4K Playback with Smoke on Mac

[Anonymous]

Hi

I have just started working on 4K projects well Ultra HD (3840x2160). Very simple retitling at the moment and it works a dream taking my HD softFX text and dropping them onto 4K supplied clean masters. My issue is playback speeds and storage. Is anyone doing 4K with realtime playback and what size storage do you have. Any help in me updating my storage to something capable of playing realtime 4K with something in the region of a couple of terabytes or more of storage would be much aprreciated as I am getting more and more of this workflow.

I am running MacPro Tower (2years old)

Processor 2 x 2.66 GHz 6-Core Intel Xeon

Memory 16GB 1333MHz DDR3

[Anonymous]

4k is pending on your colour depth something arroung 1gig/sec when working uncompressed.

imo 10bit is already a very low colour depth when working in 4k. you will run into banding quite often.

so 16bit should be the colour depth of choise.

smoke can not playback 16bit in realtime at the moment.

so even with 10bit it is difficult. i have a ssd raid on an areco controller giving more than 2gig/sec but for

what ever reason when i do a disc test on smoke it never ever shows a performance higher than 400 or 500 mb/sec. so i guess if you want to see it realtime with "normal" hardware you have to render out a compressed quicktime like prores and watch it on the desktop. that is totally anoying when you want to see your work during progress. so in that case try using proxies. i know that nearly nobody is using poxies in flame or smoke, but in fact, they work very very well. i started using proxies when doing feature film work on flame i i was completely thrilled how well it works. remember that even when advertising says 4k is the new hd, it is not! 4k is slow like hell and a disaster in every aspect. the picture quality is stunning but it is nothing you can handle in realtime.

try proxies and it works like hd. sometimes there are issues with roto shapes. i would highly recomment if you have to deal with any rotoshapes do it in full res. everything else has no issues that i would know of.

[Ant_Brownmoore]

I've been running a few tests recently and no matter what combination of bit rates or codecs I use I cannot get real time 4k playback in smoke. The fact that it still cannot provide monitoring in 4K at the moment also baffles me as FCPX can do both and it's about £200. I bought the Pegasus 2 thunderbolt 2 raid hoping it would allow real time playback. It certainly did inside FCPX but weirdly Smoke will constantly drop frames.

[Anonymous]

Dealing w/ the same issues...

HOME SYSTEM:  2011 27inch iMac

                         3.4 Ghz intel i7

                         32 gigs memory

                         ADM Radeon graphics

                         Lion 10.7.5

                         500gig SSD

                         Pegasus R6 12TB storage

I get disk test speeds between 140 & 150 @ 1170mbps...this according to the disk test in the preferences.

I CANNOT play back a full 4k r3d file...I mean not at all, nor can I playback an Ultra HD file with any effciency. I can however play back compressed 4k Prores files...but, if i create an uncompressed or prores HQ project and cache the media playback is bumpy. However, if I link to the files from one of my external thundebolt drives playback is flawless. 

WORK SYSTEM:  Mid 2012 MacPro

                         2x2.4 Ghz 6 core intel Zeon

                         32 gigs memory

                         Quadro 4000 graphics card

                         1TB SSD

                         Proavio JS 316 32TB storage

                         Lion 10.8.5 

I get disk speed tests between 240 to 250 fps @ 1500 mbps...again, according to the internal test.

http://www.proavio.com/index.php/products/mobile-rack/ds316js

Proavio claims realtime 4k playback but I have found that not to be the case. I can almost get a 4k r3d file to play in real time...but not quite. I can playback Ultra HD reasonably well and 4k compressed is a breeze.

So not a perfect solution...but would certainly love to get over the 4k hump!

[truss7]

Back in the day smoke was always internally 'throttled' to give system stability. This 400-500MB threshold you're hitting sounds reminiscent of that. I'm sure I've had this chat with some autodesk bods and they assured me that throttling of any kind had been removed.

Don't forget that at this squeaky top end the bottle neck may not be your framestore...

Any autodesk engineers care to chime in?

[joelosis]

i am 100% sure Smoke is not throttled by the engineers/developers

[alex]

So where's the bottleneck?

I can't play back in realtime on a new Mac Pro neither. Codec does not matter...

[lcrs]

No problems here playing 10bit 4096x2304 on a new Mac Pro, with the framestore on the internal SSD... project set to Uncompressed. Also fine with uncached 10bit 4096x2304 DPXs on a Lacie LittleBigDisk2.  Admittedly 12bit is dicey and 16bit way too much, but these are not exactly high-end storage options 😉

Running Smoke 2015.1.2 on OSX 10.10.2.  When I was using the previous Smoke release on the same machine with OSX 10.9 I did have really horrible playback problems even at HD - couldn't say for sure what changed but it was for the better.

[alex]

Thanks for that information, definitely good news. I'll have to give it another try.

Alex

[Anonymous]

Icrs, how are you monitoring your video output?

HDMI or?

[yann.laforest]

Hi,

I am not an Autodesk engineer (although I used to be one back in the day) but I can try to provide some answers.

First, we have to make the distinction between "throttling" and "optimization".

What I read here seems to refer to a mechanism that would induce a slow down on the read input in order to maintain stability within the application (throttling).  If so, I confirm that there is no such of a mechanism in Smoke (and never was).

The other important thing is that we cannot make a 1:1 translation between the throughput we get from the storage and the results you will get within the application as operations must be done into the given application in order to read and decode the files.  This is were the "Optimization" concept comes in.  "Optimization" essentially means getting the best performances within an existing application code base.

Each type of files has to be handled differently depending of the format, resolution, bit depth and compression (codec) and the way the files are read is different from one application to another.

That being said, the fact that FCP can read a certain type of file in a real time manner does not mean that Smoke will.  It only means a given hardware configuration is capable of sustaining real time playback for this type of files.

On the other hand, there are several things that Smoke does that FCP cannot achieve. 

Please keep in mind that faster storage usually rime with faster playback speed but that there is always an application that manages the flow on the front end.

Hope it helps,

Regards,

Yann

[Anonymous]

anyone using black magic new graphics card? like Blackmagic Design Intensity Pro 4K ? do you know if it helps smoke to playback realtime?