Upcoming 4k gigs – can a tower mac pro & usb3 or esata cut it or is it only TB land?

[Bryan Roberts]

Found this interesting external usb3 or esata iii enclosure, hmmmm…

https://www.addonics.com/products/rt3daheu3.php

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[Shane Ross]

I don’t see any speed specs on that enclosure. 4K will require a lot…I think trying it on USB3 will be a stretch. I think you need Thunderbolt or SAS at least…Fiber. Something in the 600MB/s+ range. But it depends a lot on the codec of 4K you’ll be working with too. Raw? Converted to ProRes? Because depending on the format, you might need a lot more processor power than a 5 year old computer can provide. NVidia CUDA card help as well. I know my 2012 laptop can run circles around your current tower.

Shane
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[Bryan Roberts]

Hi Shane,

I’m thinking R3D files or even ProRes 4k files (sorry for the vague-ness, both projects are still in prepro, I just forsee the client asking if I can handle 4k files just because that’s the cool thing right now and them expecting me to be able to handle some sort of 4k goodness – it’s not that I even have a 4k TV setup for them but they’d never know between a 4k or 1080p, they just want to know that the editing files are in fact 4k). The GTX780 offers almost the most CUDA cores you can get in any card so I was thinking that would help quite a bit (it certainly has made Premiere an absolute monster). Is the only reason your 2012 laptop can run circles around my tower because of Thunderbolt? In the Geekbench breakdown which just measures processor power, I still have the 8th fastest factory mac ever produced – the fastest laptop doesn’t come until 13th, a 2013 Macbook Pro…

https://browser.primatelabs.com/mac-benchmarks

Just trying to figure out if investing further in my 2009 tower with the anticipation of 4k coming my way (nothing uncompressed but whatever “normal” 4k editing format ends up being the next year) is worth it or if the lack of thunderbolt is going to crush any plans to cut in any kind of 4k the next couple years.

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[Shane Ross]

[Bryan Roberts] ” Is the only reason your 2012 laptop can run circles around my tower because of Thunderbolt?”

Nope, processor.

[Bryan Roberts] ” In the Geekbench breakdown which just measures processor power, I still have the 8th fastest factory mac ever produced”

You said 2009 MacPro, right? That’s like 97th on the list. Measuring 2117. My mid-2012 MacBook Pro is 14th on that list, measuring 3035. Almost a third faster. My MacPro is 2008, 3.0 Octocore with 16GB of RAM, and a card with CUDA. My MacBook Pro flies around it…same RAM, no CUDA.

Thunderbolt is slower than most PCIe connections. THunderbolt 1 is 4x…like a normal PCIe slot. Thunderbolt 2 (on current macs) is 8x. My laptop only has TB 1…so my Caldigit HDOne runs slower on it than on my tower. 400MB/s on the tower, 300MB/s on the laptop, with a Thunderbolt bridge. Enough for 1 stream of 4K.

Your machine might be able to handle 4K, but it won’t be as smooth as a current MacMini, or laptop, or even iMac. Just FYI.

Shane
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[Ericbowen]

You will find your processing for Red at 4K will be limited by the CPU’s more than the storage with the 2009 Mac Pro. An E-Sata raid 0 would be fast enough to handle the red files. An internal raid 0 would also handle it. Beyond that you will likely be looking at a new system if you move to a 4K workflow.

Eric-ADK
Tech Manager
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[Bryan Roberts]

Hi Shane – click 64bit Multicore since Mavericks is 64 bit and the Mac Pro is a multicore system (and programs like Premiere use multicores). My 2009 2.93 is the 8th fastest mac available per this list – 17k is the score and fares better than the 4 core trashcan. What am I missing here?

I downloaded a 4K R3D test file to see how my system would handle it playing off my internal 3 year old SSD. It will not scrub or play back smoothly at full res or 1/2 but at 1/4, it responds like a ProRes 1080 file, all scrubbing is as responsive as it could possibly be and playback is perfect. The bar above the clip in the timeline is always yellow.

So now the big question is – considering there’s a yellow bar, does that mean that my system (2.93 octo, 32gb ram, GTX780) can handle the processor side that’s required of 4K native R3D files but my current drive speed is the bottleneck to getting full res playback? Since 1080 is exactly 1/4 of 4k and I have three 1080 monitors, will I even see any degradation of quality if I’m always playing back 4K at 1/4 res in Premiere on 1080 monitors?

Thanks all…

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[Bryan Roberts]

UPDATE – when I drop MB Mojo onto the R3D clip in a 4k R3D timeline, the timeline goes from yellow to red but it still plays back without dropping frames and scrubs perfectly so I don’t THINK I’m running at the very limit of my tower but I must be close. However while I can change mojo settings in real time on say native 5D footage, when I change parameters of Mojo on the R3D clip while it’s playing back in real time, it does video stutter just for a second to make the change. Finally though, MB Looks is choppy on native R3D 4k files unless I drop down to 1/8 res. Interesting. Still for anything other than a concert w/ multiple streams of video, this seems to be plenty powerful for a native R3D 4k project…

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[Alex Udell]

Aren’t they changing the DeBayering of the Red Ftg to the GPU in the next update?

Seems like this would have an impact on your perf with Red in the same tower.

[Bryan Roberts]

I read that as well, I think in the NAB announcement – could be awesome but also gives me pause to having just purchased a GTX 780. Hopefully they don’t exclude that card but with how powerful the 780 is, I doubt they would.

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[Ericbowen]

No the Drive speed is not limiting you to 1/4 resolution for preview. The CPU processing is. If 1/4 Resolution for playback is fine for you then you are good with a raid 0 setup. If not then you are at the limits of that Mac without a Rocket card. Red is extremely CPU intensive to decode and threads very well in Adobe. If you have the threads such as my 12 Core/24 Thread E5 V2 Xeon PC then 1/2 resolution is handled easily even at 4.5 or 5K. That is the difference between the CPU’s you have and the current Ivy-E platform.

Eric-ADK
Tech Manager
support@adkvideoediting.com