RED Apple Workflow Installer V16 (08/25/2020)

[Phil Holland]

For those of you who are working with FCPX and missed today's update:
https://www.red.com/download/red-app...flow-installer

Something very notable in this update is:

FCP X plugin changes:
- Adds support for Metal GPU decode for Final Cut Pro 10.4.9 or later.


REDcode Preference Panel - FCP X Image Pipeline changes:
- Added "GPU decode (decompression)" option to control Metal GPU decode.

Happy scrubbing and cutting.


Nice link here with some workflow update info:
https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2020/...-improvements/

[Brian Timmons]

Wow- This is very nice to hear!
I remember RED delivered that code to Apple late last year.
10.4.9? must be a new version coming out.
*Edit*- I'm completely behind. New version just release.
Thanks for the heads up Phil!
I can really use this now.

***NOTE***
Before updating, backup your old version of FCP X.
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT203010

Better to have it and not need it - than need it and not have it.
You never know with these updates.

Brian Timmons
BRITIM/MEDIA

[Blair Thornton]

I guess this is the Metal Decode preference

[Homer Dulu]

I just tried it on my Hackintosh with an i7 6700K and AMD 5700XT. For reference, I've been able to playback 8K Helium footage with a 4K timeline at Full Res. Premium decode on Resolve 16.2 with zero dropped frames.

The same 8K footage in FCPX 10.4.9 also with a 4K timeline using Better Quality was pretty choppy in comparison. I also had to turn off background rendering because for some reason, it was trying to render the video files in the background, even with Create Optimized and Create Proxy settings turned off.

Not sure what's going on here, but maybe Resolve does a real-time 1/2 quality decode of the 8K footage because the timeline resolution is 4K (which still evens out as "Full Res" anyway), while FCPX does an 8K decode and then resizes to 4K after the fact? Why would it be rendering files in the background (Prores 422 according to my Project settings) - when it should be able to play back in realtime? Or Resolve's playback engine is that much more efficient compared to FCPX?

Also, I think I discovered a bug in the implementation - I opened up Activity Monitor to see my GPU usage and the GPU decompression seems to only work when "Better Quality" is selected. When that's selected, my GPU usage is 100% and CPU hovering around 50-60%. When you select "Better Performance", CPU usage goes up to 100% (how it was in all quality settings before 10.4.9) and GPU usage is barely there - I thought that when you select Better Performance, the decode quality is reduced? It shouldn't affect the GPU decode? Even when I went to an 8K timeline, and selected "Better Performance" it was still barely using the GPU.

Scrubbing is pretty damn fast now though. That's definitely much improved.

Please keep in mind that my computer's almost 4 years old. I think that any of the new 9th or 10th gen processors would be able to handle 8K super smoothly, and play everything back at full resolution with an 8K timeline. I think my optimal settings would be either 8K 1/2-quality or 4K full-quality GPU decode, but it seems like FCPX doesn't handle that scenario just yet.

I'll continue testing and report back if I find anything else.

[andrewhake]

Scrubbing is so much faster now with R3D and FCPX. I am curious if that is coming from the Metal implementation or the FCPX update. Scrubbing R3Ds feels close to scrubbing prores now. I am still not quite getting realtime playback with 8K footage in an 8k or 4k timeline though on an iMac Pro with Vega 64 16GB. Haven't tested yet on a Mac Pro but I will give it a go later today probably. I do wonder if it's like Homer also mentioned with FCPX always doing a full quality decode when in Better Quality mode, which I guess that makes sense depending on how you are using the footage in the timeline.

Homer the way bg rendering works in FCPX is it is taking whatever footage you are working with, and encoding it to whatever flavor of prores your project is set to. Which works very well in practice. Usually by the time you are ready to output your master file to prores everything is already rendered and the export process takes just a few seconds.

I do think FCPX still needs to add an option for what decode resolution is being used as Homer suggested. I wonder if this is something that Red could implement in their Apple Workflow plugin? Would be even better to just have as an option right in the FCPX viewer. Honestly, FCPX chomps up 8K R3Ds so fast into prores I usually just let background render do it's thing and never even think about it. Editing R3Ds in FCPX has been really nice for quite awhile now and this just makes it that much better. Especially the huge increase in scrubbing performance with R3Ds.

I am curious what sort of performance people at Red are seeing and on what hardware though. Right now I mainly just notice the scrubbing performance increase.

[Jon Dishler]

I guess this is the Metal Decode preference

Where is this screen please? Not sure I need it. If I take 8k footage and make the project a 4k timeline, it will play in better quality mode real time once rendered, or in better performance unrendered -- which is pretty fast considering I am running on an old 2013 Mac Pro with middling 500 gpu processors. Pretty happy to be able to play 8k so easily at 4k. I might have to get a new machine since the 8k files already scrub pretty nicely!

[Homer Dulu]

Where is this screen please? Not sure I need it. If I take 8k footage and make the project a 4k timeline, it will play in better quality mode real time once rendered, or in better performance unrendered -- which is pretty fast considering I am running on an old 2013 Mac Pro with middling 500 gpu processors. Pretty happy to be able to play 8k so easily at 4k. I might have to get a new machine since the 8k files already scrub pretty nicely!

This is in the Mac System Preferences->REDcode

[Jon Dishler]

Thanks, already defaults to GPU decode, but appreciate knowing where it is!

[Sergio Perez]

16" Macbook Pro ( latest maxed out , 2tb internal SSD). Plays back 8K Monstro REAL TIME without problems in an 8K timeline . Yes!

[rand thompson]

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