Hack Pro for 4K film editing and VFX

[Marc_Ridele]

You didn't make me sick, I'm actually sick, like the flu or something similar.

Wow... oook !!
I'm sorry for you.... but thank you to waste your last neurons to help me !!

I need to clarify one thing, the sequence sent to AE playback in Premiere doesn't work.

Ok... big disappointment !!

But, I read once again all the thread, and I think you're absolutely right about the need to take a 3930K.
And no matter what I think about thunderbolt, for now I just need the fastest computer that I can afford.
I'll got 18Tb with all my drives, almost 90h of R3D footage for working !!
So, no need for external drives array for working, and for backup no matter if I can go in 10Gb/s thunderbolt
or 5Gb/s USB3, because my drives will never sustain more than 300Mb/s in RAID0, so... goodbye thunderbolt !!

The only annoying point is the lack of integrated graphics, because like you said, Resolve have more fun with 2 graphic cards.
Maybe I can buy a cheap card (like this GT610 2Gb) just for software GUI and let the GTX680 for software computation,
but I don't know if Premiere is like Resolve and if it will allow me to use 2 graphic cards at the same time...
and what about PCI 16X ? It's not become a 8X if you use 2 slots ?

This is a very unorthodox way of working as the system was never designed to work this way.

I took bad habits with Smoke !!
But... yes, CS6 wasn't designed to do that.... I feel that I will make him suffer !!

The only thing I don't really like is that the hard drive cages obstruct some airflow
coming in from the front because the face the side of the cage and don't have the best vents.

I saw a guy who put the vents in front of the drives instead of behind to get more fresh air... did you tried it ?

I'm not a huge fan of transporting it with the huge heatsink though,
so at some point I'll probably replace it with a water cooling system.

I thought the same, so instead of the Noctua NH-D14, what do you think of a Corsair H100i ?
Don't you think it will be more quiet and cold, and especially for a slight OC like you did ?

About the motherboard, I will do some research... but I don't search for something complicated...
just a mobo which allow me to OC to 4Ghz, easy to install OSX, and with eSATA + USB3 + firewire.

Thanks again, and I wish you a good recovery.

 

[Pedrobaran]

Hi.. I know this thread is rather irrelevant to my question, but I've searched the forums and opened another thread and figured that I might get a reply here so here goes... I am a video editor new to the hackintoshing world and can admit new to computer technology in general, so bare with me please


I recently built a Hackintosh ([email protected] overclocked-couldn't get sleep or speedstep to register with OC without drop in Geekbench): GA-Z77X UD5H and a Zotac GTX 670 factory overclocked
My drive setup: 1 Corsair GT 120GB System drive and a 2TB Western digital (No RAID)

I primarily work with Premiere CS6 and After Effects.
Recently I started a project. One hour long DJ set visual with all sorts of video with varying frame rates, effects, third party plugins, color mattes, transitions, dissolves ,blend modes, adjustment layers... You name it..And my main comp is 1280x720@25fps

You might have guessed my problem is: Why are my exports so slow?

Even a 4 minute section of the clip is taking 20-45 minutes to render out... While my system is way ahead of my previous Core2Duo Imac, since I don't have a base of comparison to be sure if this is what I should expect.

Also, Activity Monitor is reporting only 30-55% CPU usage while encoding to H264 but is rather inconsistent as I can see it jumps up to 80 for a short time speeding up the render but back down again. Also under full load I realize that my clock speed also falls to 1.6Ghz at these times. I am frustrated...

So again...

COMPUTER NOOB ALERT!

With my limited knowledge I came up with a few reasons this might be happening, So you guys can possibly tell me if I'm in the right direction or am completely wrong.
1)This is just the way Adobe Premiere, Media Encoder, VFX Applications, Mac Computers, Hack Computers, Computers in general, The Universe etc.. works... Live with it...

This in my opinion is the most unlikely reason. But I am adding this because as I've said I am 23 years old and not yet have owned a computer of this caliber to able to compare, nor do I know anyone that does and do not have the option to just test CS6 in Windows because I can't afford to buy another SSD+ 7200rpm drive to boot to windows and make a fair comparison..Especially in Turkey where computer hardware is super expensive.

2)My disk setup is causing a major bottleneck... Apart from my system SSD including all work-related I have everything including music,photos,games,videos... Also my projects and and imported media on that same 2TB drive... This sounds rational.. But I need someone to comfort me that it's acceptable for CPU usage to fall sometimes down to even 15% on full load. Would a Scratch partition work? I doubt it..

