Has anyone actually played back the "H" proxy in RT?

[Adam Glick]

Actually, Adam, I was in a FCP suite with Michael :)

I didn't get to see any Scratch while I was there.

DOH! Boy do I feel like a dumb*&%!

We did a demo there a few days ago as well...thought you were talking about that...

;)

[Evin Grant]

Alright, I haven't a clue what happened but I migrated my old system from my G5 including FCS2. And now the 2K proxies playback perfectly in FCP. Still juttering in the QT player but fine in FCP. HORRAY!

However Redalert now crashes on render.

I have a Blackmagic Multibridge Extreme that can do 2K I'll try and configure that tomorrow and see how it goes.

[Jeff Kilgroe]

We've got the 2K "H" playing at solid 24fps to a Sony BVM using Kona3 on a 4-core machine with FCP. Maybe it's the altitude here in Colorado?

Nah... I'm at the same altitude you are, no dice. You told me this on the phone, I'm gonna have to stop by and see it for myself.

In REDCINE half-res medium is RT without breaking a sweat. Half-res high is almost real-time. It's like so close, we're talking 22/23fps. 3.2GHz OctoMac w/8800GT.

All my QT proxies stutter like crazy. For what it's worth, the _F QT proxy plays just as good as all the others. A stuttery 6~8fps, that surprised me. I thought the stuttering was due to QT 7.4.1, but now I'm not so sure this is the reason or even the only reason. I will do some tests this weekend. I found out how to roll back to OSX 10.5.0 w/ QT 7.3 on this system if I bypass the RAID card. Don't know what it will do to me with the 8800GT, but I'll set up and boot from an eSATA drive and play with it.

[Claus Mueller]

Maybe I'm a bit naive, but my 2k workflow on a 2.8 GHz 8-core is as follows:

1) shot in 4k 2:1 with sound
2) Import the 2K "H" proxies in FCP and place the clips (including sound) on a ProRes HQ timeline
3) Cut, CC etc.
4) Export to 2k ProRes and other format options

So this is very simple, I have sound included and don't need Redcine. But I'm just in the beginning to find the right 2k workflow for me.

[Adrian T.]

On my new Mac Pro the H and M proxies run perfectly in FCP, although they need almost all processing power (all eight cores run at 80-100%). So there's no way to play a second H or M track without stuttering.

Oddly enough, a P proxy stutters like crazy in FCP - all cores running at their limit.

In QuickTime player neither of the proxies run without heavy stuttering.

Dual Quad Core Mac Pro 3.2 GHz
MacOS 10.5.1
QuickTime 7.3
8 GB RAM
ATI Radeon HD 2600

Now here comes oddest part:

All proxies run much better on my old MacBook Pro. The P proxy runs smoothly in QuickTime player and in FCP. The M proxy runs almost perfectly in QuickTime player (a few hickups here and there) but perfectly smoothly in FCP. But here I only have a single dual core 2.16 GHz!

Dual Core MacBook Pro 2.16 GHz
MacOS 10.5.1
QuickTime 7.3.1
2 GB RAM
ATI Radeon X1600

Why does the new Mac Pro need almost six times as much processing power for the same task? If this could be brought down to the level of my MacBook Pro we would be able to run several simultaneous QuickTime streams in FCP.

Rob, did you get your Mac Pro now?

[Jeff Kilgroe]

I guess I'll chime in on my FCP experience... Haven't worked with it much since getting my new Mac the other day, but I'll put in some serious FCP time this weekend and give the new RedTrip a try.

None of my proxies play completely smooth in FCP... The _M proxy performs best and actually does almost perfectly at 24/23.98fps. It can skip and catch here and there at 4K 29.97. The _H and _P proxies stutter like crazy. Just for _Fun, I can drag the _F proxy to the viewer window and crash FCP. In playback in FCP, about half the time I get clips that will get stuck on a certain frame and will flash that stuck frame alternating with a blank green frame instead of playing back.

I've found that using Pacifist to roll-back to QT 7.3.1 does nothing to improve this. 7.3.1 only has two effects on this sytem.. 1> QT becomes unstable and will often crash Compressor or cause a system restart when rendering to new QT files. Same with trying to create new QT files from Redcine or Red Alert. 7.4.1 is a lot more stable. 2> 7.3.1 seems to eliminate the stuck frames w/ flashy green problem in FCP. But the proxies are still stuttering the same. So on this system, I'm better off to stick with 7.4.1 and render out DV proxies from Redcine to edit with.

