Red Dragon 6K will not play at 1/4 resolution in PP2014 on 2014 I-mac 5K retina SSD, AMD Radeon R9 M295X 4096 MB Graphics card

[David Roth weiss]

It is possible you have other issues too, but I assure you, seamless playback of two to three streams of RED RAW 6K, with color FX and titles, etc., requires a beefy RAID array – and, don’t forget all your audio trks, system overhead, etc, etc, etc…

If you have issues beyond media drive throughout, I think you’d have to post some images and provide some additional into that more precisely explains the issues.

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor/Colorist
David Weiss Productions

David is a Creative COW contributing editor and a forum host of the Apple Final Cut Pro forum.

[Andrew Kimery]

[Shane Ross] “The OS drive might be fast, but it’s busy running the OS. As soon as a system resource is needed, the playback is paused while the drive goes to access what it needs, then it returns.”

I know that was true with high density spinning disks but SSD seek time is typically faster by a factor of 10. If I have time tonight I’ll drop some 5K/6K R3D files onto my 2011 MBP (which has an OWC SSD) and see what type of performance I get in PPro.

[David Roth Weiss] “Shane is correct, except I think he’s recommending an underpowered RAID, as two spinning disks just aren’t going to provide enough throughput for editing RED 6K. A 6, or preferably 8-bay array is the minimum I would recommend.”

Not to be contrarian, but I can play back a single stream of 5K and 6K R3D footage at 1/2 on my 4-bay OWC RAID that gets about 240MB/s read. Just for kicks I stacked up 5 layers of 5K and 6K footage, resized and re-centered them so I can see them all and at 1/4 res my playback is a bit choppy but at 1/8 res I don’t notice any dropped frames and my JKL response is only slightly laggy.

[Jonas Smensgard] “Is the garbled/distorted image at 1/4 or 1/8 something that anyone else has experienced? Is it sure that it is a sign of a “too weak raid system”?”

No, you should not have a garbled or distorted image. Try deleting your media cache, also sometimes just a reboot can fix random problems. And you do have PPro set to use OpenCL GPU acceleration right? You don’t have it set for software only.

[Jonas Smensgard]

Hey Shane! Thanks! I don’t know if I have ” PPro set to use OpenCL GPU acceleration right? You don’t have it set for software only.” How do I check this/set it up?

[Jonas Smensgard]

Thanks Shane!!! This was my only issue “set PPro set to use OpenCL GPU acceleration right? You don’t have it set for software only.”

Figured out how to change it PP in project settings to use OpenCL GPU acceleration and now it plays great off of my 2 disk raid! No distorted image at 1/4 or 1/8 resolution but even better it now plays perfectly at 1/2 resolution and hardly stutters in full resolution! Yeah! (haha what a relief that it was just my ignorance and not the hardware software 🙂

Thanks a million everyone!

[David Roth weiss]

[Andrew Kimery] “Not to be contrarian, but I can play back a single stream of 5K and 6K R3D footage at 1/2 on my 4-bay OWC RAID that gets about 240MB/s read. Just for kicks I stacked up 5 layers of 5K and 6K footage, resized and re-centered them so I can see them all and at 1/4 res my playback is a bit choppy but at 1/8 res I don’t notice any dropped frames and my JKL response is only slightly laggy.”

No worries about being a contrarian Andrew, but what’s good enough for you above is not good enough for me, and certainly not for most of my clients and customers. A single stream at 1/2 res doesn’t cut it, and 5 streams a 1/8 certainly won’t make the grade.

Of course any discussion regarding “what’s good enough” definitely varies from Cow to Cow, as we have so many different levels of users here. And, while I am sensitive to the “do it yourself” crowd here, and the desire to be frugal, as a finishing editor, I never buy anything that doesn’t provide full resolution, seamless playback of any codec I agree to work with on a paying job. Conversely, if I can’t support a codec or a specific resolution, I will pass the job onto others I know who can.

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor/Colorist
David Weiss Productions

David is a Creative COW contributing editor and a forum host of the Apple Final Cut Pro forum.

[Andrew Kimery]

[David Roth Weiss] “No worries about being a contrarian Andrew, but what’s good enough for you above is not good enough for me, and certainly not for most of my clients and customers. A single stream at 1/2 res doesn’t cut it, and 5 streams a 1/8 certainly won’t make the grade.”

My point wasn’t that my 1/8 playback was ‘good enough’ in terms of image quality, but that I could playback 5 streams at 1/8 res on relatively slow storage (240MB/s) yet he couldn’t playback 1 stream at 1/8 res on his significantly faster storage (+700MB/s). The playback tests I did on my machine were purely for troubleshooting/comparison purposes and throughput didn’t seem to be his problem. The distortion he was getting was also not something that usually happens if throughput is a bottle neck.

I agree that everyone has different needs and it seemed like getting smooth playback at 1/2 res would’ve met Jonas’ so recommending higher end gear, which would be more in line with your needs, seems like it would’ve been overkill for Jonas’ needs (and it wouldn’t have fixed the problem anyway). I didn’t see where he said he was online editing/finishing with this machine so 1/2 or 1/4 res playback for offline editing seems perfectly acceptable, IMO. Of course the last TV show I worked on was a mix of 4K and 1080p and the offline edit was done in SD so 1/2 (or even 1/4) res of a 6K file is way nicer than the offline/online situations I’m accustomed too. 😉