Mac Pro 2014 GPU

[Peter Chamberlain]

You will not get a speed improvement using ThunderBolt and a GPU, even if you can get it to work. TB2 has a much lower bandwidth than the GPU buss connection to the MacPro motherboard and CPU.
Try using a different source disk than the target disk.. both Thunderbolt. Sometimes the speed tests are misleading when it comes to Read only or Write only compared to Read/Write.
You can test this by rendering to your SSD a small sample.

[Rick Lang]

What is the size of your internal flash? Did you go with the 1 TB option?

Rick Lang

iMac 27” 2.8GHz i7 16GB

[Búi Baldvinsson]

I actually just went for the 500gb drive…
But I am upgrading that one soon.

Bui Baldvinsson
DIT / Wrangler
Iceland.

MacPro 2014 2nd Gen.
12 Core
2x D700 GPU card
128GB RAM

[Rick Lang]

Búi, that may not help increase your Arri raw renders, but the experience of a few people here indicates that there is a general performance boost with the larger flash memory. I don’t think it’s been discussed much, but considering your configuration, you want to keep everything in balance. Peter’s suggestion of separating your input from your (render) output may help significantly if you can keep the drives on a separate TB2 controller. As you know, you have three TB2 controllers that support the six TB2 ports plus the HDMI port. And I’m sure we all really need at least two Promise Pegasus2 R8s! Seriously though, just putting the rendered data on an external SSD may help and try to keep that on a separate TB2 controller.

Perhaps Peter Chamberlain knows if your next project will perform faster renders after you upgrade to Resolve 11.

I didn’t realize there was a second generation of the Mac Pro yet, but I’ll look into that. I assume it was minor.. If you have a moment, you can tell me what was improved. Improving the price, I’m thinking be nice.

Rick Lang

iMac 27” 2.8GHz i7 16GB

[Marc Wielage]

Arri has an interesting white paper on how best to use ArriRaw in post:

https://www.arri.com/camera/alexa/workflow/working_with_arriraw/mastering/color_grading/

I personally think LogC ProRes 444 looks perfectly fine, but if you have the (massive) horsepower required, you could theoretically use the original ArriRaws. I think for 90% of most projects intended for indie release and TV, the ProRes is all you need. I don’t think an off-shelf Mac will be enough for ArriRaw; I think you’d need a heavy-duty 8-proc Linux system with very, very fast drives to handle this.

[John Sellars]

Can you tell us the exact size and aspect ratio of your footage? I would like to test this on my system with the footage from here:

https://www.arri.com/camera/alexa/learn/alexa_sample_footage/

I assume this is transcode only… no nodes right?

2012 12 core 2.4GHz
GTX 780 6GB
24GB RAM
internal RAID 0 480MB/s

[John Sellars]

I get 32 FPS rendering 2880×1620 to DNxHD 185, and 28 FPS for 2880×2160. That is for reading from, and writing to my internal RAID.