PC gaming hardware is expensive, right?
Core i7 Extreme Edition, $1,600.
2 terabyte 960 Pro NVMe drive, $1,300.
Two GTX Titan XPPs, we got $2,400.
You add 128 gigs of RAM, as well as a top-of-the-line motherboard,
and yeah, that'll be $6,800, please.
Now, to be clear, I'm not complaining.
This is a spectacularly first-world problem.
But pro video production gear is on a whole freaking other level.
Let me put it in perspective.
This one PCI Express card costs as much as all that stuff I just listed combined.
All of it.
This is the Red Rocket X, a state-of-the-art creation tool
and simultaneously a revolutionary...
...delic of a bygone era.
A $7,000 co-processor card.
Welcome to holy sh**.
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Okay, so as many of you are probably aware,
we moved to RED Digital Cinema cameras earlier this year
in an effort to bump up our production value.
And, I mean, let's be honest, we're enthusiasts.
Give Brandon and Max some new toys to play with.
But have you ever actually tried to work with RED code RAW footage before?
As Taren would put it,
it's a nightmare.
At full 8K on a 10-core Extreme Edition processor
with a $5,000 NVIDIA Quadro P6000 graphics card,
this is what timeline performance looks like.
You see those delays?
As I'm scrubbing around?
And even straight playback performance is abominable.
It's not like it's our 10 gigabit network connection bottlenecking us either.
We're nowhere near saturating it.
No.
It's the CPU.
Even though we're scaling across all 20 of our threads,
we are still running out of processing power.
And we haven't even added any Lumetri colors.
Yet, either.
That's only going to make matters worse.
Throw that into the picture,
and now we are dropping about 90% of our frames
while dealing with a quarter to a third of a second delay
when we're trying to move the playhead around on the timeline.
Ridiculous.
And both our CPU and GPU are basically maxed.
You actually need to drop your preview quality
all the way down
to 1 eighth
in order to get what I would consider to be
acceptable performance
with much lower usage.
True to form though,
RED Digital Cinema has a solution for you.
Are you unhappy with your editing experience
of the footage from your $50,000 camera?
Buy this expansion card
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Available now for 7,000 easy payments
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Call now and we'll throw in this nothing.
Absolutely free because we're RED
and your wallet is more than just our job.
It's our passion.
But what is this thing?
What does it even do?
Well, we can figure out a little bit on our own.
So there's some kind of processor here
that's under 150 watts of total power consumption
based on the single slot cooler
and the single six pin power connector back here.
There's some memory on board
so we can see those things.
So we can see those chips arranged around the chip here
and the dual DisplayPort ports
are so it can actually function as a video output device.
Though our workload necessitates a powerful GPU anyway
so we won't be using it that way.
And the main purpose of this thing anyway
is to accelerate decoding, scaling, and debayering
of our 3D files.
The first two I think are fairly self-explanatory
but the last one
is the process of reconstructing a full color image
from incomplete color samples
that are captured by the sensor
in a raw recording format.
But they give us no actual details about the hardware
other than some nebulous 5X performance claim
relative to their own first generation RED rocket.
But why would this older chip
based on older process nodes
be better at decoding technology
compared to a GPU running CUDA
be better at any of that stuff?
I mean RED even supports CUDA acceleration
in their own Cinex desktop application.
Is this thing even relevant today?
So with it installed
we throw on the latest drivers
and I don't know
it's kind of weird.
There's no configuration utility
or anything like that
but if you go into device manager
it's working properly
and everything seems fine.
So all that's left to do then
is go into our video editing software
and press enable.
So this is the same project
that we were just looking at
and we're going to change this
use rocket drop down to all available.
At full quality
my CPU is still pinned
and now I'm seeing 90% GPU usage
even with lumetri color disabled.
What?
Okay, well now
hold on just a minute here.
Surely there must be something wrong.
Let's try disabling the rocket
just to see if we can get back
to where we started.
Now hold on
this doesn't make sense either.
With it disabled
our timeline scrubbing
looks better than ever.
Our CPU usage is way down
and even our GPU usage
is under control now.
But we are still dropping some frames
far fewer though.
Well RED only advertises
the Rocket X as being capable
of handling up to 6K footage.
So maybe what we're looking at here
makes sense
if somehow it's enabled.
Dropping then down to
half quality in the preview window
yields perfect playback
without lumetri color.
Let's check that out.
Okay
and
all right
turning it on
well
it looks like we are still dropping
some frames
in that case.
But that's probably caused then
by a GPU bottleneck
because you can see
our Quadro is sitting at around
80 to 85% usage.
So then finally as a last step
we drop down to one quarter quality
and
that's looking great.
Acceptable CPU
and GPU usage
and a much nicer looking timeline
than what we were able to achieve
without the RED Rocket X.
But in a lot of ways
this actually raises
a lot more questions than it answers.
Why would disabling our add-in card
give me the best possible editing experience?
Is it just
a snake oil hardware key
to run an improved
GPU acceleration algorithm?
So I actually spent
a couple of weeks
investigating this
because timeline performance
has genuinely been an issue for us.
But investing in
one of these
for each of our editors
would be a whopping
$35,000 total.
And here's what I found.
First
some backup
for what we already knew.
Without the RED Rocket X
REDCODE RAW footage
loves
CPU cores.
Knocking my Extreme Edition down to 6 cores
yielded dropped frames
even at only one quarter quality.
But more cores only carries you so far.
A 22 core Xeon like this
costs more
significantly slashes single core performance
and doesn't even approach the performance improvement
from the Rocket X installed
but disabled in Premiere.
So then
the ideal
8K video editing configuration is
a 10 core
with a Quadro
and a RED Rocket X
disabled, right?
Maybe not.
Is the Quadro
at over four times the price
really accelerating this process
any better
than a high-end GeForce card would?
We'll be moving to an HDR workflow
sometime in Q4.
Expect an update on that.
So we need
10-bit color over DisplayPort.
A traditional Quadro feature.
But that was actually added to GeForce
a while back.
And the results here are fascinating.
Our Titan X Pascal
despite its nearly identical
on-paper specs
to our Quadro P6000
is able to use its sky-high
nearly 1800 MHz boost clocks
to reduce GPU usage
lower our dropped frames
and even drop CPU usage
a little bit
at our target
one-quarter playback quality.
It even almost managed
to pull off
half playback quality.
Both GPUs by the way were run
with their power sliders cranked
and power saving mode disabled.
So then
having finished running
all of these numbers
I came to the same conclusion
that RED support
did get back and give me.
Premiere is just being Premiere.
Disabled is enabled
and enabled is borked.
And as for
an optimal workstation configuration
well it turns out
the Rocket X does do something
for users with 8K footage
even though it's not rated for it.
But for the difference that it provides
I'm not going to invest that much
just to get a bump
in preview quality.
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