Red Rocket

[Joseph Owens]

Have never used a RedRocket card, ever since Apple COLOR started deBayering natively, and now routinely work with UHD RDC files at Quarter ResGood in Resolve with nVidia GPus — primary system is GTX480s in a CUBIX and the other system is a single Quadro4000 for UI, supported with an internal Titan with an external power supply. The only time it gets a bit clunky is when I have a lot of tracking, stabilization and NR (or Mist) applied. I don’t have a 4K display anyway, so not really a deal-breaker to work with the higher source resolutions, but overall, even regular HD RDCs don’t feel much different than ProResHQ.

jPo

“I always pass on free advice — its never of any use to me” Oscar Wilde.

[Eric Santiago]

The old ROCKETs are going as low as 800 USD at REDUSER.

Glad I bought a BT one at 3K 😛

On the Mac side, its still viable in Resolve 11.

Working without it on a non ROCKET system is clunky at export.

[Jonathon Lee]

I’m running 9 of the new Mac Can’s. The 12-core dual D700 systems with 64GB RAM on a fast Stornext SAN seem to be able to decode 4K Red footage @ full/premium 10-bit realtime 23.976. I was quite surprised to see this. No Red Rocket.

– Jonathon

[Eric Santiago]

BMD has done some amazing code with the Resolve 11.
Im hearing great things with fast export with R3Ds.
When I have time Ill test a few nMPs at work.
At home I have an old Mac Pro with ROCKET and R11 flies at DPX export nicely 🙂

[Margus Voll]

Original RR is getting old and has many problems.

I would not buy one!

New fast GPU’s do fantastic job decoding red material als in real time.

It is really up to your config how fast results you have.

In my Old Mac Pro 12 c + gtx 780 i get realtime in HD timeline
without quality loss so i see no reason to play with RR which may fail any given day.

Modern GPU’s seem to be more suitable as they will fail less and are cheaper to replace
if needed plus the speed is also decent.

—

Margus

https://iconstudios.eu
https://vimeo.com/iconstudioseu/videos

DaVinci 10, OSX 10.8.5
MacPro 5.1 2×2,93 24GB
GUI 4000 / GPU GTX 780
DL 4K
Eizo Color
Scope Box
Full Ligthspace CMS

[Stig Olsen]

Hi. I have one. I just want to know if I can free some space and get rid of it. I dont know if I have the original one or not. Stig

[Eric Santiago]

There was two that I know off.
A green and the the RED one.
The latest is the ROCKET-X which to me is way overpriced.

[Arthur Ditner]

It depends. Resolve, Premiere, etc. can all debayer on the GPU now with decent results. However you will still see a performance increase with the Rocket installed. If you can spare the PCI lanes, I suggest keeping it in your system.

Even on a NewMacPro with dual D700 GPUs I still use the Rocket (or Rocket-X for Dragon jobs) using a Magma PCI expander. Thunderbolt expanders are not as fast as PCI lanes (x4 speeds for Thunderbolt, x8 speeds for Thunderbolt 2) but there is still a substantial boost in transcoding performance. Generally we’ll get a +40% fps render speed.

If real-time playback is your thing, you’ll be fine without. However since we are in the business of transcoding we find the Rocket is essential for RED jobs.

Best,
Arthur

[Wezley Joao ferreira]

I tested the RedRocket-X with my full custom iMac 27 and found I could transcode the files faster then I could copy them to my RAID with RedCine-X Pro. There is defiantly a huge difference withy the card and when you have more then one output like offlines for edit and iPad dailies it is a great help.

Wezley Joao Ferreira
3D DIT & Dailies Colorist