Gadgetory

eight K red code raw footage how do you work with files that are multiple hundreds of megabytes per second of recording with a complex and proprietary compression algorithm that allows them to retain effectively nearly the full raw quality of the footage while taking up a fraction of the space well LG's Monitor team seems to have an interest in this and the many technological challenges faced by creative professionals because they sponsored this video featuring their 49 WL 95 C otro wide monitor where I'll be figuring out just that so in the old days when anywhere from 4 K to 6 K was cutting-edge the solution was this $7000 red rocket X card but in spite of it using either a custom ASIC or an FPGA so both highly specialized Hardware even these puppies were easily overwhelmed by the epic W and the red weapon featuring reds 8k helium sensor so now this is basically an expensive paperweight ha that's the that's the joys of cutting edge technology right fortunately NVIDIA has been running around doing demos with their arty x-series graphics cards showing GPU accelerated real-time full quality 8k playback so then is this the new way now $1300 is still a lot of money but it's a lot less than $7,000 could this be progress there's only one way to find out so my first encounter with this monster was back at CES and while 49 inch ultra woods like this one so 32 by 9 aspect ratio look at this thing have existed before what makes this one special is that the pixel density since its effectively 5 K by 1440 is much higher than the ones that have existed before making it actually suitable for creative work so it has become apparent that I'm going to need to clear some space so it has become apparent that I'm going to need to clear even more space wow that's a lot of time line even with my task manager open here okay so first order of business is to fire up a plausible project so this is an episode of fast as possible and use the the normal workstations that we have downstairs so my CPU is a little better this is a 79 80 XE 18 core processor and this is a GTX Titan X Pascal so first things first we've got ourselves at one-quarter resolution you can see scrubbing around in the timeline nice and responsive playback basically instantaneous but whenever I'm not paused you can see it's quite fuzzy not representative of the finished product so let's crank it up to full so this is a K and this is working just fine no problem whatsoever and in fact while I'm playing it back we're sitting at a mere 10 to about 30% CPU usage and our GPUs sittin tight at 25 to 30% so at first I was kind of confused by all of this it's been a while since I've looked into a K performance on the timeline and I was thinking well hold on a second is there nothing special about these r-tx cards that makes them suitable for this why does Nvidia keep talking about this and then I remembered something we shoot most of our projects at a much higher compression ratio than what they would use while shooting a VFX heavy Hollywood production for example so our data rates are much lower so let's go get some seven-to-one footage so let's start with a sample from red here this is a 7 to 1 compression ratio 8k clip that was recorded at 24 frames per second so let's go ahead and fire this bad boy up hit that playback button it oh we are looking at spikes of up to 95 percent on our GPU and CPU usage that is pinned at 100% while trying to playback that clip that is a stark contrast to the I think we use 2001 is that right David to the 20 to 1 footage that we capture and that's not even the worst of it here's some 8k 7 to 1 footage at 30fps that we captured let's go ahead and drag that onto the timeline yeah whoof not quite yeah he moves like that sure why not so what's weird though is that even with the heaviest footage that we could throw at our workstation our GPU is actually neither sitting idle nor completely maxed out so it's being used to handle the debayering process which reconstructs the full color image that we see here from the samples that are collected by the image sensor but our CPU is still in charge of the entropy decoding which is a process that allows the most common input signals to be substituted for much shorter ones saving space and wavelet decoding which frankly I'm not familiar enough with to offer even a basic explanation and the Wikipedia article wasn't much help anyway though so it's maybe our problem here is we just need more cpu horsepower to keep our GPU fed AMD to the rescue then why don't we try going from 18 to 32 processor course building improvements Oh mission failed okay it worked didn't do anything and interestingly our GPU usage is higher near a hundred percent so this is kind of fascinating I've said it many times before that every system is effectively bottlenecked because there's something that is slowing down the process or else it would be infinitely fast but this is like double bottleneck it's like they're perfectly matched to each other but still not enough for the task this is great to look what happens to Timeline scrolling when my CPUs at a hundred percent usage so while I was troubleshooting to prepare for this video I actually spent some of my time with the r-tx twenty eighty rather than the r-tx twenty atti because what I thought was that this functionality had something to do with their new and vank engine but actually it doesn't in fact there's nothing about the tensor cores or the ray-tracing cores or anything like that that makes the r-tx cards so good at this it's just the sheer frigging processing power of all those CUDA cores so we are gonna jump for 8k seven to one footage straight to the RT X xx atti and you might think to yourself well gee Linus that's a 1,200 to 1,300 US dollar graphics card of course it can handle it but that's not necessarily to be taken for granted I mean we installed CPUs that cost up to two thousand dollars and they couldn't do it it's all about having the right tool for the job okay everything's working normally here we go this is the moment I mean now that is kind of gotten its act together that's a lot better we are now at a hundred percent CPU 95% GPU but we are still dropping frames so that's it then no CPU on earth can handle this 30 frame per second 8k seven to one read code raw footage at least not as long as it has to handle the entropy decoding and wavelet decoding what if we could offload those to the GPU we are going to need a beta version of Reds decoder that unfortunately isn't supported by Adobe Premiere at this time fortunately it's built into the beta of redson DX pro and we're gonna start with the 24 FPS footage now it's a little flaky right now I'm actually not sure if this is going to work but let's go ahead and give it a shot so we're gonna enable GPU decode and it's flaking out on me so it's running it like eight frames per second fortunately the fix right now seems to be to just toggle between image pipelines and there it is smooth 8k playback that hitch by the way is the clip restarting but that's not even the most impressive part so our CPU is sitting at just 10% utilization and our GPU is up at 77 80% utilization so we potentially have some Headroom to spare so our overall usage for the system is way down like 10% of our 32 cores we could be doing this on a more human workstation you know one with six or eight cores by offloading this work to the GPU because the thing to remember as well is that when we were pinning both our CPU and GPU at a hundred percent that was just playback we weren't even applying any real-time effects like denoising the footage or or anything like that we were at the limit now we have Headroom to play with let's go ahead and try our 30fps footage though that's actually working a little bit better than I expected when I the first time around I actually had to overclock the GPU a little bit to get this quite so smooth but you know what I'm taking it so there it is our GPU CUDA usage jumps up near 90% but our CPU stays at 10% and we are smoothly playing back seven to one 8k red footage at 29.97 frames per second we get some applause sound effects in the video or something I don't know this is crazy so all that's left now then is to thank LG for sponsoring this video featuring their 49 WL 95 C W ultrawide monitor I mean I think it's pretty obvious why they wanted us to feature this in this video because it's designed for content creators like photographers filmmakers music producers and more who can really benefit from this kind of a canvas being able to work on more than one thing simultaneously or just be able to manage and see extremely long timelines without zooming out giving them a finer degree of control and it's not even just for creators but office work would also be a great option for someone like a programmer stock trader or really anyone who needs a ton of side-by-side screen real estate because it's basically exactly the same as having to 2560 by 1440 monitors side by side except that you have no bezel in between LG's also been hard at work on software that allows you to take two inputs select your desktop in your laptop and seamlessly share your mouse and keyboard between them just like moving between them so you can control two systems at once it's got full support for USB type-c including power delivery so you can use it as a single cable docking solution for your laptop and it's got support for HDR 10 with - ten watt speakers built-in in fact it was didn't realize they were gonna be that loud that happened that happened a couple times during the video so check it out at the link in the video description and I guess that's pretty much it thanks for watching you guys if you disliked this video well you can hit that button but if you liked it hit like get subscribed or maybe consider checking out where to buy the stuff we featured at the link below also down there is our merch store which has cool shirts like this one 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