This may be an off the cuff question, but I own and shoot on a Red Scarlet, so I preview footage in 4K and 5K quality, and with my current I would say monster rig I am still only able to buffer 10 seconds in advance and then forced again to re-buffer to continue watching, surely this also has greatly how complicated the scene is and how much information is stored in the image.
I have not been editing anything on my own, since I have an editor for that (currently working on debut feature film), but I would still love the idea of having an easier time previewing footage while at home.
I have
Windows 7 64bit
GTX 580
16 gig 1600 mhz Ram
intel 4 core 3.4
My main question is, is this mainly a question of ram, and if so what kind of mother board supports more ram, should I be waiting for an upcoming CPU or Graphics card?
RedCine, but with on half the quality it still wont run smoothly.
I am worried that my CPU is bottlenecking the whole experience, but I doubt my motherboard supports sandybridge, this being it.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813188069
First things first, you have 16GB of RAM in a triple-channel motherboard, in a configuration which I can only assume is 4x4GB. The problem here is that triple-channel RAM only operates in triple-channel mode when the number of sticks inserted is either 3 or 6. With 4 sticks, you're very likely operating in single-channel mode*, which means you could get a three-fold increase in memory bandwidth simply by taking one of the RAM sticks
out of your PC (check the motherboard's manual to see which slots the remaining ones should be in). This might be a bottleneck, and it's not going to cost you anything, so it's worth trying. If it turns out to help, but you don't want to give up the extra RAM, then a move up to 24GB (6x4GB) might be worthwhile. (Alternatively, the quantity of RAM might be the issue, so a move up to 24GB might be advisable in any case, but it's worth testing with 12GB first).
The second piece of advice is to get an SSD and make sure the files are on it before previewing (I don't know if you're previewing off a hard-drive, or directly from the camera). Redcode footage is an insanely high bitrate, and I wouldn't let it near a hard-drive. Get a Samsung 830 SSD, or even two in RAID 0 (and this is pretty much the only time when a RAID stripe of SSDs is actually justifiable) and you'll probably see some improvement.
The issue is, though, that even with faster RAM and an SSD, you're still not likely to get brilliant performance with Redcode footage. Not only are you dealing with a very high bitrate, but Redcode needs both decompression (which is based on a CPU-intensive wavelet compression scheme) and de-bayering (also CPU-intensive). If you put together a workstation with two 8-core Xeon CPUs, 64GB of quad-channel RAM at 2400MT/s and four Samsung 840Pro SSDs in RAID 0, then you should be able to get everything running smoothly, but it's hard to guarantee decent performance on anything less than that. In fact, Red actually make
a PCIe card just for decoding Red footage, and charge almost $5,000 for the privilege, which illustrates just how difficult even
playing Red footage is for the average computer, let alone editing it (although you'd be much better spending the $5k building the aforementioned workstation).
The last option is the cheapest one; don't bother trying to play the footage natively. Every night after shooting, leave your computer to transcode everything you've shot into 1080p h264, and run over it in the morning. Given that you're not editing the footage, and you almost certainly don't have a 5K monitor, it seems the most sensible solution.
*It's technically possible it's running in double-channel mode, depending on the motherboard and the exact configuration of the sticks, but I'd bet on single-channel.
