Nvidia release new CUDA drivers for Mac

Nvidia have released a new version of their CUDA drivers for the Mac, Version 5.0.24
For some reason they are not seen by the CUDA update tool in system preferences.
You can download them manually from here.

On my Mac Pro with a GTX550ti I saw performance improvements in xbench, Quartz graphics went up from 288 to 335 and OpenGL rose from 114 to 119.

I'm expecting my GTX660ti to arrive today so will update these figures with the results from that.

If you are interested in running a PC graphics card in your Mac Pro, please read my other post here

Blackmagic Cinema Camera starting to ship!

The Blackmagic Cinema Camera

The Blackmagic Cinema Camera is finally starting to ship, although it seems to only be only to bloggers at first
(not me unfortunately) :-)

Dan Kanes has put up an unboxing video on his blog here

Hopefully they will be shipping to lesser mortals soon, I'll let you know when we have any in stock at CVP where you can order one at 8% off list price. Click here

UPDATE: Blackmagic have posted the user manual and first version of drivers for the camera here

Blackmagic release DaVinci Resolve 9.0

DaVinci Resolve 9.0

UPDATE 26th September Resolve 9.01 has been released

UPDATE 9th September. Resolve 9.0 has been released

UPDATE 16th August Blackmagic have released Beta 3 of Resolve 9

UPDATE 8th August: Blackmagic have just released Beta 2 of Resolve 9

From the press release:

Blackmagic Design today announced the release of DaVinci Resolve 9 public beta, a major new update to the world’s most advanced color correction tool featuring a completely redesigned user interface to optimize workflow speed. DaVinci Resolve 9 public beta is now available for free download to existing full featured DaVinci Resolve customers, as well as the free DaVinci Resolve Lite!

This significant user interface overhaul has been created to harness the power of multiple new technologies added to DaVinci Resolve in the last few years, including automatic 3D eye matching, multi layering timelines, XML support plus more camera and file type support. The new user interface is extremely fast to use and eliminates unnecessary clicks and settings to get working fast. A job can be up and running in three clicks: one to log in, one to drop media into the project and the next to grade.

New user interface improvements include a new streamlined project import, export and selection workflow, scrubbable media thumbnails to speed up shot selection, production metadata fields for entering on set shot notes and larger color control palettes to give faster access to grading tools. There are new clear graphical palettes for control of power windows, keys, sizing, tracking and stabilization, camera raw and data burn ins. The Gallery now includes resizable stills displayed in user named albums and 44 “prebuilt looks” for fast grade selection. DaVinci Resolve 9 now ensures that the product remains a true, modern, multi platform tool, while retaining all the powerful features as the previous version.

Other new features in DaVinci Resolve 9 include ‘Log grading’ in every corrector node, audio playback support up to 16 channels per source clip and audio renders in both Quicktime and MXF, automatic ‘Audio Sync’, clip data burn ins and batch rendering for dailies, additional and faster automatic stereo 3D image alignment tool, plus new stereoscopic 3D floating windows and new 3D monitoring options.

I've had a quick look through the installation guide and I noticed a couple of interesting things:

Resolve can now support a single graphics card for UI and processing, this was always a problem on some systems because of the restrictions on adding second GPU's.

Resolve 9.0 is designed for Mountain Lion and CUDA 5, you can use the Nvidia GTX 470 or GTX 570 in a Mac Pro running Lion and you can use the GTX 680 under Mountain Lion but only using an external expansion chassis, I presume because of the power requirements of the GTX 680. Similarly the GTX 480 and GTX 580 can only be used in an expansion chassis.

The UI will now run at 1680 x 1050 on a laptop, but is designed to run at 2560 x 1440 so ideally you would have a 27" monitor at that resolution. Resolve will run on the new Retina display MacBook Pro, but only at 1920 x 1200

On both the Mac Pro and Macbooks 16GB of RAM is recommended although it will run with 8GB.

I'm going to install it and have a play. I will update this post if I find anything else of interest. :-)

Download the beta for PC here

Download the beta for Mac here

Enabling the Mercury Playback Engine for Premiere Pro CS6 in Mountain Lion

Premiere Pro CS6

Adobe recently released Creative Suite CS6 with new versions of all their creative software including their video editing application, Premiere.

I have tried Premiere on a number of occasions before and never really liked it, but starting with version 5 it has been improving steadily.

One of the key new features is the "Mercury Playback Engine" which leverages the power of your graphics card to give you smoother playback and more real time effects without rendering.

