8K cameras are becoming more common, but computers struggle to follow this sensor race, and editing high-resolution video can be challenging. Therefore, RED and NVIDIA teamed up to announce a solution to facilitate 8K editing.
According to NVIDIA: “as 8K production has increased, the need for massive CPU processing power or single-purpose hardware like the RED ROCKET-X puts it beyond reach for most content creators. That’s changing.”
The goal of the partnership is to deliver a SDK software solution that will unleash the power of the graphics card to work with high-resolution footage without the need for proxies. Earlier this year, NVIDIA and RED announced an initiative to accelerate 8K video processing by offloading the compute-intensive decoding and debayering of REDCODE RAW footage onto a single NVIDIA GPU.
Last week, the graphics card manufacturer demonstrated the solution during a live event. 24+ frames per second capabilities were shown running on an NVIDIA Quadro RTX 6000 GPU to play back, edit, and color-grade RAW 8K footage on a system with a single-CPU HP Z4 Workstation, thus “eliminating the need for either a $6,750 RED ROCKET-X or a $20,000 dual-processor workstation.”
NVIDIA said “this 8K performance is also available with NVIDIA TITAN RTX or GeForce RTX 2080 Ti GPUs, so editors can choose the right tools for their budget or shooting location.” This raises the question of the need of and expensive Quadro card if high-end consumer RTX cards can also manage 8K footage. The final RED R3D SDK and REDCINE-X PRO software are planned to be available at the end Q1 2019. We will stick to proxies until we can review this new GPU software solution.
The only problem with this article is what was in the HP workstation as far as CPU, memory and disk goes. If you look at the Z4/Z6 page you will find a plethora of options for the machines including 18 core CPUs, up to 384 GB of memory and lots of disk options including RAID for SATA and SAS as well as M2. SSD.
8K video??? Man, 4K video editing is a complete pain, let alone 8K. Creating proxies for 4K footage takes alot of extra time even before you get to edit any of your footage. You're computer struggles to get through most of the editing process. Premiere Pro CC constantly stutters, locks up or crashes because it's just not an easy process. Uploading any 4K footage to Youtube is a pain, and people can't even view it on their tablets or cellphones because it just takes forever to buffer. And, even though 4K TV's are more and more common, no network on TV, besides Netflix, even broadcasts ANYTHING in 4K yet! All in all, the world hasn't caught up with 4K and here we are already talking about 8K???