David Fincher's new movie shot and post produced at 6K and used 36 TB of SSDs!

Gone Girl

Working wtih 6K material from a Red Dragon calls for epic computing resources!

Gone Girl was shot on the RED Dragon Camera at 6K and was then offlined at 2054 x 1152 (which allowed them to reframe shots and monitor them at 1920 x 800) in Adobe Premiere CC, before being conformed in Adobe Premiere CC and Adobe After Effects CC at 5120 x 2560. All the computers that were used were fitted with Nvidia's latest Quadro GPUs and all debayering, stabilisation and reframing was performed in real time using a CUDA based version of REDline (no REDRocket cards required)

The numbers are certainly impressive. The resolution of the RED Dragon at 6K is 6144 x 3160 pixels with a single stream of 24fps playback needing 1.8GBps of bandwidth. (Yes that's Gigabytes not gigabits, 4K is a mere 800MBps)

The offline systems were Mac Pro 2011 and 2012 workstations fitted with Nvidia Quadro 5000 and K5000 GPUs, up to 64GB of RAM and connected to a shared storage system from Open Drives over Solarflare 10 Gigabit Ethernet.

The conform systems were HP Z820 PCs running 12 core Intel Xeons and 256GB of RAM. They were fitted with Nvidia Quadro 6000 GPUs, dual port 10Gbps Solarflare Ethernet adaptors and pairs of Fusion IO 1.6TB Solid State IOdrives providing 2.6GBps throughput.

All the storage systems were provided by Open Drives, who had previously worked on systems for House of Cards. The offline system had 36TB of SSDs coupled with 60TB of hard drives, connected via 6 10Gbe ports. The conform systems had 320TB with a 1TB SSD cache, again connected with 6 10Gbe ports.

First film originated in 6K to be edited with Adobe Premere CC

According to Jeff Brue, CTO of Open Drives, this was the first feature film originated at 6K on the RED Dragon and the first feature edited and conformed on Adobe Premiere CC in this way. The final movie was conformed by nesting After Effects projects into the Premiere timeline eventually reaching the stage where over 80% of the timeline was embedded After Effects projects.

To be able to maintain real time playback in this situation is a testament to the way Adobe have worked together with Nvidia to leverage the GPU using their Mercury Playback Engine, and how Open Drives are able to configure storage arrays that meet the bandwidth and access requirements of a project of this size.

You can see Jeff's Siggraph presentation here: Jeff Brue Siggraph 2014

Watch the Gone Girl trailer video over the page

 Read: Think editing 4K raw in real time is difficult? How about 6K then?

And here is Nvidia's press release about their new Quadro cards (over the page)

NVIDIA (NASDAQ: NVDA) today unveiled its next generation of NVIDIA® Quadro® GPUs -- providing new tools and technologies to meet the visual computing needs of the world's leading designers, artists and scientists.

NVIDIA Quadro K5200
The new lineup delivers an enterprise-grade visual computing platform with up to twice the application performance and data-handling capability of the previous generation. It reflects NVIDIA's extensive work with leading customers across industries to gain greater insight into their growing requirements to work with more complex models and higher-resolution images; to incorporate cloud-based resources; and to access work remotely, often on mobile devices.

"The next generation of Quadro GPUs not only dramatically increases graphics and compute performance to handle huge data sets. It extends the concept of visual computing from a graphics card in a workstation to a connected environment," said Jeff Brown, vice president of Professional Visualization at NVIDIA. "The new Quadro lineup lets users interact with their designs or data locally on a workstation, remotely on a mobile device or in tandem with cloud-based services."

NVIDIA Quadro GPUs are already the overwhelming choice of leading creative and design professionals, who depend on it for their most important work. For the past six years running, every film nominated for the Academy Award® for Best Visual Effects was made with Quadro technology. And Quadro is the choice of essentially every automotive designer worldwide.

"From increased efficiency to new workflow models, the results we've achieved with the latest Quadro GPUs are fundamental to our future," said Steve MacPherson, chief technology officer at Framestore. "The world's leading brands and studios trust Framestore because of our history of creativity and successful delivery, which depends on a technology infrastructure and talent base that has no boundaries in terms of realizing a creative vision. NVIDIA Quadro is an essential component to helping us keep our edge, and gives us the reassurance of knowing the graphics technology our artists rely on has been developed specifically for professional users with the highest standards of reliability and compatibility."

Benefits of New Quadro GPUs
The new generation of Quadro GPUs -- the K5200, K4200, K2200, K620 and K420 -- enables users to:

Interact with data sets or designs up to twice the size handled by previous generations.
Remotely interact with graphics applications from a Quadro-based workstation from essentially any device, including PCs, Macs and tablets.
Run major applications -- such as Adobe® CC, Autodesk Design Suite and Dassault Systèmes SOLIDWORKS 2014 -- on average 40 percent faster than with previous Quadro cards.
Switch effortlessly from local GPU rendering to cloud-based offerings using NVIDIA Iray® rendering.