Windows Thunderbolt + PPro + Red Rocket = cool demo

[David McGavran]

While I appreciate the demo and Dave H always does a great job, I think it would be a more impressive demo if he were using the Blackmagic card to output to an HD-SDI monitor. In most of the demo's for Premiere Pro the first thing that gets "adjusted" is the fractional playback setting 1/2 1/4 1/8 to get realtime playback. From my experience with Blackmagic using an Extreme HD 3D card, there is no fractional playback. Its full resolution or nothing. This in my opinion has been the weakest link for Premiere, getting the app to work with the third party I/O vendors. Haven't seen any real improvements in the CS-5 series after a year of waiting. Anxious to see what CS-6 brings.

Ray

I guess if you could hear me you would hear me humming happily

Cheers

Dave

[dhelmly]

Just thought I'd respond to a few questions (as usual, Dave McGavran and I are in sync) on the Thunderbolt (TB) demo.

No real reason I chose to show it to run under Windows 7 other than I've been surprised that we haven't seen any demos of Windows running TB before now. It actually works pretty good in it's current beta state. That said the Mac OS kicks @ss running the same config. Please keep in mind that half the battle is getting alpha/beta Windows drivers for each TB device. All TB devices need drivers at some level. There are also various rules about the order of TB devices in the chain and the number of devices. Laptops and desktops have different TB controller chips and each has different limitations - Welcome to what I call THUNDER WARS.

The Mac + TB is really last years news and we all want more TB peripherals to start shipping and to start showing Intel and PC makers that there is lots interest on both sides and it will benefit all TB users. I have no preference on OS and use both everyday.

Adobe and Intel are working weekly on various things and TB is near the top of the list. They have been great about picking Adobe ProVideo to partner on all things TB and we want to insure our Premiere & AE users we are running all on cylinders when it comes to TB. I have provided TB devices to both engineering teams and you can bet they are making good use of them ;) Yes, Dave McGavran and his Premiere Pro development team have been busy.

I hope to arrange a very cool demo at NAB where users can see a similar TB demo for themselves. I'll warn the mac users now, the demo will more than likely be a PC. Apple has ZERO interest in providing hardware to show our Pro Video solutions at events. I buy my own Mac towers (personal expense) and Adobe provides the Apple laptops. The PC makers go out of their way to help (Hp is #1 in my book for supporting us, no questions asked) . Several PC TB makers have already contacted me. I have not picked the TB hardware partner yet for NAB. I just wanted to get that out of the way as I know people will comment. It's not an anti-mac thing, I just feel strong about the partners that support my field team.

A note about the audio, the Sonnet prototype enclosure I'm using has very loud fans and I had to do some quick sound clean up before posting. I was limited to the short distance of the TB cable as you can see at the end of the demo, the Snowball mic is too close to the whole setup. I could have taken the time to make a more professional video but I felt I needed to keep it what it was - an experiment and more of blog video. The final version of the Sonnet Chassis is now at Intel for final approval and yes it has quiet fans.

You have to admit, doing ingest on the BMD box and playback on the Sonnet/Rocket via TB at the same time really gets you thinking about whats possible.

None of this would have happend if the 4 companies did not communicate as often as we do. Intel, RED, Sonnet, and BMD all supported Adobe in showing this. It's all back to partners working together - thanks to all of them.....

DKH

[Brad Allen]

Nice to hear updates like this Dave ^^. Thanks for sharing - looking forward to seeing what the next year holds for Adobe. Hopefully I will get to meet you at NAB this year :)

[Mohammed El Sharqawy]

is it possible to a GPU beside the rocket in the same box and get GPU accelerated fx?

[Steve Johnson]

Dave,

Thanks for these great comments and to hear real life experiences and honest experiences coming out.

Look forward to more videos showing what is possible.

Would be interesting to see what the playback or transcoding using the Sonnet with a RR card in it, and then transcoding the R3D files to say ProRes or DNxHD and moving them to say a TB Promise RAID - how taxing that is on the system.

Again, thanks Dave. Hope to hear more from you.

:))

[dhelmly]

Currently, it's not possible to get GPU cards to work in TB chassis. Believe me, I have tried... working with Intel, Sonnet, and NVIDIA on this. The current issue is that every TB driver needs to aware of the TB chain at all times. It needs to know what to do when a device is disconnected and how to reset. In the case of graphics cards (GPUs) , a lot things need to happen in order to get a monitor to light up . Anyone dealing with the new Apple 27" or worse the new Apple 27" TB display will know what I mean. These are gorgeous displays (I own 2 of each) but work entirely differently on a TB chain. Again the driver needs to know how to deal it - i also saw another (fairly ugly) TB display at CES and it will be interesting to see what happens as more devices roll out. In my discussions with Intel & NVIDIA & Sonnet, they all want GPU support at some point but there appears to be a few more hurdles while they work out the spec. All in all , I've been pretty happy with TB and multiple devices.

On the Transcoding side, the good news is that the Rocket and Intel processors can work together to get the encoding done. Let's get Dave McGavran's opinion from an engineering side. I can run some test.

[roryhinds]

anyone know when Thunderbolt is coming to PC's?

[Jaakko Rinne]

Currently, it's not possible to get GPU cards to work in TB chassis. [...] In the case of graphics cards (GPUs) , a lot things need to happen in order to get a monitor to light up .

Does this mean that you can't use a GPU in a TB chassis even if you use it just for CUDA processing (no monitor attached) or just that you can't use it with a monitor?

[David McGavran]

Does this mean that you can't use a GPU in a TB chassis even if you use it just for CUDA processing (no monitor attached) or just that you can't use it with a monitor?

That is a good question.. We don't have enough of these chassis's to work with yet...

Cheers

Dave

[Sanjin Jukic]

Magma ExpressBox 3T looks even more attractive with three PCIe 2.0 expansion slots (Two x8 and One x4)