Premiere CS6 takes this to an even higher level with improvements to the Mercury playback engine that provide a really slick and responsive interface.

In order to take advantage of the Mercury Playback Engine you need a computer with supported Graphics hardware. Adobe publish a list here.

If you look at this list you will see there are plenty of cards for the PC, but only three for the Mac Pro, and they're all a bit old. Following on from my post about running PC Graphics cards in a Mac Pro, I thought I would pass on my experience with getting Premiere CS6 to run with the Mercury Playback Engine enabled on a Mac Pro 3,1 running Mountain Lion (OSX 10.8)

My Mac Pro had been running Lion happily with a PC version of the GTX550ti graphics card, I recently updated the OS to Mountain Lion with no problems (well, I did see some issues with resuming from sleep mode but I just switched that off) However, the GTX550ti is not on Adobe's list of supported graphics cards.

There is an excellent guide to enabling support for the Mercury Playback Engine on PC's here, but I found the Mac instructions to be confusing, plus I know most people are not comfortable with messing around with the command line.

So here is my non-command line guide to enabling support for your graphics card in Mountain Lion.

First: Install Premiere CS6, you can download the trial version of Creative Suite 6 here.

Second: If you create a new project in Premiere and then check: Project > Project settings > General under the "Video rendering and Playback" tab you should only have the option "Mercury Playback Engine software only" If you see GPU acceleration as an option your card is already supported.

Third: Shut down Premiere, in finder go to the folder where Premiere is installed, by default it should be: Applications - Adobe Premiere Pro CS6. Command click on the Adobe Premiere Pro CS6.app and choose "Show package contents", then choose contents.

Fourth: In the contents folder you will see a file called "GPUsniffer.app" again command click the file and choose "Show package contents", then choose contents, then MacOS.

Fifth: Command click the file "GPUsniffer" and choose "open with> Terminal.app. A terminal window will open with information like this: (this is from my computer)

Vendor: NVIDIA Corporation

Renderer: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 550 Ti OpenGL Engine

OpenGL Version: 2.1 NVIDIA-8.0.51

GLSL Version: 1.20

Monitors: 1

Monitor 0 properties -

   Size: (0, 0, 1920, 1200)

   Max texture size: 16384

   Supports non-power of two: 1

   Shaders 444: 1

   Shaders 422: 1

   Shaders 420: 1

--- GPU Computation Info ---

Found 2 devices supporting GPU computation.

CUDA Device 0 - 

   Name: GeForce GTX 550 Ti

   Capability: 2.1

   Driver: 5

   Total Video Memory: 2047MB

OpenCL Device 1 - 

   Name: GeForce GTX 550 Ti

   Capability: 1.2

   Driver: 1.1

   Total Video Memory: 2048MB

logout

Copy the Name of the Graphics card, so here it is GeForce GTX 550 Ti (spaces and capitalisation are important)

Sixth: In finder, navigate back to the Premiere CS6 app contents, there you should see a file called "cuda_supported_cards.txt" double click the file to open it in the text editor. You will see a list of supported graphics cards, paste the name of your graphics card under the other cards listed. If Mountain Lion says that the file is protected and asks if you want to edit a copy, say yes. Then save the copy with the same name, overwriting the original. (at this point text edit on my computer hung, but the file was saved, so just force quit text edit)

Optionally, do the same with the file "OpenCL_supported_cards.txt" you may need to do this for AMD graphics cards that do not support CUDA

Seven: Launch Premiere Pro CS6 and check Project > Project settings > General, under the "Video rendering and Playback" tab you should now have the option "Mercury Playback Engine GPU acceleration"

Congratulations!! You have successfully enabled Mercury Playback Acceleration.

DISCLAIMER: I cannot guarantee this will work with your card but it should be fine with any Nvidia GTX 500 or 600 series card. I accept no responsibility for damage to your machine or lost data.

I have been playing with Premiere CS6 since enabling the Mercury Playback engine and have created a timeline with 8 layers of Chroma key at HD resolution that plays back in real time!!! Here is a screenshot of the project :-)

Eight layers of Chroma Key in real time!!!

Use the comments to let me know if you succeed, or to ask questions. Thanks and good luck!!

Macbook Pro retina display - perfect portable production?

Apples new Macbook Pro with retina display

On Monday in San Francisco Apple revealed their latest flagship laptop, the Macbook Pro with retina display. It's a beautiful, slim and powerful machine, with an Intel i7 processor and SSD drive, but of course the most striking thing about it is the screen. 2880 x 1800 pixels of retina display goodness.

