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New Machine for Mistika Boutique


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Since my current setup is getting annoyingly slow I am looking to buy or build a new machine around Mistika Boutique.

The biggest issue I have is the fact that I love to work within MacOs and don't like the messy Windows interface.
On the other hand I would have no problems building a Window machine because it save's me 50% of the total price compared to a new Mac Pro.
 

My questions are:

The MacPro Route - How will the support be for the new Mac Pro, since it is using a AMD GPU (Vega II with 32GB looks very promising)
 And wil the 'Afterburner' card be supported in the future? Since I got the feeling that Mistika is more Window's focused?

The Windows Route - I know that Mistika is a GPU driven software system and for stability you advise to use a Quadro Card since it is tested that way.
On what other components does Mistika Boutique run best or what is the basic setup for a custom build Mistika Boutique workstation
It would be really nice to know what motherboards or CPU's are preferred or used in the systems to develop/debug Mistika Boutique.
So I can build a super stable workstation.

 

 

 

 

 

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Obviously SGO should weigh in on this. But I'll give you my perspective, having first started on MacOS and now having moved to Windows recently.

First of all, I don't think Mistika is Windows centric. They come from a world of Linux, not Windows. What they do focus on is NVidia cards, and since those are not available on Macs for the most part, it creates the perception of a Windows bias. In fact I would say Mistika has a bit of a rough time on Mac to live within the Mac desktop. All the system settings you have to adjust to have two screens, hide the menu bar. It's a bit painful.

Mistika supports ProRes renders on Windows, so there is no issues there.

Right now I'm running with two RTX 2080Ti cards and except for 8K footage my UI has been pretty much real time and easy to work with. Last night I was rendering out some dailies (HD, Varicam Log, basic LUT & grade) and my render performance was about 195fps. It took less than an hour to render out 320GB of dailies into ProRes HQ files on Windows.

The new MacPro looks very nice. But if it's a system that you primarily use for Mistika, I would definitely go the Windows route because it gives you more GPU selection and the interface will be a bit easier.

Edited by jan1
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Thank you for your insight Jan. How is your experience in stability these days with Windows? Since I have horrible memories of keeping the whole setup stable in the past.  

I am gonna use it for 50% Mistika and 50% in BM Fusion. 

If there would be a good focus on the new Mac Pro and on the AMD GPU I would be super happy.

 

 

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On 12/8/2019 at 11:38 PM, mail18 said:

Thank you for your insight Jan. How is your experience in stability these days with Windows? Since I have horrible memories of keeping the whole setup stable in the past.  

It's a bit of a mixed bag. No issues while running Mistika. The stability issues are generally elsewhere.

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I should also say it's been improving since I built the system. Yesterday with the help of Wacom we figured out which old driver is stable for touch on the Wacom - the answer is the June 19 version, not the latest. Other things are also slowly getting there. And I have a lot of workflows on this system, so there's much to tune. On a simpler system it should be less of an issue.

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Since I am also working with a Wacom I remember removing the annoying circle when you clicked something in Windows, where I had to dive into the register to disable it.
Bizarre that you have to pick a older driver to get it to work properly. 

I hate to lose time managing system related problems while I have to focus on a grade.

 

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On 12/9/2019 at 12:03 AM, mail18 said:

I hate to lose time managing system related problems while I have to focus on a grade.

Of course. But that will be an issue with any new system, regardless of OS. When I first installed Mistika on the Mac it took a very long time to work out lots of kinks.

You also have a big learning curve on Mistika ahead of you. I've done a dozen or so client projects now, and I'm getting faster and using more of the system now.

I think you have to be realistic about the productivity curve regardless of choice. I get the aversion to Windows, I'd rather avoid it too. But at this point, despite the fresh off the line MacPro, I don't trust Apple enough anymore to rely on them 100% and I also find their ecosystem to constraining. But YMMV.

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On 12/9/2019 at 6:08 AM, jan1 said:

You also have a big learning curve on Mistika ahead of you. I've done a dozen or so client projects now, and I'm getting faster and using more of the system now.

Yes, there is a lot to take in! Some things that are quite easy on another platforms are quite tricky in Mistika and vice versa.
Right now I am test-driving Assimilate Scratch and Mistika Boutique to see what serves me the best after coming from Resolve.

I really love the experience of color-grading in Mistika, especially with the full Tangent Elements Setup, it's like driving a Ferrari 'super fast an intuitive'.

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On 12/9/2019 at 9:21 AM, mail18 said:

Btw Is there a feature request list somewhere for Mistika Boutique?

PM me with them! 

We will save your request and will consider it for discussion when our next R&D meeting takes place. If you have any additional questions, please do not hesitate to reach out.

 

On 12/9/2019 at 2:02 AM, mail18 said:

My questions are:

The MacPro Route - How will the support be for the new Mac Pro, since it is using a AMD GPU (Vega II with 32GB looks very promising)
 And wil the 'Afterburner' card be supported in the future? Since I got the feeling that Mistika is more Window's focused?

The Windows Route - I know that Mistika is a GPU driven software system and for stability you advise to use a Quadro Card since it is tested that way.
On what other components does Mistika Boutique run best or what is the basic setup for a custom build Mistika Boutique workstation
It would be really nice to know what motherboards or CPU's are preferred or used in the systems to develop/debug Mistika Boutique.
So I can build a super stable workstation.

Regarding the original question of this thread, one of my colleagues more into this kind of questions will get to you as soon as possible! 

 

Thank you very much again and have a great day.

Kind regards, 

Cristóbal 

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Mistika Boutique is agnostic in terms of the operating system and hardware brands. Most of the software is open-gl based, which should run at similar speed on Windows and Mac.

