Not enough Card Slots in a Mac Pro !!

[Jack Jones]

Tell me about it!

I need room for my Matrox MXO2, Matrox MAX card (useful separate as you can encode and monitor at the same time), Fiber Card and then the two graphics cards. That’s already 5 slots!

I’m also after a RED Rocket for Debayering to DPX in advance… It’ll really depend on how close to realtime DaVinci OS X is when it comes to RED or whether it would just be better to go down the DPX route. So that would be a 6th slot.

Maybe I just have to look at running two Mac Pros. One for prepping and encoding (Rocket, MAX, Fiber, ATi) and one for DaVinci OS X (2x nVidia GTX 285 and MXO2/Decklink)… Although I need to get fiber in the DaVinci to make the RAIDshare actually useful! Maybe it’ll have to be a GT 120 and a GTX285??

Anyone have any solutions in mind? Apple to add more slots plus new nVidia options!

[Jeremiah Belt]

I hear ya for sure. I think I have it figured out in my case and it should fit….barely. 2 Video cards, AJA Kona 3, and Raid Card. I’m assuming the RED R3d support will at least be better then Apple Color’s. I have been fine with Apple Color’s support….edit with the RED medium proxies in a 720P timeline, send to Color which will then auto recognize the R3Ds and allow for the conform and color correction up to whatever resolution you like with full exposure control of the R3Ds. Then render, which has been very reasonable on my system, and send back to Final Cut Pro. No pre-transcoding of the RED data at all. That process used to be only half/high debayer but with the latest version of everything it is supposedly Full debayer now. The only down side is the lack of noise control, but I have discovered several tools that solve that problem for me. I think you can skip the RED Rocket in my opinion. If Color can work as quickly as it does with the above workflow I’m sure Resolve will be far better.

[Jack Jones]

I’m imagining it to have similar performance with CUDA as Premiere CS5… Which is pretty amazing!

That said, for feature-length 4k RED I’d rather just debayer in advance to DPX instead of breaking down the timeline into 20 minute segments. That might not be an issue either for DaVinci OS X, I’ll have to do a test run. Stability is important to me in a client environment, allows me to just work without having to keep explaining why I’m doing a workaround to achieve what they want!

I like Color’s workflow for RED, once you’ve got it sussed out then it works perfectly everytime. I’m pretty techie workflow and system wise so I’m sure I’d get a stabile enough technique pretty quickly.

Still, having to use two systems because Mac Pro’s don’t have enough slots will be a pain. Maybe the encoding/assisting machine will just end up being MCR-based and operated remotely when web-encoding or prepping sequences to DPX or otherwise. Might not be the worst idea… Would unclutter the Op suite nicely.

[Luke Maslen]

Hi Jeremiah,

The lack of slots is a problem for some users but should be much of a problem for people working in SD and HD. We’ve had a lot of ideas about how to overcome the slots issue and are fairly confident of finding a solution and then making that information available through the support pages of our website. I’m not sure whether that will happen before or after we ship the first version of Resolve for Mac but we are working on maximizing the already powerful Mac Pro configuration for use with Resolve.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Simon Blackledge]

Would be interesting to see if a pcie expander may do the trick. Suppose it depends on the x lanes are poss.

Possible option could be pcie card > 16bay external raid with 3 more pcie slots internally.

This would give you 24bay DAS plus 7 more slots
https://www.netstor.com.tw/_02/02_detail.php?NTU=

not sure on the speed split between them though :-/

many options.. only gonna get better 🙂

s

[Jeremiah Belt]

Thanks for your response Luke. I think in my case I have figured out the card slot issues so I can still utilize an external RAID for 2K-4K work. However I would like to ask if you could clear up some technical questions. Do you indeed need to have 2 video cards in the system…one for your monitors and one for the CUDA computations of Resolve? I plan to utilize both a GTX285 and a 8800GT, would that be enough power? I would like to just utilize one if I could. Sadly Apple ditches it’s customers far to quickly and I will be forced to run a PC version of the GTX 285 with some injected code that will enable full support of the card in my first gen Intel Mac Pro Dual Quad as long as I utilize a mac compatible 8800GT card to assist. The performance and CUDA benchmarks with this modded setup look very good and promising. With the injected code it utilizes the proper Mac drivers for the GTX285. Much cheaper then buying a whole new Mac Pro just for PCIe 2.0 support, which I doubt the GTX even fully uses. Hopefully some of your ideas for the slot issues utilize some sort of PCIe expander like Simon mentioned. I also think a budget friendly version of something like Nvidia’s Quadro Plex or maybe even the Tesla cards with support for the Mac platform would be a huge boost in performance for DaVinci Resolve on Mac. I’m sure you probably utilize similar tech for the Linux versions. Also does the Resolve auto detect and utilize all CUDA capable video cards attached to a system? Because the use of an expansion rack like this one… https://www.magma.com/expressbox4.html…with 4 more video cards in it would be an amazing performance boost then! Thanks for your time and I hope you can clear up some of these technical questions. There is very little info on the Black Magic site and DaVinci site front end.

