Re: 4K, 5K, 6K RAW - Workstation?

E

ectobuilder

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Re: 4K, 5K, 6K RAW - Workstation?

If budget is not a concern what would be the ideal Workstation for working with 4K, 5K or 6K RAW files directly (no proxies)?

Please feel free to add your own practical perspective as I realize the term "RAW" can mean a lot of things as there are different proprietary compression formats for instance (i.e. RedRAW, KineRAW).

By "working" I mean either some or all of the following:
1) Debayering
2) Grading, Time Re-Mapping, Stabilizing
3) Possibly Compositing
 
I've only worked with Red .r3d's and what I found is that the files were not terribly processor intensive. I was even easily able to edit 4k files on my laptop the one time I was required to edit .r3d's in the field. Of course, more horsepower is never a bad thing so I'm not trying to say you don't need a fast processor/GPU; rather the whole system needs to be up to scratch because any singular bottleneck will slow down the whole system.

What you will need, is an extremely fast data pipeline - think along the lines of a Thunderbolt Raid array. I've never had a hard drive setup that I've been fully satisfied with for RAW workflows. As soon as you move to 2 layers of RAW video the amount of data transfer really can bog you down. If I was working more often with RAW though, I'd be investing in a good external RAID solution.
 
As of today, if you have a little time, I'd be holding out for the GTX1080Ti to become available. Nothing faster out there.

In addition to what John says above: external HDD array, large and fast and set to raid 5.
 
I use a Thunderbolt RAID 0 with daily backups, and I'll be honest. It's still too slow. But then again I'm not editing single layer films. I'm doing multi-layer commercials. Which is why more often than not we use ProRes rather than raw. For all practical purposes by the time a commercial hits the air nobody can tell the difference anyway.
 
I would say the ideal setup without budget concerns would be a RAID setup using SSDs. RAW moves all of the heat to hard drives where overly compressed footage moves all of the heat to the processors/GPUs. Now when it comes to compositing, the hard drives are not as important but as in the case of After Effects boatloads of RAM will help you out as well as many cores on the CPU.

Is this a MAC or a PC? If it is a PC then waiting for Broadwell-E will be your best bet.
 
Good point Bassman, I overlooked the "compositing" part of OP's question. For that, you WILL need plenty of horsepower, and lots of RAM (Think 64GB minimum).
 
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