3)My BIOS settings...
When I first built my hack I struggled to get my machine to at least 15.000 Geekbench 64-Bit score. Maybe not a very smart practice. I was motivated with the instinct of getting my bang for the buck...
So I made a minor Overclock to 4.2. But had to disable CPU EIST and lost sleep functionality. I finally got a good Geekbench so I stopped
This might as I read in another thrread be because I have my SSD on one of the Marvell 6GB/S ports, but is it possible this is because of a lack of voltage? I'd be happy to report my BIOS settings if anyone assists

4)The computer is doing this automatically to reduce heat...But why? I haven't seen any of my processor cores pass 70C max on full load.
I have a Cooler Master Hyper 912S(not using the silencer cable) in a Corsair 500R case...

5)The nature of h264 Encoding. Because I remember sometimes rendering full sequences capped at up to 88% but can't remember which settings I used and since time is of the essence, and my deadline is nearing I cannot try this at the moment


This is all that I could think of.. Am I doing something wrong?

Thanks for your time and understanding

 

[benbumben]

I thought the same, so instead of the Noctua NH-D14, what do you think of a Corsair H100i ?
Don't you think it will be more quiet and cold, and especially for a slight OC like you did ?

About the motherboard, I will do some research... but I don't search for something complicated...
just a mobo which allow me to OC to 4Ghz, easy to install OSX, and with eSATA + USB3 + firewire.

Thanks again, and I wish you a good recovery.

hi,
watercooling is defenetly cooler than aircooling. but it makes more noice. the air pushed throw the ventilator ans also the pump makes noice. but i would go with water to overclock.

this was just released. it´s more highend:

http://www.amazon.com/WAK-WATERCOOLING-EISBERG-240-RL-EB24-16FK-R1/dp/B009G9MOP0/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1359061364&sr=8-1&keywords=cooler+master+eisberg

 

[benbumben]

@Pedrobaran- a few question to clarify

-is this happening in premiere and after effects?
- have you enabled multiprozzesor in AE?
- how much ram do you have and how fast is it?
- how much space is left on your ssd and hdd and where is the folder for adobe media cache?
- 15000 points in geekbench is really good, do you get it all the time?
- have you enable mercury playback engine?
- how long does one minute export to h.264 take without any effcets apllied?

 

[DBP]

There are three tools which will let you analyse a lot of what your computer is doing. Of course, it helps to have enough screen space so you've got room to see them.

1. Activity Monitor

With the dock icon set to display memory allocation you can see at a glance if you're low on RAM.
With the Floating CPU Window you see a set of load graphs for all your cores (including virtuals). Or you can use the CPU History window if you prefer.
The main Activity Monitor window lets you see which processes are chewing power. Remember to set it to display All Processes, so you can see if mds (Spotlight) or other system processes are getting in the way.
If you look at Disk Activity you can see how much read and write activity there is. Aggregated across all the disks, but at least with reads and writes separated into different colours.

2. HWMonitor

You can see the core temps and the CPU frequency (and fan speeds), but you should also be able to see the temps/clocks/fan stats of your GPU (does it cope with more than one GPU?).
Combined with Activity Monitor you can see if the CPU cores are busy. Note that some parts of processing might be bottlenecked on a single-threaded task: this should be obvious from the Activity Monitor stats with a ~100% CPU load on a program, and a spike in the CPU loads (although that 100% can get moved around the cores so you could see 4x 25% load for example).
You can see at a rough level if your GPU is working or idle (the clocks will ramp up/down).

3. iostat

This command-line tool can tell you a lot. I use a wrapper around it which pretties up the output slightly, but for the basics you don't need that. In Terminal, run:

iostat -d -n 99 -w 2

This will spit out a line of numbers every 2 seconds (the same refresh interval as Activity Monitor). If you have lots of disks you may need to stretch the Terminal window to stop the lines wrapping (I have a window with a small font stretched across the bottom of one of my monitors).
For each disk on your system it will show you how many transactions per second there were, the average size of those transactions, and the MB/s those equate to. Unfortunately it combines read and write activity, but it's still useful (Activity Monitor gives you a feel for that). Here's a short extract from a 2-drive laptop with the boot HDD being hammered:

    8.00 447  3.49     0.00   0  0.00 
    7.99 905  7.06     0.00   0  0.00 
    7.96 1096  8.52     0.00   0  0.00 
            disk0              disk1
    KB/t tps  MB/s     KB/t tps  MB/s 
    8.19 397  3.18     4.00   0  0.00 
    7.88 280  2.16     9.52  22  0.20 
    8.00 403  3.15     0.00   0  0.00 
    8.01 471  3.68     8.02 131  1.03 
    8.26 556  4.48     8.00   1  0.01

You can see a lot of what's happening on the system. Your CPUs might be idle because they're in a phase of processing where they're waiting for one thread to complete, or they might be idle because there's not enough RAM, or maybe because they're waiting on one (or more) of your disks. Or they might be waiting on the GPU?

