resolve for mac- multi core utilization question??

[Ola Haldor voll]

I have the early 2008 myself, currently running GeForce 8800GT and some poor 6GB RAM. I guess I’d have to at least upgrade GPU and RAM. But it’d be very nice to know more about performance on our systems.

[Joseph Owens]

I have to say, that on sober third thought, I’m slowly losing interest.

Not the kind that you have to pay on a third mortgage to re-equip AGAIN… although that is almost certainly one more factor.

Its this. Re-educate, me please, if my apprehensions are unfounded.

The above kind of posts — although so detail-oriented as to be a bit silly, especially since we only know the barest of the system operations and requirements (which are going to become a moving target), do register the uncertainty of adopting a whole new strategy.
It would be nice if computers were designed to utilize their multi-core architecture to bring massive power to single tasks — but in fact they were designed to create compartmentalized virtual machines that were suitable for multi-task. That is to run multiple applications with minimal conflict. This doesn’t really help us in our quest for data throughput. Its great for the book keepers, though, as they can run both Excel (to show that the company is losing money hand over fist) and Word, to dash off memos to everyone to stop using up all the office supplies… dashing off memos.

Then there is the rarely-seen-in-practice mirage of 64-bit processing — which “Snow Leopard” is supposed to bring into common usage. Frankly, for me, Snow Leopard has been (by far) my biggest Apple mistake (of many).

Nearly all of my peripherals, and many applications, failed immediately when I upgraded, but by relentlessly hunting down Beta drivers and as software updates dribble out, I have been able to almost restore the system. All my ProApps still have bugs, though — system resources do not share well, applications suddenly shut down or freeze, codecs are not found, or worse, are mis-interpreted. Whole projects have come back from COLOR garbled or pure green, while the render preview showed an accurate depiction. I had to hand-upgrade SHAKE AGAIN, but this time file-by-file, because the 10-bit processing went south AGAIN. To list a few problems…

So now we’ve got the prospect of BlackMagic Resolve, and the first thing people ask is “do I have to have a controller panel”? Let me get back to this later.

No, the first crucial thing to ask is — we know that the full potential of the application is realized on a Linux proprietary build, hardware and software — but what version of Mac OS is the software going to be comfortable with? I really don’t think its Snow Leopard. Almost nothing actually needs it, but…
then there’s the issue of what operating system is going to come with new MacPros?
So if you’re trying to cram together a BM Resolve into a “recent” MacPro…. and most of the users on this site will be Final Cut editors, and people who have come to COLOR, and I would bet large sums if I wasn’t already a small business owner that most of “us” have exactly the diametrically opposite configurations on our current machines — ATI GPU’s and AJA Video I/O cards, to what is recommended or supported by the RESOLVE software.

So it will come to a choice — ditch COLOR (and to a certain extent the FCP Studio…) to build a dedicated Resolve? Kind of puts paid to the concept of making all this cost effective, especially within the parameters of the “democratized” desktop/laptop production world.

Don’t get me wrong — I would dearly love to have the toolset, and I have worked with the classic daVinci grading approach for far longer than the Apple offering. But this argument is an internal one, concerning features vs. benefits — and clients’ priorities fall squarely in the latter category.

What’s the tradeoff? Its all about workflow when it comes down to business model. Auteurs and service providers will have different priorities. “No-deadline” and strict delivery will have antagonistic demands. I recall the arguments a few years ago regarding the slow through-put that Apple COLOR offered — acceptable interface to making grade decisions, but the round trip… ye gods. If it worked. But after that was a ton of rendering and so on and so forth…. unacceptable for the “daVinci online” crowd, where the project needed to be turned around in hours, not days. I could name names.
And so now we have the same prospect of BM Resolve more or less occupying some kind of in-between territory?

I would like to be clear in my understanding of the workflow. As far as I gather, here is the contrast: Apple COLOR offers a fully non-linear, multi-layer environment, presenting a FinalCut-like timeline, does pretty much everything a grade application should, and then returns new media to a new Final Cut sequence (within the parent project) that is still (in some ways) editable, but can be pasted right back into cousin sequences, but it might take some time, and it doesn’t do any compositing.

Resolve, however, still operates in the exact same way that all daVinci correctors have — essentially a final, locked version tape-to-tape (imported digitized Quicktime), better if its a textless/graphics-free submaster, single-layer, CMX EDL. So it will still require more preparation and post-production. This is more flexible? I also doubt that it can randomly re-render elements in the timeline to take care of tweaks and revisions. Not the way I remember….

