Blackmagic Forum

Hey guys.

I want to upgrade my working setup, getting a decklink as a first.

But before that I thought I'd consult the professionals here.

I got a windows machine
16gb ram
i7 8700
Nvidia GTX 1080
Windows and resolve on a m.2
Rest all on HDDs
3 monitors (one for gui, one as clean feed, other for detached scopes)

Right now I am using resolve studio 17 and a braw clip with a 6 node structure
1. Exposure
2. Colour
3. Color space transform
4. Sharpen & noise

In a 1080 timeline, playback isn't real time! I don't know if it's a resolve 17 problem. But

If I go back to node one to tweak the exposure, it's hogging down and scopes and log controls jump in a stutter. Makes it very challenging!

If I check the taskmanager performance while doing so, nothing seems to be hogging. GPU at around 20% cpu about 40% I guess. 8gb ram using all 8gb (max I can allot to resolve in preferences) and hdd at about 2% to 50% jumps sometimes.

I read on forums here that a decklink mini 4k plays back realtime even if the system is hogging. Not sure how true that is.

I do not have a huge budget at the moment, but as more work comes in and more profits, I would build an entire color grading suite in my vision and capabilities as I am serious about this.

Keeping that in mind, and my setup currently, what would you guys suggest the upgrade path I take?

What should I get or upgrade right now, and what would be the next things. If there is any order to investments.

This would be a great help for me and for anyone in my position. As I haven't found such discussion here on forums or extensive research.

Also from researching on the internet, I somewhat understood that I can get external scopes and turn on the scopes in davinci and that majorly helps. Again not completely sure.

You guys might have been in my postion too and now where you all are. Please guide a fellow novice!

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irfanintekhab wrote:I read on forums here that a decklink mini 4k plays back realtime even if the system is hogging.

I've never used one, but I don't see how that's possible for any I/O device. All they do is feed the rendered frames from the NLE to a connected display. If the NLE can't render those frames in real time...

irfanintekhab wrote:What should I get or upgrade right now, and what would be the next things.

Outside of the Decklink paired with the best 4K HDR grading monitor I could afford, my choice for computer upgrades would probably be for a 3000 series RTX card from nVidia, followed by an 11th gen Intel CPU (coming out soon).

I don't know. I thought the same about io cards. But someone on forums here said so. And some confirmed as well. Can't find the thread right now

No mention of the RAM! so are you guys implying 16gb is enough?

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Jim Simon wrote:

irfanintekhab wrote:What should I get or upgrade right now, and what would be the next things.

Outside of the Decklink paired with the best 4K HDR grading monitor I could afford, my choice for computer upgrades would probably be for a 3000 series RTX card from nVidia, followed by an 11th gen Intel CPU (coming out soon).

Ofcourse I would do the same. But the thing is, when I monitor my resources. Neither the cpu nor the GPU seems to be bottlenecking. Hence my confusion of whether something other than a GPU and cpu is more valuable to look at first before eventually upgrading computer components. Like a decklink. But even that I just want to do smart investments in a good helpful path.

For example someone investing thousands in a panel, burning out and not being able to invest in an accurate monitor is a foolish step.

My postion is after each one or two upgrades, I'll have to keep hold for a few months till more work comes in and upgrade again and so on till I get to a stable point.

The problem is, I don't know an ideal path, hence don't want to invest in something that is less useful than what I should have invested in. If that makes sense

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irfanintekhab wrote:are you guys implying 16gb is enough?

More is always better. Others may have a different view, buy I would upgrade that third.

irfanintekhab wrote:more valuable to look at first before eventually upgrading computer components. Like a decklink.

I'll have to defer to Decklink users to confirm, but I don't see how that would improve performance at all. To the best of my knowledge, their only function is to ensure an accurate signal to an external monitor.

Jim Simon wrote:

irfanintekhab wrote:more valuable to look at first before eventually upgrading computer components. Like a decklink.

I'll have to defer to Decklink users to confirm, but I don't see how that would improve performance at all. To the best of my knowledge, their only function is to ensure an accurate signal to an external monitor.

Same. Don't know how that would improve performance. If you were in my position, my clean feed monitor from resolve (gui) is a hardware calibrated monitor. Does pretty good. But some people just don't talk to you until you have a decklink. In my case would you go for the decklink first or GPU?

