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OT – is the “new” Mac Pro a failure
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I love mine. Also my new Retina Macbook Pro. Great with FCPX.
Jim Wiseman
Sony PMW-EX1, Pana AJ-D810 DVCPro, DVX-100, Nikon D7000, Final Cut Pro X 10.2.2, Final Cut Studio 2 & 3, Media 100 Suite 2.1.6, Premiere Pro CS 5 5.5 and 6.0, AJA ioHD, AJA Kona LHi, Blackmagic Ultrastudio 4K, Blackmagic Teranex, Avid MC: Mid 2015 MacBook Pro Retina 15″: 2013 Mac Pro Hexacore, 1TB SSD, 64GB RAM, 2-D500: Helios 2 w 2-960GB SSDs: 2012 Hexacore MacPro 3.33 Ghz, 24Gb RAM, GTX-680, 960GB SSD: Macbook Pro Retina 2015, i7, 500GB, M370X 2GB: Macbook Pro 17″ 2011 2.2 Ghz Quadcore i7 16GB RAM 250GB SSD, Multiple OWC Thunderbay 4 TB2 and eSATA QX2 RAID 5 HD systems -
Hey Walter!
I’m thinking about a Rift machine on the PC side that I’ll also run Avid / Premiere on. dnx universality has freed me up enough to move in that direction. But I’d like Thunderbolt, since I’ve got a dozen T-Bolt RAIDS. What are you using for Oculus? How are those HP Tbolt cards?
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I think failure or not depends on how you look at it. In the beginning people were also holding out on the nMP ’cause it might overheat, it might have some technical flaws because it is the first model. As it turns out the nMP is running smoothly and works great so I don’t see it as a failure.
But,… I would have expected at least a yearly update to the nMP (CPU, GPU, etc). That that hasn’t happened is a failure of Apple more than a failure of the machine they released in 2013.
Perhaps they need to sell all the stocked up parts for the 2013 nMP before an update comes along, I don’t know. Would be nice to see upgrades but as usual there is a big silence. It might suddenly be there, it might not come at all.
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[Mitch Ives] “It could be faster… I’m only using 6 drives. Sixteen would make a huge difference. In addition, SSD’s would definitely speed things up dramatically.”
Thunderbolt 2 is 20 Gb/s, or 2.5 GB/s. Knock a little off for overhead, and the fastest you’ll ever get a TB2 RAID running — no matter how many spindles or SSDs you add — will “only” be somewhere around 2 GB/s.
I’m not saying that’s slow. 2 GB/s is absurdly fast for most applications. It is, however, less than half the speed of the current state of the art and barely fast enough for a single stream of uncompressed 4K at 60fps.
[Mitch Ives] “Why do they need to be internal? The external RAIDs I’m seeing are making huge numbers.”
They don’t need to be internal. But they can be, if you want them to be, unless you have a Mac.
[Mitch Ives] “For balance, you should tell everyone what a 16 SSD RAID cost? Be prepared to pass out people…”
Probably around $9,000 for 16 TB of raw storage and a RAID controller. But there is no solution like this for the Mac platform available at any price.
Walter Soyka
Designer & Mad Scientist at Keen Live [link]
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
@keenlive | RenderBreak [blog] | Profile [LinkedIn] -
[Walter Soyka] “Probably around $9,000 for 16 TB of raw storage and a RAID controller. But there is no solution like this for the Mac platform available at any price.”
Considering I spent around 12K for my first Mac X-serve that probably handled around 4TB (raid 0) at around 300 Gb/s – not bad at all.
Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions
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nothin’ attached to nothin’
“Deciding the spine is the process of editing” F. Bieberkopf -
[Herb Sevush] “Considering I spent around 12K for my first Mac X-serve that probably handled around 4TB (raid 0) at around 300 Gb/s – not bad at all.”
Fun with fractions: you could spend half the cash from that SSD solution on a Pegasus2 R8 with twice the capacity and a quarter of the performance.
Walter Soyka
Designer & Mad Scientist at Keen Live [link]
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
@keenlive | RenderBreak [blog] | Profile [LinkedIn] -
[Walter Soyka] “2 GB/s is absurdly fast for most applications. It is, however, less than half the speed of the current state of the art and barely fast enough for a single stream of uncompressed 4K at 60fps.”