The core usage with REDCODE on this system seems to be way out of wack. It has to be burning up serious CPU cycles that are unnecessary. It's using 8 x 3.2GHz cores at 80% plus decoding R3D for playback. That's significantly more CPU power than on my 18 month old C2D 2.33GHz Macbook Pro. And this new Mac Pro is only 2.5 times as fast for most REDCODE tasks, and sometimes not even that good. But sometimes, some sort of magic may happen and it will run fast, I don't have any answers just yet.

As far as other software goes on this system - Lightwave, Maya, Modo rendering, Compressor, DVDSP, etc.. This system smokes. REDCODE is definitely not seeing the same sort of performance gains that I would expect, definitely needs some optimization.

[Paul Lee]

We're doing the "H" files in FCP at their native resolution and just fine. Not really focusing on the 'ol how fast can you playback in RedCine game.

[JonW]

Hey all,

I've been lurking for the past week, while beating myself up when my _H proxies wouldn't play cleanly - same issue, the footage "strobes" along at something like 10-12 fps. This is in a timeline that matches all aspects of the proxy except for the compressor codec, which FCP switches to ProRes(HQ), and has an orange render bar.

our workstation:
Mac Pro 3Ghz 8core, 8Gb ram, mac 4Gb fiber channel card
ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT 256MB
Ciprico 1.8Tb MediaVault RAID, Kona3 PCIe + Kbox3
Leopard OS X 10.5, FinalCutPro 6, Redcode codec for FCP 1.5
QT 7.3.1

One workaround that I stumbled upon was switching the timeline's timecode base to 59.94. Then the footage plays all frames and looks really really good. Unfortunately, this isn't frame accurate, and using our Kona3 outs to any sort of monitor, the audio gets out of synch. If I switch to a dual monitor setup, running off the dual DVI out from the graphics card, playback is fine and in synch.

While not optimal, the workflow for our first Red job on this system is to get our edit down using these proxies, then convert just the footage we need to 1080p24 and conform the edit (these are 30 second spots, not long format, so that's actually reasonable).

Having scoured reduser and cre@tive c0w for some answers, it seemed like everyone was converting their footage somehow, then editing. I held out, hoping that I could find a solution to edit with just the proxies (glad to hear it's working for some people!). But I haven't seen anything promising (yeah, setting quality to 'Low' doesn't get me anything), so last night I did a test using Compressor - here are the results:

90 Red raw clips ~ 56Gb in total
-
Compressor droplet takes _H proxies and makes 2048x1024 ProRes(HQ) clips
-
ProRes file size: 56Gb in total (nice coincidence that they ended up about the same file size!)

render time: 1hr50min


The only issue I see is that compressor desaturates the clips - could be a proxy thing, could be a codec thing. But I can build the droplet to correct for that I think. Does anyone else already have setting they're happy with and want to share?

and, does anyone know if Red is going to come out with some sort of Compressor type solution? is that what Redline is supposed to do?

Yes, I'm a convert.

JonW

[Evin Grant]

After some more testing it seems I can only get full frame rate in FCP if the RT settings are "Dynamic" for resolution. Which gives me a low quality playback.

[NateWeaver]

Well I'll be damned. Learned a couple things just now, if I would have been curious enough to screw around a little before I actually started cutting!

So before, I cut in _M, thinking that was the only way to get full frame rate. I also cut in a 1024x512 timeline, and was monitoring 720p. It was pretty smooth and not too painful on the scrubbing around in the viewer. I got my cut done (this music vid I just finished), and hand reconnected all the _Ms to _Hs. A pain, for sure, but only took maybe an hour.

So NOW:

Just screwing around, brought all the _Hs into a new project, new bin. Same painful scrubbing in the viewer. Ok, so lets bump timeline quality to Low. MUCH better...this is usable.

Dump into timeline, match resolution and framerate, but let it auto set to ProRes...there we go. Pretty nice. Full frame rate, 1080psf23.98 out the Kona looks a little soft, but not bad.

THEN I turned off "Scrub High Quality". NOW I'm scrubbing I would expect with files with a datarate so low. Buttery smooth. Full framerate in viewer, timeline. Perfect.

Sorry if I'm rediscovering what somebody here has already said, but I had seen precious little discussion of how the quality levels affect performance, and nothing about "Scrub High Quality"!

[edit: All this on a budget 2.66 Intel Quad with Kona LHe. I thought I was gonna have to upgrade to a octo to get this!]