Do I need to have a red Rocket card to run r3d files in real time?

[Angelo Lorenzo]

As of now, I don’t believe the RED SDK used in Premiere allows for GPU debayering – I’m not even sure if the SDK includes it as it seems only Redcine supports it.

In other words, GPUs won’t add much if anything in terms of full debayer quality playback/export in Premiere.

Red Rocket supports the One, Epic, and Scarlet. The Red Rocket X is needed to support Epic Dragon.

A modern system can playback at 1/4~1/8th quality reliably, but you’ll feel the pain during export.

——————–
Angelo Lorenzo

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[Myles Conti]

It depends on your machine setup. I work with native R3D files all the time in Premiere without a Red Rocket card. Depending on the size of the R3D files, set your playback settings accordingly. I usually have them set at 1/2 or 1/4 res, and on my new Mac Pro they play back quite smoothly, without the need for rendering. On my new machine I’m even sending my timeline to Speedgrade, applying a quick grade to the rushes, sending back to Premiere and editing, all without rendering, and able to work fine.

At 1/4 res 4k footage looks about the same as Standard Def when editing, and 1/2 res looks close to HD.

If you’re working with Dragon 6K files, you may have to drop don to 1/8 res (depending on your machine) I’m currently editing a job shot on Dragon 6K on the new Mac Pro with a speed grade look applied, and it works fine at 1/4 res – outputting to my HD broadcast monitor.

If you’re ending up outputting HD – then it makes sense to work on a HD timeline and scale to fill, and you can probably work at 1/2 res.

Hope this helps – the only time you will need to go higher is for output.

As for processing time, I recently did a 2 cam job where we shot Dragon 6K and Scarlet MX 4K. The rushes were given a grade in Resolve before being exported at highest output quality to ProRes HQ HD files. On a new Mac Pro the Scarlet footage was rendering at real time (while applying grade), whereas the Dragon footage was rendering between 11-15 fps (depending on the complexity of the grade).

Myles Conti
Director/Editor
contibrosfilms.com

[Angelo Lorenzo]

[Myles Conti] ” On a new Mac Pro the Scarlet footage was rendering at real time (while applying grade), whereas the Dragon footage was rendering between 11-15 fps (depending on the complexity of the grade).”

Interesting, I wonder if Resolve has integrated the GPU acceleration. Those numbers would sound about right on a dual GPU system if so.

edit: Just looked it up on Google, they added support in 10.1.3 so it looks like GPU support is trickling into other apps; I guess that’s what I’ve missed while being on back-to-back shoots.

Not yet in Premiere so far as I can tell. Premiere and Speedgrade are very good about their quality selection directly controlling debayering quality though. Speedgrade also applies its looks via the GPU shader which is why you (Miles) are seeing good performance there on the new Mac.

——————–
Angelo Lorenzo

Need to encode ProRes on your Windows PC?
Introducing ProRes Helper, an awesome little app that makes it possible
Fallen Empire Digital Production Services – Los Angeles
RED transcoding, on-set DIT, and RED Epic rental services
Fallen Empire – The Blog
A blog dedicated to filmmaking, the RED workflow, and DIT tips and tricks
Can your post production question fit in a tweet? Follow me on Twitter

[Chris Borjis]

CC 2014 introduced 4k GPU debayer without the need for a rocket.

[Angelo Lorenzo]

Thanks for the heads up. That’ll come in handy if/when I need to run the rocket in another program while spitting out other files in Premiere.

——————–
Angelo Lorenzo

Need to encode ProRes on your Windows PC?
Introducing ProRes Helper, an awesome little app that makes it possible
Fallen Empire Digital Production Services – Los Angeles
RED transcoding, on-set DIT, and RED Epic rental services
Fallen Empire – The Blog
A blog dedicated to filmmaking, the RED workflow, and DIT tips and tricks
Can your post production question fit in a tweet? Follow me on Twitter

[Ericbowen]

The GPU accelerated Debayering works for raw codecs so far including all the R3D 4k, 5K, and 6K along with DNG. 5K 98 frame media plays back at 24 or 60 frame realtime at full resolution preview with the correct setup. Even 6K can on a few systems. The Red Rocket card though lowers the decoding load on the CPU to a fraction of what it is normally. This allows far more complex timelines or FX work. Along with that the performance in Davinci is significantly effected by the rocket with R3D currently. 32GB of ram though is not enough to for 4K+ media and 2x GPU’s. I suggest atleast 64GB if 2 video cards are used.

Eric-ADK
Tech Manager
support@adkvideoediting.com

[Adrian Tecson]

We’ve been editing on r3d files since Premiere Pro v 6 and have had very little issues. The new Red Epic files though are quite heavy and have required us to find a workaround, such as exporting proxies. It is a pain, but until we upgrade our current workstations, this is our best solution.

Adrian