According to my calculations, the data rate for DCI 4k @ 60 fps is 759 megabytes/sec. See https://www.theblackandblue.com/2011/03/12/how-to-calculate-red-camera-data-rates/
The HP Z820 workstations used to edit Gone Girl “only” had 1.8 to 2.6 gigabytes/sec I/O bandwidth:
https://www.4kshooters.net/2014/08/13/david-finchers-gone-girl-1st-feature-film-shot-entirely-in-6k/They probably shot it using 4:1 or 6:1 “Red Raw” compression which would lower the data rate (at 4:1) to about 167 megabytes/sec. If anyone knows otherwise, please correct this.
It was edited essentially using off-line proxies on a 1080p timeline, which greatly reduced the required I/O bandwidth. Of course you ultimately need to conform the footage so at some point you have to process the entire full-resolution locked cut, probably in uncompressed format. For a 2.5 hr film that would be about 6 terabytes (if 6K), however I think the final frame size was 4k.
Most people are not shooting in 6k Red Raw, but the above data rates were sufficient to handle that, and capacities were very roughly in the 2 GB/sec range.
In a more approachable scenario, the Mac Pro that Mark Spencer used on this job could move 2 terabytes within 45 min, or a sustained average rate of 741 megabytes/sec. That is simply using Pegasus RAID arrays, nothing exotic (start at 03:45):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qvl49PvHdZU -
[Joe Marler] “According to my calculations, the data rate for DCI 4k @ 60 fps is 759 megabytes/sec. See https://www.theblackandblue.com/2011/03/12/how-to-calculate-red-camera-data-...”
Your calculation as described is for RED data, not uncompressed RGB frames like a finishing system would ultimately use.
One frame = 4096 x 2160 = 8,847,360 pixels.
8,847,360 pixels * 3 channels * 10 bits per channel = 265,420,800 bits, divided by 8 bits per byte = 33,177,600 bytes, divided by 1024 = 32400 KB, divided by 1024 = 31.640625 MB per frame.
31.640625 MB per frame times 60 frames per second = 1898.4375 MB/s.
That’s not a bad middle ground assumption. You could knock some data rate off with chroma subsampling, or you could pile some more back on with 16-bit half-float RGB.
BTW, these numbers, while uncommon, are actually real. VR has big needs for both large rasters and high frame rate. This matters a lot less in editorial and a lot more in compositing/finishing.
[Joe Marler] “The HP Z820 workstations used to edit Gone Girl “only” had 1.8 to 2.6 gigabytes/sec I/O bandwidth:”
Gone Girl was only 24 fps, right? So you can more than halve the bandwidth we were calculating before.
10-bit uncompressed 6K @ 24fps is about 1666 MB/s.
Walter Soyka
Designer & Mad Scientist at Keen Live [link]
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
@keenlive | RenderBreak [blog] | Profile [LinkedIn] -
[Walter Soyka] “[Joe Marler] “The HP Z820 workstations used to edit Gone Girl “only” had 1.8 to 2.6 gigabytes/sec I/O bandwidth:”
Gone Girl was only 24 fps, right? So you can more than halve the bandwidth we were calculating before.
10-bit uncompressed 6K @ 24fps is about 1666 MB/s.”Gone Girl was edited using ProResLT files and the edit was handled on MacPro towers with high-end Nvidia cards. The RED processing and prep before the grade was handled on HP workstations. RED files were converted to DPX for deliver to the grade. That was done at Light Iron using Quantel Pablo systems.
https://digitalfilms.wordpress.com/2014/11/07/gone-girl/
– Oliver
Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com -
[Walter Soyka] “You can hit about 5 GB/s in a Z840 with an internal RAID of 16 SSDs…the fact remains that there is simply no way to get it on the nMP.
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The nMP has three TB2 buses. Even if you leave one bus for a 4k display, you could theoretically put multiple large RAID arrays on the other buses. That could potentially be six Pegasus R8s or SSD RAIDs. AnandTech achieved 1.38 GB/sec on one TB2 bus of the nMP. That was an actual real-world test, not a theoretical calculation. That would imply that around 3 GB/sec total should be achievable. I wonder has anyone ever tested that?
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