Red Rocket 2.0 ?

[Sanjin Jukic]

Norbert,

you must have a RR card to finally get a real time RAW playback, initial grading and fastest transcoding of R3D in RCX Pro or the major apps that support RR (DaVinci, Baselight, Smoke, Scratch, Pablo, etc,...).

Also I have doubts that is coming up any soon RR 2.0 or similar because the present RR card is made by the industry leader of all JPG 2000 encoding cards a German company DVS, makers of Clipster.

And not only with this example because RED depends a lot of third part development something like with a crucial Dragon sensor upgrade, etc,...

RED is a very small company and can't do it everything in time as we wanted...

[Greg M]

As computers become more powerful and the software continues to improve, the current Rocket becomes less crucial. I own two, one in a Mac, the other in a PC, and while they're nice, I'm not so inclined to purchase any more of them.

There is no computer fast enough to replace what the Rocket can do. Get the Rocket now if you need one. Highly unlikely you will see a new version anytime soon. The Red Store has had BT units available in stock for a week now. I ordered another one last week. Should be here Monday.

IMO the Red Rocket is essential for anyone dealing with Red footage.

[Axel Mertes]

Norbert,I

you must have a RR card to finally get a real time RAW playback, initial grading and fastest transcoding of R3D in RCX Pro or the major apps that support RR (DaVinci, Baselight, Smoke, Scratch, Pablo, etc,...).

Also I have doubts that is coming up any soon RR 2.0 or similar because the present RR card is made by the industry leader of all JPG 2000 encoding cards a German company EVS.

And not only with this example because RED depends a lot of third part development something like with a crucial Dragon sensor upgrade, etc,...

RED is a very small company and can't do it everything in time as we wanted...

Sanjin,

You mean DVS - not EVS. And sorry, they are surely not market leader in the JPEG2000 sector. They rely on Analog Devices JPEG2000 chips as far as I know.

Market leaders would be IMHO companies like IntoPix, who do 8k real time JPEG2000 via FPGA on a single card.

Cheers,

Axel

[Sanjin Jukic]

Sanjin,

You mean DVS - not EVS. And sorry, they are surely not market leader in the JPEG2000 sector. They rely on Analog Devices JPEG2000 chips as far as I know.

Market leaders would be IMHO companies like IntoPix, who do 8k real time JPEG2000 via FPGA on a single card.

Cheers,

Axel

Sorry because of that typo, now corrected!!!

But to me a leader means here more like a high quality product that DVS definitely has it with RR.

[Mark Toia]

Come on RED, show us some portable red rocket looooooooove......

[Jeff Kilgroe]

There is no computer fast enough to replace what the Rocket can do.

On that point, I must disagree. However, what is really holding back current systems is the software. As great as much of it is, Adobe MPE, etc.., the bulk of the resources on the latest 8-core or better systems still goes unused most of the time.

Get the Rocket now if you need one. Highly unlikely you will see a new version anytime soon. The Red Store has had BT units available in stock for a week now. I ordered another one last week. Should be here Monday.

IMO the Red Rocket is essential for anyone dealing with Red footage.

Definitely agreed on these statements here. If you work with RED footage on a regular basis and don't have time to waste, you will want (or most likely, NEED) a Rocket. Although, that threshold where it will become obsolete is coming closer with each iteration of new CPUs and continuous updates to the popular software applications most people use. And the current Rocket isn't going to help us if Dragon and other future sensor and camera designs continue to increase the number of pixels and the amount of data each of those pixels represents.

[Joseph S.]

I can do some tests if you guys want tomorrow on a dual E5-2690 setup.

I don't have a redrocket, so I'll just see how close I can get to real time playback.

Plus, the price difference on a really fast machine, far exceeds a redrocket card price.

[Gabriele Turchi]

i have 3 Red rockets , so i am not testing too much without RR ,
But it happened to try , and i was surprised that EPIC footage 5K on a MacPro 8 Core using latest RCXPRO could not playback realtime and smoothly all the way even at 1/8 resolution ...

is it normal ?

thanks

g

[Jeff Kilgroe]

Dual E5-2690 is a powerhouse for sure, but like I said above, and you'll see for yourself if you run your tests, the software is the crux here. As incredibly awesome as REDCINE-X Pro is, the team at RED has primarily focused on optimizing for the Rocket and not for systems with a huge number of CPU cores. Additionally, as far as transcodes are concerned, you're going to be additionally bottlenecked by other factors -- storage speed, how well your codec software scales on the system and more.

@Gabriele, your playback experience may be normal, depending on the configuration of that Mac Pro. If it's an '08 model, then yes, it will choke at 1/8th res just due to the speed of the memory, let alone other factors. My 2010 12-core Westmere Mac Pro (just sold it recently) could play back 5KFF EPIC files at 1/8th resolution just fine. My '09 Nehalem tower does OK too, but stutters on occasion. Both of those systems should be able to handle it at half-res full or better, if their CPU power was used to its fullest... It's not. A dual E5-2690 like Joseph is talking about *should* be able to play back in full resolution, full quality, real-time.. Or at least get real close. The software isn't written to exploit that hardware and make it so. It's funny, old REDCINE (before the X), could play back 4K 16:9 RED files at 24fps without skipping a beat, full resolution, full quality, on an overclocked quad-core PC in 2009. That old REDCINE was far more multi-threaded than the current version. Even then, it scaled well to 4 CPUs well, but beyond that didn't capitalize on much more.

Of course, 5KFF from an EPIC is nearly 4X as intensive per frame for decompression and debayer.... Then again, the current crop of 12 and 16 core systems are more than 6X the computer too...

I'm not bashing the state of current software tools directly. Proper multithreaded programming is difficult and with something like the Rocket available, has not been the most ideal or easiest solution. Better to use the custom hardware solution that was made to do the job. Software will eventually catch up... It pretty much has to... Otherwise people are going to really start questioning why they even bother to purchase these monster systems.