Mac Pro, Final Cut Pro X 10.1, and five streams of native R3D

The present and future of post production business and technology by Philip Hodgetts

I decided to take a video of the Mac Pro’s amazing performance with native Red R3D 4K files. Watch five streams, with composite modes, scale, rotation and more play without rendering.

Final Cut Pro X with the new Mac Pro playing five simultaneous streams of RED RAW (.r3d) native off the internal SSD. The background layer is scaled to fill the 16:9 aspect ratio. The four overlays are scaled, rotated randomly and positioned randomly. They have different composite modes applied, and two have drop shadows. There are various short and long fades added. The aerial shot is a GoPro shot scaled up. The opening time lapse is a ProRes 4444 scaled. The interview shot has a Color Board correction applied. The slow motion footage was shot that way and is playing at normal speed.

Final Cut Pro X 10.1 was set to Best Performance (which I believe is an adaptive deBayer) and Background Rendering was off. You can see from the orange bars that this was not pre-rendered. I chose to shoot with my iPhone simply because I didn’t want to do a screen capture that might affect performance. read more...