/software issue more than a hardware issue.

Matthew

Curran Giddens

02-01-2008, 05:45 AM

Actually you are correct. 2 dimms, one on each card, 4 dimms, 2 on top card and 2 on bottom card (which is what I have right now, 2 1GB on top and 2 2 GB on bottom) 6 dimms, 4 on top and 2 on bottom. When I buy 2 more 2GB chips I will put them on top where the 1 GB chips are and slide those chips over to slots 3&4.

http://barefeats.com/harper3.html

A better scenario, if you insist on using those two factory 1GB FB-DIMMs is to order four 2GB FB-DIMMs, pull out the two factory 1GB FB-DIMMs, put the four 2GB FB-DIMMS in slots 1 and 2 on each riser, and put the two 1GB FB-DIMMs in slot 3 & 4 of the top riser. That will give you a total of 10GB.

This is what I'm going to do with my 4 x 2GB FB-DIMMs that will finally be here this afternoon.