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[DAV's Tech Table] Welcome back to the Tech Table. [Dave Helmly] Today I thought I'd share some things that we're working on with Intel and Thunderbolt, and to make it really interesting I thought I would start off by using a lightweight notebook computer like this MacBook Air running under Boot Camp Windows 7 64. Anyone that has a MacBook Air knows its a fantastic little computer, and I wanted to really see if I could push it to the limits with Thunderbolt. And to really make it more interesting I teamed up with my friends at Sonnet, got a hold of one of their chassis and got a hold of our friends at RED, threw a ROCKET card in there, and really wanted to push this ultra notebook to see can I actually edit in the field and have a good experience using this combination of Thunderbolt technology, and also to keep it even more interesting I've added more peripherals like this Blackmagic Ultra Studio 3D. So, let's jump into my lab and take a closer look. Let's start by taking a quick look at the timeline I've already got set up. This RED 4K timeline has already got 4 clips in it, and the first thing you'll notice is the media pending window up here has a tough time just drawing the first frame, which is not a very good sign that I'm going to have a great editing experience on this laptop. So, let's take a closer look at why. So, if I right-mouse click, and I go down to playback resolution the first thing I notice is that it's a 4K project at full. So, full resolution is going to be very difficult to play on any system without some sort of assistance, much less an ultra lightweight notebook. Typically, you would bring this down to a scalable resolution like a fractional resolution of 1/8 or 1/4, depending on your laptop, but in this case I want to show you how we can actually achieve full. So, the first thing I want to sort of point out is what's in this MacBook Air. So, let's go to the control panel and take a close look at the system settings. The first thing you'll notice is it gets a fairly decent Windows experience index, a 1.8 GHz processor that's in there, Core i7 that's 4 cores, 4 nice threads to work with, 4 GB of RAM running via Bootcamp Windows 7 64, and that's pretty much the high end on a MacBook Air these days. Let's go ahead and bring up the task manager so you get an idea of what the CPUs are doing when we try to play these frames back. So, let's go ahead and hit play on the program monitor and see what's going on. As you'll notice the buffers quickly fill up and the CPUs are pegged at a 100%. All 4 cores are threading nice and evenly, but, again, it's completely over saturated the processor, and there's not a whole lot going on in this window, and, again, that's to be expected. So, if we wind this back let's sort of see what we can do about this. I'm going to right-mouse click on the RED clip in the project window here, go to source settings, and the first thing you'll notice is that my use RED ROCKET tab is actually available. So, if I go down here and select all available that's actually going out over Thunderbolt into the Sonnet chassis where the RED ROCKET's sitting and making that now available for my use on this notebook. So, now if I scrub this you'll notice that I actually get a fairly nice experience. So, that right off the bat is telling me I've actually got a usable situation. If I hit play you'll notice it actually plays, absolutely no problem, 30 frames a second. No dropped frames, it looks great. So, what does that really mean? Well, let's take a closer look at the CPUs and see what they're doing. So, if I wind this back and I hit play, you'll notice that it's now sitting at 30 or 40% of where it was before, which means I now have a lot more room to do other things with those CPUs. Again, back to that 64-bit Mercury playback engine that we have. Again, this is using the Mercury playback engine on the software side. No hardware from GPU. This is strictly just CPU usage as well as the RED rocket card, and working really, really nicely. So, I'm going to go ahead and close this down and sort of give you a scenario on where you might use this. So, let's right-mouse click, go back into source settings and take a closer look at some of the RED settings, and you just want to go ahead and see whether or not the shot that you've taken is actually usable. Let's take a look at this and start adjusting some of these levers here. Maybe bringing the shadows down to bring up some of the contrast, mop up the saturation a bit, and maybe turn the heat on those flames a little bit, and sort of come up with a nice look. Bring this back, let's bring it up full screen and hit play, and you'll notice that it's actually doing a really, really nice job. So, that's pretty amazing that I can actually get that sort of performance out of an ultra book notebook like this MacBook Air running Windows 7, but what's really amazing is what I've actually had running in the background the whole time. The whole time I've actually been recording this entire session on a Blackmagic Ultra Studio 3D Box. The camera you're looking at there has actually got an SDI jack on the back being fed into the Blackmagic Box, out of the Blackmagic Box into a Promise RAID. So, the whole time that I'm working with Thunderbolt inside the Sonnet chassis here, and have that data going back and forth to the Promise RAID, it's actually recording everything live at the same time. So it's got playback and recording going back at the same time, and on top of that I'm actually recording Camtasia Studio to get the screen graphs that I need. Pretty amazing, I've been very impressed with what I've seen with Thunderbolt so far and cannot wait to see what's next.
