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.