Then there is the time factor. Those who cannot tolerate a grade and output over a time-scale that Apple COLOR would represent naturally choose a “real-time” solution, and Resolve would appear to be ready to supply this requirement, and it would be the right choice for them.

But then, there are those who are asking if it “needs” a control panel? Perhaps these are people who have never used one…. or have never had a deadline. It has the feel of either ignorance, naivety, or just not clear on the concept.

Its fine to suggest that, sure, go ahead, do your color doodling on a laptop on the flight home from Vegas…. is this the right message? This is why the whole daVinci brand is being ported to the Mac? I’m honestly curious (to borrow a line from something I’m in the process of finishing…).

jPo

This IS my blog!

[Mika Joon]

Thanks JPO for your response

what mac tower set up do you have, I’m running Snow Leopard and FCS3, logic and CS4 and luckily no major problems.

if any black magic guys could contribute, would my mac set up be sufficient?

here’s my current setup:

– Early 2008 8 core 3.0 ghz
– 18 gigs of ram
– already installed GTX 285
still have GT 8800 that will re- install when I get Resolve (BTW – how can I power both cards when GTX takes both power connectors)

– upto date Snow Leopard
– already bought Extreme HD card

At NAB saw the demo running on a Nahelem 2.93 ghz (current top of the line model)

but how would the program perform on an older machine intel machine

thanks in advance

[Greg Leuenberger]

Hi – sincerely doubt DaVinci will be making use of more than 1 core. It gets it’s processing power from the GPU, so you would be much better off spending your money on the best (NVidia only) GPU you can get. We all need to cross our fingers and hope that there’s a Fermi based NVidia GPU on the way from Apple… and that we can put it in older machines. If not then BM better hire some gfx card driver coders so get the newest NVidia cards (or Teslas) working on OSX. If that doesn’t happen have fun working on 3rd generation hardware (this release would have been much better on Win. 7….).

I’m pretty sure Smoke is heavily multi-threaded…I haven’t had time to run the demo yet but it’s 64-bit only and from an answer I got on another forum it will take advantage of all your cores. 64-bit Apps and Multi-core rendering is coming – and it will be worth it… it’s just taking a while. The 3D apps (I own a production company but I’m a 3D animator by trade) are way ahead of everything else out there – both in terms of being 64-bit and massively multi-threaded. I can peg all 8 of my CPUs at 100% when rendering in modo or Maya. CS5 should help with this as well (CS4 is kind of a hack…but it works).

I suspect the next version of FCP will move us closer to leveraging our cores and 64-bit OS – if not then Apple has failed miserably to leverage it’s hardware and OSX with it’s most professional applications.

Utilizing CUDA like DaVinci does is very much cutting edge – eventually you’ll be able to stack two or three Teslas in a Mac and get ridiculous performance… just not yet (and like I said, fingers crossed on Fermi… or there’s going to be a lot of confused people…) It’s also possible (**possible**) that you could migrate the CUDA processing over to OpenCL – which is an open standard supported by Apple and will work on Nivida and ATI cards. I’ve heard OpenCL doesn’t have the performance of CUDA yet – and any coding of that nature is definitely non-trivial.

best,

Greg

Greg Leuenberger
CEO
Sabertooth Productions, Inc.
http://www.sabpro.com

[Joseph Owens]

[Alejandro Flores] “what mac tower set up do you have”

Its a MacPro 3,1 2×2.8GHz Quad-core Intel Xeon.

jPo

This IS my blog!

[Peter Wollsey]

Then there is the rarely-seen-in-practice mirage of 64-bit processing — which “Snow Leopard” is supposed to bring into common usage. Frankly, for me, Snow Leopard has been (by far) my biggest Apple mistake (of many).

So Jpo…..why didn’t you just use your cloned backup drive of your previous OS and revert to Leopard? Was there something in Snow Leopard you absolutely had to have?

PW

Do not use Color unless you have a compatible video I/O device and broadcast monitor.

[Joseph Owens]

[Peter Wollsey] “why didn’t you just use your cloned backup drive of your previous OS and revert to Leopard?”

Hahahahha….. my what?
Its to prepare for the 64 bit world. There were whispered promises of RED at the speed of thought…
SnoLeper worked for about two weeks and then started failing by increments. So I started fixing it by increments.
It is once again stable, so going back would be going back.

My MBPro laptop is on SnoLeper as well and functions flawlessly. Its quite maddening.

This IS my blog!

[Peter Wollsey]

Oh well…if you want a stable system can’t go past a moviola I guess….

PW

Do not use Color unless you have a compatible video I/O device and broadcast monitor.