5k iMac enough for 4K RAW?

T

Timo Flink

Active member
Hi.

I need an advice from those, who have some experience with maxed out Apple's 5K iMac.

Is it enough to edit 4K RAW footage from FS700+7Q with Resolve+Tangent Elements? My current maxed out early 2011 iMac is not :D It can barely keep up with HD-footage.

Thx.
 
Not sure but I struggle sometimes with my new Mac Pro to run 7Q 4K raw in realtime...
 
By RAW - do you mean the cndg in premiere?

I would suggest transcoding to ProRes and working with those files. I'm able to work in 4K on my 2013 fully maxed 27" iMac, IF i have drives fast enough. On slower drives they don't keep up, but the system itself does.
 
I use 4K RAW very rarely and If so I transcode the 7Q DNG files in Resolve to ProRes with some standard settings. It does playback 4K DCI 25p in real time in a 4K timeline, also with two nodes for levels and primary. But I have only HD monitoring which works fine for me. iMac Retina i7 4GHz, 24GB RAM, AMD Radeon M295X 4GB, 3TB Fusion - WD my passport Pro 4TB RAID0 for media files.
hth.
 
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Seanmc, what Mac Pro are you running? Whats the configuration. Just curious because I'm buying a new system. Thanks.
 
4K prores is buttery smooth., with multiple nodes and ever some NR.

4K cDNG, seems to flip flop. Some projects it's smooth, others it's choppy playback. Not sure what timelines settings or project settings would be different...Pretty sure I set them up the same...but I would have to do some serious trouble shooting to determine where the issue is. I too was excited when I got the machine. Thought it would be a monster! hahaha, nope.
 
seanmc said:
4K prores is buttery smooth., with multiple nodes and ever some NR.

4K cDNG, seems to flip flop. Some projects it's smooth, others it's choppy playback.
Click to expand...

This usually happens when storage can't keep up. Depending on where exactly the video resides on the physical drives of the RAID, some projects will be able to playback smoothly, some won't. This can be verified by doing a striped test, but doing one might not be practical if you've already filled up with data.
(I'm assuming you are using hdds in the box.)
 
It now occured to me that this is easy to verify by creating a RAM disk and playing a project from it. If it is smooth, then the bottleneck is definitely storage related.
 
754MB/sec write
830MB/sec read

Don't thing my RAID box is a bottleneck, but I'll try the ram disk test.
 
seanmc said:
754MB/sec write
830MB/sec read

Don't thing my RAID box is a bottleneck, but I'll try the ram disk test.
Click to expand...

I have an old TB1 Pegasus R6 RAID that gives 512MB/write and 439MB/read. Blackmagic Disk Speed Test says that the drive won't do 2K 12-bit RGB 444, so I think your values, though higher, may not be enough for 4K RAW at times. And that also tells me I have to invest to not only a better Mac, but also a faster TB2 RAID system. Bummer :)
 
My raw frames are 13MB each. Running at 24fps, I need to sustain 312MB/sec to ingest the footage. Then I need a processor (CPU or GPU...Resolve is GPU) that can debayer the footage fast enough. Dual D700s should be enough.

Like I said, it does work sometimes, just not all the time.

PS, when my Pegasus 2 was brand new and empty, I was getting almost 1TB/sec read/write. It's a very fast RAID.
 
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