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Topic: DCP Conversion System Info
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Carsten Kurz
Film God
Posts: 4340
From: Cologne, NRW, Germany
Registered: Aug 2009
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posted 02-08-2016 07:34 AM
Annli - the more processor cores, the faster the conversion.
Last year I bought a second-hand dual Xeon workstation for very little money, 2*6 core Xeon Z600. Very solid machine. You can get them for 500-600US$ on ebay.
If you have enough money for a new machine, get an i7 5820, 5930, or 5960 single CPU system. Although a dual CPU Xeon will always be faster, yet a lot more expensive with current hardware.
You can get near realtime performance with one of these.
Note, with many cores to use for encoding, you need enough memory as well. For a dual Xeon, get a least 12GBytes of RAM. If you are running out of RAM during encoding, the disc swapping will throw you back into the stone-age.
When buying a used Z600 or Z800, make sure you get the necessary RAM with it, as it is not easy to source suitable RAM afterwards, they are a bit special.
This is for using DCP-o-matic and the likes, using OpenJPEG encoding.
'FinalDCP' uses the Kakadu SpeedPack, and is blazingly fast (and expensive), though not as user-friendly as DCP-o-matic. You can easily get near 2-4 times realtime encoding rate with it even on on 'commodity hardware'.
You can also use networked render nodes to increase encoding speed, both with FinalDCP and DCP-o-matic. Speed increase is considerable, pairing two identical machines will give you nearly twice the encoding speed, as far as the network throughput can sustain (Gigabit-Ethernet absolutely necessary).
- Carsten
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Carsten Kurz
Film God
Posts: 4340
From: Cologne, NRW, Germany
Registered: Aug 2009
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posted 02-08-2016 11:52 AM
I have no direct comparison, but as DCP-o-matic/j2c scales very good with the number of cores, it seems a full Dual-Xeon 5660 Z600 system at around 600US$ is about on par with a Xeon D.
http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Xeon+D-1540+%40+2.00GHz&id=2507
http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Xeon+X5660+%40+2.80GHz&id=1305&cpuCount=2
Note this would be a complete system at this price, including case, discs, Memory, etc. For the price of the Xeon D board alone, you could buy two of those systems running probably twice the speed of a single Xeon D board. I would always try to start with a dual CPU capable system.
Carl Hetherington put a few pages up with DCP-o-matic benchmarks, but there are no numbers for the most recent mainstream CPUs yet.
http://dcpomatic.com/benchmarks/
The reason is simply that these HP Z600 or Dell Precision dual xeon workstations were an industry standard and are available now second hand at very low cost, because there were so many of them sold.
They are also of exceptional build-quality. Just that some components are not standard PC stuff, so you have to make sure you get them fully equipped or become knowledgeable yourself to source the proper items. If you buy them with Dual CPU and enough RAM right from the start, that's the best way to get them to work quickly.
The Z600 is also very quiet.
http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu_value_alltime.html
- Carsten
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