Tutorial: ProMAX ONE: Looking at the Hero

Thanks for the review Walter!

Slight note of contention...minor, but it's very important in many workflows:

You can most certainly encode into ProRes on Windows with software. Telestream Products (Episode, etc.) that have Windows 2008 Server can do it. ffmpeg (free!) can do it. (even easier with AnotherGUI).

Sorry to nitpick - not my intention, but Prores encode on Windows is a misconception that has yielded some really odd workflows.

I appreciate your effort with this review!

~Michael



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So I have to find Windows 2008 Server to do that? Well I guess with four boot drives on the One that's a possibility to load it up on one of the boot drives.

As we already own an AJA KiPro and KiPro Mini, easier for us just to use those, but thanks for the clarification.

Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Editor, Colorist, Director, Writer, Consultant, Author, Chef.
HD Post and Production
Biscardi Creative Media

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Anybody Hackintosh one of these babies?

Nice review, Walter, but I am surprised at the time the ProMax One took to render the ProMax One test composition in After Effects. My "modest" machine only took 15 Min 32 sec to render the same composition.
My specs are as follows:
i7 3960X
Asus P9X79WS (in performance mode)
64 GB of RAM
Quadro 5000
1 OCZ Vertex 3 for the OS
4 OCZ Vertex 3 in RAID 0 for the media
Win 7 64 Ultimate

I forgot to mention that I am running After Effects CS6 as well.

Hello Walter,
Thank you for sharing the review, but as tech lover, I'd have loved to find something more.

I'd love to see what's in the box. There are no inside pictures, and no mention of the components used to build this hero. I'm thinking to the internal airflow, to the mainboard, to the drives and to the RAID host bus adapter (and its management software).
18TB of RAID5 means about 13.8TB net, and a problem of RAID consistency would be a disaster.

I'm surprised from the result of the RAID benchmark. Usually even the most advanced RAID HBA can't multiply perfectly the performances of a single drive. 18TB means 6x3TB 7200RPM drives. 1310/6 means that each drive can sustain at least 218MBps; I haven't find any 7200rpm able to do it.
Moreover, in my opinion, the AJA System Test is not the only (and best) way to test an array. In the video editing we use several streams of video so it is important to know what is the RAID capability to read several files at the same time. For this reason I use an old and free tool called "Nbench". It allows to specify the number of concurrent threads and get speed result from each one (max number about 20, max file size 20x999MB i.e. about 20GB).
I hope you are you in time to integrate the review.
Many thanks and greetings from Italy,

Paolo.Castellano@ivs.it
http://www.ivsEdits.com
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"Post Fata Resurgo"

It's an awesome machine, but i'm not sure if i want all that harddrive heat in a workstation internally.

Thanks for the review. Have been interested in the ProMAX One and the RAIN Element 2 as a possible replacement to one of my MacPros. At first, cost seemed to be a barrier, but if one considers adding a new raid, the cost factor is comparable. I was impressed with the speed test as well. Seems these all in one solutions will be the next phase of high end PC's.

Also thanks to the others for posting simpler ProRes export workflows from a Windows machine.

Victor
http://www.editvictor.com
http://www.hbhm.tv
http://www.itvisus.com

So when Walter ran his tests on the ProMAX ONE he did so in CS5.5. As you know there were a lot of performance enhacements in CS6. So to provide a fair comparison for those using CS6, we just ran the test in CS6 on a ProMAX ONE Hero.

Results are: completion in 7 min 35 seconds.



Jess Hartmann
CEO
ProMAX Systems
http://www.promax.com

There's also the additional issue of RayTracing in CS6, which isn't supported by the iMac GPUs. Had extrusion /raytracing been added to the clips for the test, the iMac would've jumped to days instead of hours for its estimate.

Render time for a early 2011 MacBook Pro
Ram: 16G
2.2 Ghz i7
AMD Radeon HD 6750M 1024M

P.S.: seems to come with the same gamma issues as the QT encoder does.

I'm always interested in more speed and have been looking at BTO options for a Windows based box. Still my 2 year old MacPro beats the Hero.

12 core MacPRo 32 GB CS6 Render Time 15 min, 41 sec. Memory and Multiprocessing set to use 12 of 24 CPU's. RAM allocation 2GB per CPU.

I did see the impressive results you got with CS6. So I stand corrected.

However, $17K vs 5K, I'd hope the results were substantially better.

[walter biscardi] "Do you have an 18TB RAID inside your Mac Pro?
"

No, I don't, I have a 2TB RAID, 2TB non RAID and a small SSD for a cache. The Hero wins hands down.

You are right, the results are very impressive and for some users, yourself for example, the ROI and cost benefit are meaningful and worth the investment.

Fair enough if you buy all components from Apple. My machine is a lowly 12 core 2.66, I bought the RAM and hard drives from third parties.

I ran the after effects test render as well, just for comparison reasons. I know a lot of people are looking for mac pro alternatives these days.

So, the outcome... In my new workstation, which is a hackintosh build, the render took 23 minutes and 33 secs. It could have been a little faster if I had overclocked more, but I prefer to keep my system more stable and cool. The cpu temperatures were around 64 celcius while rendering, using a multiplier of 42.

I'm using an Asus p9x79 deluxe motherboard, with 16 GB of ram, a i7 3930 K processor and a GTX 560 Ti graphicscard.

Editor/Colorist, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
http://www.pepijnklijs.nl

:-) you made it while I was going asking you to try with Win 7!

Paolo.Castellano@ivs.it
http://www.ivsEdits.com
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"Post Fata Resurgo"

This is such a great article. I fell in love with the new ProMax Win7 PC at NAB. And it's really NOT expensive - you would pay $5000 - $6000 just for a high quality 8 bay RAID array and controller card, making the computer portion between $2000 - $3000 and for that money (the price of a Quad Core Mac Pro) - it blows the doors off the Mac Pro. Try getting an equivalent HP Z820 and an external 8 bay with a hi quality RAID host card (typically around $900 bucks), and you will spend a LOT more money. This computer is designed to be a stand alone server. It has LOTS of x16 lane slots (4 I believe) and 2 or 3 more slower slots. It has provision for a Sonnet QIO, or LTO tape. It has FOUR ethernet ports (not two that Walter stated), so it can be setup for basic shared storage right from this box.

It's a great computer at a GREAT aggresive price for what they are giving you.

With that said, I just got an HP Z420 (about $1400) because I know that people will want to spend as little as possible, and I want to see what I can do with this nice cheap computer. But I truly believe that the ProMax is a great value for what they are giving you - and the only competition is from HP and Boxx Systems, both which cost more.

Bob Zelin

Maybe a silly question, but are there color space/gamma issues between Mac and Win anymore? I'm thinking about changing 1 machine to a promax, but the bulk of our systems will still Mac and we do lots of distributed rendering over night with C4D. And all our projects are used on just about every machine, so color correction effects would need to appear the same across every system. I seem to remember this being an issue back in the day.