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Playback for a comp workstation in film

How is the playback problem solved on comp workstation (Nuke/Shake) at big companies? I imagine that not every workstation has fibre storage attached, and the memory capacity (esp. with todays players being mostly 32 bit) is limited. How do compositors preview their shots (especially if the shots are long) - only in dailies/review? It's absolutely terrifying to playback your shot in chunks of 50-60 frames.

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3 answers

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ian_68

Hi All

I had this problem in the past while working in Montreal.

The solution was simple.

We had 32bit Mac pro workstations. 16gb ram 2.8ghz, we added 3 "WD Raptor" 150gb 10,000rpm hard drives, in a raid 0 configuration. Giving around 300mb per second sustained through put. So when Framecycler ran out of ram the hard disk speed was fast enough to play any length clip at full 2k. You will have to play with the settings in Framecycler to get the best results.

The local raid also served as a local cache for shot elements, speeding up work flow in Nuke overall.

I think this setup would work just as well in either Windows or Linux environments.

As regards the bigger studios, like Hugh says, they have a dedicated systems for 2k playback, which are shared. which will be more reliable, while costing considerable more.

my two pence, Ian

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julik
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Aha! so the key is just bursting a few internal drives that are 10k, which puts it at around 750 euros per workstation. Expensieveye for home use but seems to fit the bill, thx!

ian_68
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Yes, I would like to add you don’t have to use Mac hardware. I find home gaming hardware does a very good job when setup in a Linux environment running Nuke.

If you do set some think up let me know. Cheers, Ian

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  • 4

dbr [ Editor ]

Playback software like RV and DJV have 64-bit versions, but the bigger problem is being constrained to 32-bit OS's..

That said, even with a 32-bit machine and the Linux bigmem patches, I've been able to load most shots into memory (bigmem allows the kernel to address more than 4GB of RAM, but individual processes are still limited to ~4GB each)

For longer sequences there was a review machine with a fast local RAID, and scripts to send shots to this machine

In an ideal world, a 64-bit OS with 64-bit playback software would make this a non-issue, but I wonder, could an average workstation decode Cineon files straight from a SATA II drive? Theoretically it should (~11MB * 24fps == 264MB/s, SATA II == 384MB/s), reality might disagree

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franssu_27
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I second the mention of RV and DJV, two worthy alternatives to the ubiquitous FrameCycler (sans the stupid interface). DJV is free, but buggy. At least it’s open-source, if you’re in the mood to tweak it. RV is not free, but is heavily customizable and super easy to integrate in a pipeline.

As for the theoretical possibility of reading 2K dpx files from a single SATA drive, if I remember well RV comes close to do it, but not for super long sequences. I will try it again tomorrow to have a more precise answer.

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  • 2

hugh_gid [ Editor ]

Usually as half-res DPXs using Framecycler. Or at full-res if the shot is short enough.

Often also using quicktimes - depending on the resolution. On one show, we'd generate 1080p ProRes quicktimes from every render, and they were pretty good for checking the shot at full res (although without the ability to change the colour space, and with the obvious compression problems that anything like that will have)

In our office (a smaller place) we have a FrameCycler DDS station with local fibre storage. We've got a script that will queue up a copy of their files, and then they can go in and view their shots at 2k.

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julik
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So is that a dedicated viewing machine that anyone can use (not booked with clients for grading and things like that)?

hugh_gid
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We’re small enough that this isn’t really an issue – it’s obvious to the artists whether the room is in use or not. They don’t use it as much as we’d like, but some do, and it’s certainly available for them to use. It’s purely for review purposes – we don’t do any grading in there (Framecycler isn’t that good for grading anyway – we purely use it as a place for viewing 2k footage)

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