NVIDIA & RED Team Up To Enable Real-time 8K Video Editing With CUDA

At a special event held last week in Los Angeles, NVIDIA and RED jointly announced that some CUDA-accelerated goodies are coming soon – set to become available at the end of Q1 2019. The goal of this venture is to use NVIDIA’s graphics cards to dramatically improve real-time 8K editing workloads.

8K isn’t quite ready for consumer consumption on any sort of scale, and that means now is the right time for movie and TV show makers to start shooting at that resolution, so as TVs become readily available, content might actually exist. When 4K became available, it took what felt like an eternity for the content to catch up. The situation today is pretty good, with numerous online streaming services now offering it. UHD Blu-rays have been available for a couple of years now, as well.

Anyone shooting at 8K today can use their ultra high-resolution footage to scale down to a crisper 4K. The same process became popular when 4K first hit the scene. You might recall that some 4K Blu-rays hit the market long before the official UHD format released. The reality was that 4K master footage was scaled down to 1080p, so ultimately, the end result looked better than if the source was shot at 1080p (or not much higher). In the case where someone shoots at a resolution higher than their target, it opens up the doors for improved panning, zooming, and cropping.

Being able to edit video in real-time isn’t just important, it’s imperative. If your PC can’t keep up, then playing back the preview in your editor of choice isn’t going to go over too well. What you’ll see are constant stalls of the video, where one frame will stay for many seconds because of a bottleneck. Having to constantly wait and fiddle with the timeline playback is a major impedance to workflow.

If you’ve never touched raw 8K video before, it’s heavier than you probably think it is in terms of technical demands. Some decently modern PCs even struggle with raw 4K – but 8K (7680×4320) is 4x4K. Merely playing it back can be tough; editing it is another story. It’s so tough, in fact, that RED has sold dedicated hardware (costing in the thousands of dollars) to speed things up. With this new CUDA-based REDCODE RAW acceleration, NVIDIA’s GPUs (both GeForce and Quadro) completely replace those. The RED Rocket-X costs about the same as a Quadro RTX 6000, but the GPU is obviously going to give you far greater flexibility. Further, a “dual-processor workstation” is no longer needed, either.

NVIDIA is of course not the first company to talk about 8K editing. Following the launch of AMD’s Radeon Vega architecture last summer, the company announced its Radeon Pro SSG, set to enhance the exact same workflow. At that time, RED’s president Jarred Land talked about the benefits of editing 8K footage with SSG (a GPU with onboard SSD storage), but that love didn’t seem to last too long as he’s quite settled on NVIDIA’s offerings now.

In the video linked at the top of this post, Land pleads with Apple to begin supporting NVIDIA GPUs again, because while macOS is still very much preferred by many for editing, the hardware options haven’t been ideal. I’d imagine NVIDIA itself would be fond of that idea as well, but when the only Mac that can accept PCIe cards is even more outdated than the current Mac Pro (seriously – it’s outdated), the company is kind of stuck when it comes to Mac support.

Nonetheless, RED’s R3D SDK and also the REDCINE-X PRO update will come towards the end of Q1. For those anxious to give the solution a test sooner, a beta of the REDCINE-X PRO update will come out some time earlier – but how much earlier, we have no clue.