[Joseph Owens]

[Jeremiah Belt] “There is very little info on the Black Magic site and DaVinci site front end.”

That much is correct. There may be a reason for that.
But correct me (as I’m sure you will)…
You’ve got an entire junkyard of hacked components ready to go… in an attempt to… I’m not sure what you’re trying to do, actually…. if I were trying to model the problem, I’d be thinking… maybe you’re trying to find free monthly parking in midtown Manhattan.

All to run the world’s most sophisticated color grading software on more-or-less obsolete or unqualified hardware. This is Apple COLOR thinking — if I duct-tape together a Matrox thingee with an outboard nVidia sumthin with a DVI computer monitor thingamajig that I “calibrated” to Photoshop standards, then I’m a world-class DI suite. AVATAR-II, here I come.

I’m sure this is what Blackmagic really wants, you know, to keep the DaVinci name synonymous with the highest quality grading solutions available in the world.

I’m kind of thinking that they should be selling the software with a dongle that checks out the config.
Otherwise, I think they’re shooting themselves in the foot, as Silicon Color found out — the application loses its value almost instantly.

jPo

This IS my blog!

[Arnie Schlissel]

[Simon Blackledge] “Possible option could be pcie card > 16bay external raid with 3 more pcie slots internally.”

Well, as was discussed in this thread (scroll down a ways), all of the cards in the expansion chassis are sharing the bandwidth of the single slot on the Mac that the chassis is plugged into.

Perhaps we should start a petition drive…

Arnie
Post production is not an afterthought!
https://www.arniepix.com/

[Arnie Schlissel]

[Joseph Owens] “I’m kind of thinking that they should be selling the software with a dongle that checks out the config.”

Not a dongle, a system engineer with a mallet. The mallet is for you & me, in case we’re trying to kludge together a DI suite with a Mac mini and an iPad.

Arnie
Post production is not an afterthought!
https://www.arniepix.com/

[Jeremiah Belt]

Ok frankly your getting carried away there Joseph. I am a DaVinci trained colorist and professional. My training was done with DaVinci Systems in Florida on 2K Plus systems and at that time the beta version of Resolve running on a massive Linux cluster. This was well before Black Magic ever stepped into the picture. I by no means am a consumer level pee-on trying to make a DI suite out of an “iPad and Mac Mini” like Arnie put it.

I am running a very well equipped 2007 Mac Pro with 8 3.0Ghz Intel processors, a ton of RAM, over 3TB of online RAID storage, a Kona 3 with Digital SDI out to a calibrated Pro JVC Digital SDI Broadcast monitor (CRT none of this inferior LCD crap), a 30″ Apple Cinema Display, a 24″ secondary monitor, client calibrated monitoring, all running on APC powered backups. I plan to build a full DI theater shortly with a Christie 2K projector, heavily utilizing Cine-tal’s CineSpace color management and calibration software. I had planned on jumping ship and moving to a full Scratch system before the official announcement of the Mac version of Resolve that anyone could of seen coming with the purchase of DaVinci by Blackmagic. I am quite serious with what I do. I have finished many works up to a rez of uncompressed 2K. My work has played at many festivals including the International Santa Barbara film festival and soon possibly Sundance. I am under no dillusions of working on a large budget “Avatar II” feature, but talking about finally moving back to the system and quality of DaVinci that I love…All to better the quality of my work for my clients.

I am simply trying to find a way to leverage my 16K investment for a few more years. Aside from the chipset and CPU versions, the only real difference that may even matter between the current 2009 Mac Pro’s and a 2007 is the change from PCIe 1.0 to 2.0. However performance tests have shown that most video cards don’t even begin to tap the bandwidth of PCIe 2.0. There is nothing “inferior” about a 2007 Mac Pro that doesn’t allow it to run a GTX 285 video card other then the forced driver exclusion by Apple. In a PC workstation the GTX 285 would sing in a PCIe 1.0 slot without any compatibility problems. It’s just forced obsolescence by greedy Apple. A simple driver modification “injection” is all it takes to have the GTX285 running on any MacPro at full speed utilizing Apples drivers.

The DaVinci Resolve heavily utilizes the CUDA processing workflow through Nvidia GPUs. The slight cache and speed differences of the 2009 Nehalem processors wont matter in the Resloves processing. The heavy lifting realtime Linux suites simply tap into clusters of rackmounted GPUs. So in discussing things like the Tesla and external PCI express racks, I’m simply looking for a way to emulate that GPU clustering. An external array of GTX285s if utilized by the CUDA processing of the Mac DaVinci Resolve would be a huge boost in speed. Not to mention, with the proper RAID, begin to approach the Linux cluster performance for a fraction of the cost. All the demos of the Mac version of the DaVinci Resolve were running GTX285 cards.

If I must upgrade my workstation I will. But one cannot be faulted for looking for the best, logical upgrade path to better utilize a current asset. I understand where your coming from…I know many people with the mindset you speak of…however I am not one of them.