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A Decklink is not speeding up anything. If at all, it might even slow you down to a small degree. And then:
If your work is aimed at the internet, go for GPU. Your images will look different on all devices anyway.
If you have picky corporate clients and work for TV or Cinema, go for both. You should then have the money or your business model is wrong.

irfanintekhab wrote:In my case would you go for the decklink first or GPU?

Depends on what you prioritize - a proper color grading suite, or performance.

It's my impression that when Resolve doesn't seem to be using much GPU or CPU on what should be an involved render, this is an indication that there's a lot of I/O going on and the CPU/GPU are mainly sitting around waiting for it to happen. Is this true, or am I just making up a reasonable-sounding fable?

If there's truth to it, then I think the answer is probably large images being fed to the GPU, causing a lot of swapping in and out of the GPU: while it's waiting, it can't do anything. I'd think that the CPU would be involved in transferring that data, so you should see high CPU usage... so that's a contraindication to my theory. Unless the moving from RAM/Disk to GPU is happening via another controller or is happening in the GPU but doesn't count as "GPU usage".

Some apps don't show the real load on the GPU.
AFAIK, the GPU does not swap in Resolve, it just tells you that there is not enough memory.

Uli Plank wrote:A Decklink is not speeding up anything. If at all, it might even slow you down to a small degree. And then:
If your work is aimed at the internet, go for GPU. Your images will look different on all devices anyway.
If you have picky corporate clients and work for TV or Cinema, go for both. You should then have the money or your business model is wrong.

. My business model is definitely wrong. Needs a lot of fixing for sure. Not into cinema and TV at the moment. But that looks soon enough. Right now dealing mostly with mixed media. With blurring lines between TV ad commercial and internet.

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Uli Plank wrote:the GPU does not swap in Resolve, it just tells you that there is not enough memory.

That is a real problem, if correct.

Uli Plank wrote:Some apps don't show the real load on the GPU.
AFAIK, the GPU does not swap in Resolve, it just tells you that there is not enough memory.

Yeah maybe the taskmanager doesn't show it as usage. I've tried other software monitor and that doesn't show much usage either.

The GPU does show usage and sometimes tops when doing face enhancement and multiple trackings.

For the cpu however it doesn't hit tops at all. To be sure I also monitored the cpu temp and it just slightly goes up, nowhere how it would when going tops.

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For now I guess I'll get things in this order

GPU
And very quickly decklink

Wait for a bit

Upgrade the computer internals, ram cpu etc

Wait for a bit

Flanders DM240
Not putting this monitor on priority as the current one I have hardware calibrates and what I see on my clients side, ranging from consumer TV's to projectors, is fairly decent. Maybe this would be a better investment when getting into mainstream TV and cinema. If at all.

Some kind of a panel. Cuz keyboard and tablet is not good!

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Uli Plank wrote:Some apps don't show the real load on the GPU.
AFAIK, the GPU does not swap in Resolve, it just tells you that there is not enough memory.

Good point. I was using the term "swap" literally in the sense of deciding that texture A, currently in VRAM, is disposed of and texture B is read into VRAM instead. That kind of thing has to happen, and I imagine BMD probably manages that simple level of "swapping". Not to be confused with the considerably more complicated CPU/RAM OS swapping that involves pages of memory and swapping out modified pages, etc. More like entire replacement (no sub-part pages) and read-only.

The amount of VRAM Resolve uses definitely changes over time, as you can see in my screen capture. If they need to, say, multiply texture A times texture B, resulting in texture C and all three cannot fit into VRAM simultaneously, I assume things just fail.

wfolta wrote:
The amount of RAM Resolve uses definitely changes over time, as you can see in my screen capture. If they need to, say, multiply texture A times texture B, resulting in texture C and all three cannot fit into VRAM simultaneously, I assume things just fail.

May I ask how much ram is that? Ram and not vram right?

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Oops, typo: the graph is VRAM. That's on an 8GB Mac AMD Radeon card. RAM-wise, I have 64GB and Resolve uses relatively little. I'm a data scientist and other things I do use a LOT of RAM.

wfolta wrote:Oops, typo: the graph is VRAM. That's on an 8GB Mac AMD Radeon card. RAM-wise, I have 64GB and Resolve uses relatively little. I'm a data scientist and other things I do use a LOT of RAM.

Ofcourse data and ram go hand in hand .

Don't know what programs they use but even a very long excel uses a lot of ram. Most people don't realise that

Thanks for the info bro

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