[Jonathon Lee]

I drive a German car and I use German microphones, so I suppose it is time to switch the power cables too.

[Jonathon Lee]

Hey Sascha,

What power y-cable did you use? I just fried my mac pro using one… it was a 6-pin to 2x 6-pin splitter. Thank God I had apple care, but they said I toasted the power supply & proc #1… I’m on a 2009 MP.

best,

Jonathon

[Jonathon Lee]

Wow!

I wonder what the performance differences are between the Quadro and Tesla cards are vs. highe end GTX cards like the 590, 580 & 570.

The spec for the 590 says it’s a dual 512 core w/1536mb per GPU.
For the 580 its 512 cores w/1536mb
For the 570 its 480 cores w/1280mb

The Tesla c2075 is 448 cores w/6GB.

Are the CUDA processors on the Tesla different then those used in the GTX series? I’m doing 4k DPX & RED. I’m really looking at switching to Windows. Will the GTX cards be able to process 4k or is there not enough RAM on them?

thanks,

Jonathon

[Jonathon Lee]

Hey Gary!

Thanks.. actually, my questions were related to 4k automatic processing. Our system definitely slows down significantly at 4k. The CPU’s are fairly old vintage relatively speaking… it’s in one of the supermicro systems with pci-x slots.

best,

Jonathon

[Jonathon Lee]

Hey Sascha,

I do know about the 32-bit adress space limit. Some apps can take advantage the PAE (physical address extension) support on OS X intel machines. I was never quite sure how Resolve did or did not take advantage of this. Which makes me wonder about the high RAM recommendations by BMD for resolve.

In any case I am curious if anyone had specific experience using 6x 8gb DIMM’s in a Mac Pro 2009 or 2010. Specifically what happens when this RAM configuration is installed and one boots into the 32-bit kernel under 10.6.8. I had read a technical post indicating that only 32gb of system memory is recognized under the 32-bit kernel. So will the system just ignore anything above 32gb or will it completely ignore the DIMM’s in the 3rd slot of each processor RAM bank?

Eventually I will be running everything in 64-bit kernel so at least there will not be an OS level constraint. Basically I’m wondering if there will be performance hits or if the thing just won’t boot, or if all will be good in Valhalla and unicorns and cotton candy clouds will jump out of the heat vents of my Mac!

On the Pro Tools HD 10 issue. I get what you are saying about the SSD, but what I’m talking about is very different. Avid/Digidesign have always had storage “addressing issues”. For one, Pro Tools used to be VERY picky about what type of storage it would allow you to read and write too. For the most part, on a non-Unity Pro Tools system writing or reading to NAS was not allowed. Also on the Mac writing to USB was not allowed. On the PC direct writing to FW drives was not supported (although you could try).

WIth V10 Avid implemented an entirely new disk caching scheme that utilizes the PAE on a Mac and the equivalent on WIn7. What it does is it allows the user to allocate any amount of available RAM to pre-cache audio data so that ANY storage, even slow USB1 or network attached storage can now be used as record and play volumes. A huge deal for Pro Tools users — this means that no longer are fast shared storage systems always necessary. A facility using v10 can simply use any decent server that has ethernet. Pro Tools, like any audio app really, needs to write in very small and high density blocks. This would often bring the mightiest FC-SAN’s to their knees, the ones with multiple PT systems reading and writing.

I know most facilites would not be dumb enough to use the same system for DI and audio! So at the office we are not dumb and don’t have them on the same system. But at home, I am really, really dumb and I have my main system with Smoke, Resolve, Maya, FCP, MC, CS 5.5, etc, etc…. with expansion chassis and FC RAID. I was hoping to install 6x 8gb DIMM’s so I could take advantage of the new PT10 RAM caching (which must be system RAM not SSD unfortunately). Actually I found Crucial and Kingston 6x 8gb for about $500!

Apologies for giving T.M.I. just wanted to clarify. Maybe someone else can use this info. I always do appreciate your input here and on the Scratch list. You have solved problems for me several times in the past few years! I for sure owe you a few beers.

– Jonathon

[Jonathon Lee]

Hey Alejandro,

If you are trying to run with only 1 video card, as in no GUI card, you should go with one of the modified GTX470 cards. This will be much faster then the Q4000.

If you really need the high quality, realtime red decoding that is. Regardless without a dedicated GUI card yo may not get realtime anything. If you are working with R3d and need realtime playback I suggest this config…

slot 1: Q4000
slot 2: GT 120
slot 2: Decklink
slot 4: Red Rocket

Then for storage get one of the mod kits that lets you take the two internal SATA ports and make eSATA ports from them. This will give you 2-channels of eSATA ports each capable of doing up to 100mb/sec. You could then connect 2 external RAID-5/6 units… one to each port. This would give you a playback RAID and a RECORD RAID. For working with RED footage and ProRes or DNX renders this will work great. It would also give you reasonable performance for rendering 2k or HD DPX file outputs.

SAS is great, but there just are not enough PCI-e slots to do what you want to do, without using a CUBIX chassis.

– Jonathon

[Jonathon Lee]

LOL! I’m not a mole either… I bought a 285 from you… curb side service baby. Drove up, called, got my card. It looked way more nefarious then it was. At least there is an honest source for cards. I almost got ripped off buying two SAS chassis from some fool on ebay.. if it were not for the buyer protection I’d have been screwed out of $700.

With macvidecards you never have to worry about getting ripped off or having to jump through hoops.

Also… not really why people jump up each other’s bung-holes on this list. This is a fantastic, (almost always) friendly and generous group.

– Jonathon

[Jonathon Lee]

I’m also using an HP Dream Color w/ Blackmagic HDLink Displayport. Looking for a projector at some point.

[Jonathon Lee]

Yes, this is from the IBC press release…

“DaVinci Resolve for Microsoft Windows™ will be accompanied by the Mac OS X version, so when a customer purchases DaVinci Resolve, they can choose which operating system they want to use, and then install either one. This allows the flexibility to let customers potentially choose to use a Windows desktop computer in the office with powerful multiple GPU processing, while at any time the customer can unplug the dongle and plug into one of the latest stylish Mac OS X MacBook Pro computers when on set.”

[Jonathon Lee]

I know… the lack of stills support and lack of text generator is problematic. I’d prefer stills support first, then text generator later. When these are implemented this will incredibly simplify my subtitling workflow… which I will make a tutorial for we have stills support (stills with alpha channel please!).