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burnsranch

macrumors member
Original poster
Jun 19, 2013
81
5
One of the surprises with my nMP, was the lack of professional grade support in the products. I admit I know nothing about Video, but I understand computer hardware.
My test set up was FCPX with the data bases in a 500MBS raid drive. I used the internal SSD drive as the destination drive because my other raid drive was not fast enough. If I had a faster external raid drive I would have used that and I do not think it would have made a difference from my testing. Importing and exporting on the same raid drive sucked and my internal drive is not large enough test that.

At this point, the machine is not designed for h.264. In researching the AMD video card I have to wonder if the h.264 hardware is on the card and just not being utilized.

You can see the video being processed by the GPU is an order of magnitude faster. My numbers are just eyeball guesses from the disk monitor program apple provides, but you can see where the performance is and where it is not.

If the video market is moving from editing to process, then hardware will have so support the video processing, not the cpu. It looks like that is the process in the nMP.
It is curious apple went with the professional codecs instead of h.264. When I look at the system design differences between a searchable video database and videos storage system, I do not see too much professional testing done on the database side. Most of the performance testing is done at the video editing level.

I would guess at some point the video technology in the in the iPhone/ipad world will have to merge with the nMP The market war will be in the video processing/gpu area, where video editing will be processor based.

In looks like the nMP is a great tool for building a video data base in 422 and a lousy tool for working with h.264

I have never build a video data base or worked with much video, so this is all new to me. I am driving a 4k UD590 and two other monitors, two tb raids and a usb raid. I can scan 60 fps on driving the 4k and the 1920x1080 full screen video without a pause.

I used to do professional performance testing, and you can write the test to sell what ever you want. Mostly I did professional system testing, then you had test how well it worked in the real world.

I have years of work on the video database and if it takes all night to export a h.264 video I can live with it. If the next nMP is a swap out upgrade, as long as it preserves the integrity of my video data base I can live with that. There is a difference between a game machine and a system machine.
If apple owns the video processing technology from a system level, the hardware will not matter.

I am still sorting through how to build my system and understanding the tools I have.



Mac Pro (late 2013)
3.7 GHz Quad core Intel Xeon E5
64GB 1866 MHz DDR3 ECC
AMD FirePro D300 2048 MB


Raw Video 4096x2160 12fps optimized 4096x2160 60fps


Optimized 4K Raw 4K

Read MBS Write MBS Read Write
4444xq 250 900 8 100

4444zq filter 70 140

4444 240 900 8 100

4444 filter 70 140

422hq 250 900

422hq filter 70 140

422 400 600

422 filter 300 230

422 lt 100 100

422lt filter 70 70

422 proxey 100 50

422 proxy filter 100 50

h264 30 10 3 3

h264 filter 30 10

Import 4k 500 500

Transcode 30 90

Import with transcode 30 90

timeline scans 60 FPS on external drives.(optimized)
 
It seems like the H264 video you are talking about is in a delivery end product. The nMP & FCP X can certainly work with native heavily compressed H264 files, but to work natively in an editing environment it has to compress/decompress it as its playing/editing on the fly. Especially if you are doing multicam editing with H264. Thats why ProRes is so prevalent as a codec to be used as an editing format in FCPX and H264 is more for an delivery final output format. Not sure if that helps or not and if thats what your talking about.

FCP X does utilize the GPU during export on the nMP to speed up rendering.
 
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Thanks,

I am looking at say a five year design for my video database. The output and editing is a secondary process, so how the nMP handles date efficiently matters. I did the testing so I build a system correctly and understand where my limitation were.

When I started testing 120FPS raw video from my GoPros, I cannot get true 120p, I end up with an interlaced video. 60fps works fine. If I shot some footage I need frame by frame resolution, I need to understand what really works. If I render in my data base and it messes up my frame by frame resolution I need to understand that.

Most of the testing today is final product bases, not video database based.
 
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