Sonnet Express Pro & Red Rocket

[gbalaji]

At-last received my Sonnet Express Pro and today installed Red Rocket with latest drivers.Without any hassel when restarted the 17' Macbookpro while connected detected RedRocket as 4X while RedCineX Pro 14 opened and encoded more than 1000 clips worth of 5K Epic footage to 1080p24 DNxHD 36 MXF @ full debayer without any issues as full speed.I would like to know what would 8X would improve in my current workflow.Trying tomorrow connecting ATTO SAS card and backing LTO-5 Tapes using HP LTO-5 Tape Drive(SAS)


The Sonnet Express Pro works great in 4X speed, but has issue sometimes on certain clips, which throws decoding error on certain frames & System hangs and was forced to remove express pro and encode using CPU.

Attached screenshot of setup which we are running. Itprovides two PCI slots which would be of great help for On-Set LTO Backup with additional Atto SAS card in second slot.

[Kirk.Attard]

Glad its working well. Liking the idea I can use the red rock with more than one computer.

[Eric Santiago]

Thanks for your review gbalaji :)
A lot of us are looking forward to your findings.
Hopefully you can report back with real world results.
I'm just glad to hear you can get 4X to work with ROCKET :)

[Eric Santiago]

Here is Jeff Kilgroe's words:
http://www.reduser.net/forum/showthr...=1#post1034465

[Kristian Kettner]

We just tested our Sonnet + Redrocket + early 2011 MBP today all I can say is WOW.
Download the RR driver plugged in the TB cable, and we where flying ( compared to before )

[Mike Halper]

I got my Sonnet today and I agree. Wow. In RCXP and Premiere Pro I get 5K realtime playback at 1/2 debayer and 4K at full debayer. RCXP chomped through transcoding 308 gigs of 4K and 5K R3D's with color correction to ProRes HQ in 87 minutes. This is all on a new Retina MBP with 2.7GHz i7 and 16GB RAM and the hard drive was an OWC Qx2 RAID-5 connected via a LaCie Thunderbolt eSATA hub. In Premiere Pro CS6 it worked in both a 5K sequence and a 1080p sequence outputting to an external monitor via a Blackmagic Design Intensity Extreme Thunderbolt.

[Sergio Perez]

I got my Sonnet today and I agree. Wow. In RCXP and Premiere Pro I get 5K realtime playback at 1/2 debayer and 4K at full debayer. RCXP chomped through transcoding 308 gigs of 4K and 5K R3D's with color correction to ProRes HQ in 87 minutes. This is all on a new Retina MBP with 2.7GHz i7 and 16GB RAM and the hard drive was an OWC Qx2 RAID-5 connected via a LaCie Thunderbolt eSATA hub. In Premiere Pro CS6 it worked in both a 5K sequence and a 1080p sequence outputting to an external monitor via a Blackmagic Design Intensity Extreme Thunderbolt.

Very promising! Still looking into which enclosure to get, but that is basically the setup I'm planning for myself. Thanks for the impressions!

[Mike Halper]

I did see this mentioned anywhere, so thought I'd ask. Is anyone else's Sonnet box pretty loud? The fans seem almost too loud.

[Jeff Kilgroe]

Sonnet box is pretty quiet compared to everything else. But I think it could be (and I would like it to be) quieter. On my desk with the iMac setup, the two noise offenders are the Promise R6 RAID. It's going to be relocated as soon as those fiber optic TB cables start shipping in the next couple months. The other offender is the HP LTO-4 tape unit. I understand the need to keep these enclosures economical, however I think most users would be OK with costs going up a by $5 ~ $10 in most cases to make them nearly silent. To me it's very important in a desktop-use environment. Apparently the engineers designing some of these products don't understand that. Thankfully I only have to turn on the LTO drive when I need to use it and it's connected to the Sonnet box with an ATTO host card inside. Both it and the R6 RAID can go somewhere else once I have that fiber cable.

[Kennan Ward]

Jeff,

Thank you for all your sharing of information over the years. I read your posts with confidence!

This is the first I have heard of fire optic TB cables! Who, what, & where, please?

Thank you again!

Kennan