Note that iostat only gives you the device names (disk0, etc) but you can work out which volumes these are by looking at the output of df:

david@pterodroma:ttys000:~ % df -g                
Filesystem    1G-blocks Used Available Capacity  iused     ifree %iused  Mounted on
/dev/[B]disk0[/B]s2        243  148        94    62% 38999474  24837857   61%   /
devfs                 0    0         0   100%      648         0  100%   /dev
map -hosts            0    0         0   100%        0         0  100%   /net
map auto_home         0    0         0   100%        0         0  100%   /home
/dev/[B]disk0[/B]s3        221    0       221     1%    76370  58066195    0%   /Volumes/pterodroma_D0
/dev/[B]disk1[/B]s2        931  252       678    28% 66258283 177848383   27%   /Volumes/pterodroma_D1
david@pterodroma:ttys000:~ %

I hope this info helps.

Go forth and learn, young padawan.

 

[Marc_Ridele]

@Benbumben
Even if at the end I don't OC my CPU, does it worth to take a watercooler ?
(I'm still hesitating for an OC, because each time I see a person happy with his OC,
I read 10 other person who tears their hairs in trying to do the same !! )
Anyway, about the Cooler Master Eisberg 240L, it's definitely a better choice than just
take the H100i and buy 2x more Noctua fans to replace the Corsair provided with the cooler ?

@Pedrobaran
Benbumben asked you "how long does one minute export to h.264 take without any effects apllied?",
and you'd better also try to export this same minute in PRORES422HQ... the H264 is a complex codec,
so it's normal that it takes times to render.... but I don't have a 3770K, so I don't know if it's normal to take
so much time, but if a simple PRORES export take the same amount of time to compile than the H264... well....
that's just mean God, the universe, your computer, or even Darth Vader... one of them don't like you !!

Go forth and learn, young padawan.

"That boy is our last hope !"

 

[benbumben]

@Benbumben
Even if at the end I don't OC my CPU, does it worth to take a watercooler ?
(I'm still hesitating for an OC, because each time I see a person happy with his OC,
I read 10 other person who tears their hairs in trying to do the same !! )
Anyway, about the Cooler Master Eisberg 240L, it's definitely a better choice than just
take the H100i and buy 2x more Noctua fans to replace the Corsair provided with the cooler ?

if you don´t overclock you should take a air cooler. in the past i thought water cooler are more silent but they are quite loud. this can be getting on you nervs. i have a antec watercooler and it´s really loud if i run it with full power. also to push the air through the radiator need more pressure than to push it through a aircooler and that´s why it makes a lot of sound...

 

[qwerty123]

Sabertooth board also seems like a good option.

Kundica: what case are you using? And feel well soon!!! Rest up and enjoy your time

Yeah, I'm not sure the time for thunderbolt has yet arrived for video editing. The only thing that seems appealing about it right now is the ability to send a signal out for a monitor, etc. Drives are too expensive right now.

I've done a clean install on my 3770k build, and it's giving me better geekbench results. I haven''t yet done anything new with it in premiere, and I doubt it will make that big of a difference.

Being able to edit at 5K in 1/4 rez with no dropped frames is impressive.

 

[Pedrobaran]

Hi guys, Thanks for your replies!

I finally finished my project and was able to test things.

@benbumben

-My Hack is still quite new and it's my first long-term project with it. I am mainly using Premiere and After Effects.
-Multiprocessor in AE is enabled.
-I have 16 GB of 1600 Mhz Corsair Vengeance RAM
-In my SSD I have 24.31GB of free space, My HDD has 348.13 GB space left on it. I will get around to emptying all stock footage I used for this project to an external drive which will save me around 230 GB free space.My media cache folder for After effects is in my Library folder, and for Premiere is in my projects folder on my HDD.
-Yes I just again tested and got 15778 64-bit which I know is great!
-Mercury Playback is also enabled

@benbumben & Marc_Ridele



-In Premiere Pro it takes 1.09 to export a minute of 1080p DSLR25 footage to H264 using 40% of CPU in activity monitor.
Exporting the same sequence into Prores 422(HQ) takes 37 seconds with 50% CPU
-In After Effects it takes 59 sec using only 20% CPU

What I'm actually curious of is, should I expect CS6 not to take full advantage of my processor even with a sequence full of effects? Is there any chance maybe you guys could share your render times as well? That would be really helpful...Thanks again

 

[drnoodle]

If you need some 4k or 5k RED Epic footage for testing purposes, check this site: www.footage-online.de -> Freeclips!