RED Scarlet & Resolve Configuration

Hi,
I have RED Scarlet camera and shooting R3D.

I have following configuration;
Mac Pro 2x2.4 Ghz Quad Core (32 GB Ram)
DeckLink HD Extreme 3D
Apple Cinema Display (HD)
NVidea Quadro 4000 for GPU
Nvidea 120 GT for GUI
Davinci Resolve 9 (full)


I am using Davinci Resolve for color grading. Although i am shooting 4K or 2K with RED my final outputs are always HD for broadcast (mostly music videos). So I do not need 4K monitoring or rendering.

I can play RED R3D files with 25fps in Quarter Rez Decode Quality. But it is very soft and not easy to make decision while grading.

My question is can I play RED files "realtime-25fps" in FULL REZ (1080p) with above configuration? If yes what i am doing wrong?

If not which way should i go:
1-Buy Red Rocket Card
2-wait for NVidea K5000 card. (which is almost 1/4 of red rocket)

thanks in advance

Whats the processer/s like, as theres two likely locations that cpuld be causing the issue.

If it's in the decoding then thats normally the processors , then the RED rocket will take over it for RED footage and that should help alot.

If the processors handling the decoding fine then it's the GPU thats struggling.

It is of course possible that both are struggling.

At HD outputs make sure projects set to HD resolution as well as monitering.

As a tempoary measure consider using a ProRes or similar workflow, do a bare min in R3D then do most of it in Pro Res, you lose some detail but its alot smoother and likely to give better results if you are having to debayer at that quality.

Another thing to speed things up is to use Resolves trim R3D function (with or without handles), will limit the amount you're loading into memory.

[Dwaine Maggart]

Your results appear normal for a system without a Red Rocket card. Without a Red Rocket card, decompression and debayering of the r3d files all happens in CPU space.

Adding a better GPU card will have NO impact on this. The only way to get better real time Red Decode quality is by using a Red Rocket card.

@Pete mac pro has 2x2.4 Ghz Quad Core and 32 MB RAM (not 12)

Hi Dwaine
i really do not understand why better GPU card like K5000 will have no impact on performance? are you sure?

Hi Dwaine
i really do not understand why better GPU card like K5000 will have no impact on performance? are you sure?

If its decoding the RED footage that's the issue not rendering then only the CPU power matters or a red rocket. R3D encodings designed by RED to be only doable by the CPU or by RED rockets, to sell the what 5k cost of the rocket. This is likely to be the bottle neck you are experiencing especially if you have set the sequence to 1080p or less. The GPU muscle can only deal with rendering tasks, which can't exceed the speed at which footage is supplied to it, the CPU for most codecs is the holdup here, the rocket is just a specialised hardware decoder.

[Dwaine Maggart]

Because, as I said above, r3d decompression and debayering is done in the CPU's. As in those quad and hex core things from Intel. NONE of the r3d processing is done in the GPU. We would like to do the debayering in the GPU. If we could, that would make performance MUCH better. Unfortunately, Red has not given any third party manufacturers the ability to do that. We must use their Red SDK to process the r3d files, and the SDK functions only work in CPU space.

Faster CPU's will make this work a bit better, but not enough to get Premium quality decodes in real time.

make your playback quality something like 1/8 and see if your machine runs better with it.

you get softer image but may be able to play faster.