Although it's a laptop, it's fast enough and powerful enough to be a serious portable production machine. It features two Thunderbolt ports allowing connection to external storage like the Promise Pegasus RAID arrays or Lacie's Little big disk or video i/o devices like the forthcoming Blackmagic Design Ultrastudio express or the AJA iO XT

Even the USB ports are USB3 so you can also use USB3 based storage which is easier to find than Thunderbolt storage and would also be compatible with PC based systems.

The thing I would really like to see paired with the Macbook though is this, the Blackmagic Cinema Camera.

Blackmagic Cinema Camera

When Blackmagic announced this at NAB they surprised everybody. A compact large format digital camera that produces 12bit RAW images at 2432 x 1366 pixels.

It records on to SSD disks which are mounted in the camera and it connects via Thunderbolt for media download. Pair this with the retina display Macbook and you've got a portable shooting, grading and editing system, as it comes complete with a copy of DaVinci Resolve software.

The Macbook has integrated graphics courtesy of the i7 processor but also comes with the Nvidia 650M discrete graphics chip which has 384 CUDA cores. That means it should be able to run Resolve at a very respectable speed, and should be equally at home with Avid Media Composer 6, Adobe CS6 or even Autodesk smoke.

Get back from location and plug it into a bigger screen, mouse and keyboard and you've got a full blown edit suite with reasonable performance.

I've got one on order so as soon as I get a chance I'll post some thoughts on the performance.

PC Nvidia Graphics cards in a Mac Pro UPDATED

One of my computers is a Mac Pro, which I've been very happy with, except for the restriction of using "Mac" versions of Pci-e Graphics cards, which are typically more expensive than their PC counterparts.

I had been running the machine with an Nvidia GT8800, which was a fairly powerful card, but was dismayed to see all the new cards coming out for the PC which were faster and cheaper.

There are ways to "hack" OSX to get it to accept a non-Mac graphics card but I was loathe to mess around with a working machine.

So I was very curious to read that in Mac OSX Lion (from 10.7.2 I believe), you can install a standard PC graphics card and a driver from Nvidia, and it just works :-)

I thought I would give it a try. I first installed the Nvidia driver for OSX 10.7.3 from here. I then installed an Nvidia GTX550ti graphics card. I chose the GTX550ti as it has a lower power requirement than some of the faster cards and I didn't want to overstress the power supply in my Mac Pro.

I crossed my fingers and powered up...

There were a few moments of doubt as there is no boot screen or spinning icon as the machine starts, but then the desktop appeared and everything was working!!

I also run Windows via boot camp and rebooting into windows I got the "found new hardware" message and the drivers for the graphics card were updated.

I haven't had a chance to run any serious benchmarks yet but I'll have a play with the system this weekend and see how it's running. First impressions are very good, the system seems happy and the graphics performance is definitely better. The GTX550ti only cost me €150 :-)

NB: Apple updated Lion to OSX 10.7.4 which broke the Nvidia driver, but Nvidia released a new driver here which apparently works. I haven't tested it personally. I'll wait until any other issues with 10.7.4 have been identified.

UPDATE: Last night I took the plunge and updated my Mac Pro to Mountain Lion 10.8

The GTX550ti is supported as standard, without installing any drivers from Nvidia, in fact the drivers installed by OSX show as driver version 295 which is newer than the 270 drivers for Lion.

Apparently Mountain Lion will support GTX 500 and 600 series cards natively but watch out for power consumption issues with the higher spec cards.

UPDATE 2nd August. I have had some instances of graphics corruption in Mountain Lion which I didn't have in Lion. I will keep an eye on the Nvidia site to see if they release updated drivers for Mountain Lion. The built in driver has a release number of 295 so it is behind the 300 series drivers that are current for other platforms.

UPDATE: It seems the GTX550ti has problems in Mountain Lion relating to sleep and recovery. For the moment I recommend you do NOT use the GTX550ti in Mountain Lion.

UPDATE 29th August. I have ordered a GTX660ti and will put up a new post with my experiences with that.
I have also found a cheap source of Mac Pro GPU power cables, you can order them from ebay here. I ordered two and they arrived the next day!

This post is getting quite old now, please see my other posts for more recent information.

Avid for $4.99?

Avid have released a version of Avid Studio for the iPad
It looks like a useful addition to iMovie but I doubt it will be very useful to the professional editor.
You can download it from the app store for $4.99 here

More information from Avid here