 

However, there are some differences in these particular  codecs:

 

- RED has launched a new Cuda decoder  for R3D files. Currently it only works with NVidia boards,  and Apple does not support it.  But R3D files still work on Mac with the traditional decoder based on CPU, so if you go the Mac route and you need R3D just  try to get a good CPU with as many cores as possible, and of the  highest clock speeds.

- NVidia has also launched a hardware encoder for H264 & H265. But by now Apple does not support it, so it only works on Windows and Linux 

 

Regarding Afterburner, we have not made any tests with it yet. In principle, Apple Prores formats are already   pretty fast in Mistika by just using  the CPU, as Prores playbacks  have  been troughly optimised in Mistika . With good CPUs they are already  realtime at  4K 60p, and also in some 8K 24p variants. But if we see that our clients start  requesting  this capability of course we will try to implement it in the future.

Regarding your question about our tests on  Windows hardware , our developers and engineers typically test every  windows version  on Hp workstations (z820, z840, Z4 and Z8),  also using several models of Intel CPUs and different  NVidia boards. But it is also tested in other brands whenever we have opportunities.

Regarding GPUs for Windows, the sweet spot seems to be the 1080ti for computers with no video boards,  and the P5000 ( or even P6000) for high end systems with video boards . RTX equivalents are also great , but they are similar in speed and are probably more expensive just  because they are newer. RTX have more capabilities for other markets like gaming and machine  learning, , but for the particular case of Mistika they don't come with significant advantages over the previous generation. In any case just check the cost factor  because it  is constantly changing.

Regarding the computer brand, what we can say in general is that Mistika seems to be  equally stable in computers of  well known  brands,  but we have seen quite a few  support cases where custom-built computers were unstable due to using PSUs with not enough power or due to thermal issues. Those are the two main  aspects to check when not using a volume brand.

Also, we maintain a document with recommended configurations here:

 

https://support.sgo.es/support/solutions/articles/1000269519-recommended-configurations-for-mistika-boutique

 

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Thank you Javier for the in depth explanation!

On the RED & Apple side there is good news regarding decoding r3d.
Only at this point it's not clear if it is done by the GPU or the Afterburner card.
(it would be really nice if it would be the Afterburner)

Article about the support.
https://www.newsshooter.com/2019/12/13/red-apple-complete-metal-gpu-accelerated-r3d-support/

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R3d isn't done on the Afterburner card. It's implemented via Metal to get GPU acceleration. 

I wouldn't be surprised to start seeing Agilex cards elsewhere, not just under the Afterburner brand. Intel is most likely going to be happy to sell it to others... especially with AMD's repeated drubbings. ?

I'm using both Scratch and Mistika right now. Both do some things extremely well that I wish could be combined into a single application sometimes.

In general, I prefer Scratch's UI, but Mistika is a wonderful compositing application, and I love how easy it is to simply roll your own delta keyer using channel booleans and the clean plate node. I honestly have no idea how to go about setting that up within the timeline itself, but it's nice and easy in the node graph (which is why I couldn't set it up in the timeline -- I didn't try to ? ).

Speed... Scratch. Nothing comes close. Mistika finally got into the ballpark with the new Red SDK update, and I suspect that Resolve will be close now also. 

The visual grading tools are very nice in Scratch. Being able to click on a point in the image and manipulate is rather pleasant, even though you can easily mangle the whole thing.

Conforming in Mistika is kind of a pain. That has actually been the main impediment for me in using it on more projects. The tools are all there, but they're clunky as all hell, so generally I don't much like conforming in Mistika. There's no elegant way to view the reference video along side or over the raw video, and there doesn't appear to be a particularly straightforward way to simply replace a clip. In Scratch, you select the replace mode, hunt down the clip you want to replace the erroneous clip with, and drop it in place. Then you just type the right timecode into the "in" field for the clip, and Bob's your uncle. I wish it were that easy in Mistika. Hopefully there's a nifty trick there that I don't know about yet... 

Most of the time however I can get a pretty clean conform from Resolve using AAF, so for dicey conforms I sometimes just do the tedious part of it in Resolve which has by far the best editing toolkit of the three (no surprise) and export an AAF. That's usually almost 100% spot on, and saves a lot of work, though I think it's a bit comical to be using Resolve as a conforming tool ?

The Red SDK update with Mistika 8.8.10 made a big difference. It's a LOT faster now, to the point where it wasn't usable without a monster machine similar to Jan's, to now I can use Mistika on my ZenBook Pro Duo. I can't really get much use out from the 2nd monitor on my machine in Scratch or Mistika. In Mistika, not at all. In Scratch I can only use it as the second monitor in dual head configuration, which mirrors the AJA output.

 

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Hi Rakesh. Thanks for oyur honest review, it is very valuable feedback for us.

About the clip replacement in Mistika, I am wondering if you could use this technique:

1 - Hunt the replacement clip wherever it is. If you select  it in the media browser it will appear in the Source Monitor, or  if you prefer to select it in the Tiemeline then press Ctrl+C (Copy) to send it to the clipboard, which in Mistika just is the Source Monitor)

2 - Put the Record Monitor (red bar) in the head of the clip to be replaced (or in any other in point you want it). Alternatively type the timecode for it directly.

3 - Press SourceMonitor->Overwrite (the icon with a red clip going down into a green clip). Or directly use its hotkey (B) while having the pointer in the Source Monitor (hotkeys like this affect the marks of the panel where you have the pointer at that moment).  Whe  you do that, the new clip will we placed at the record monitor position while also overwriting whatever was in there. 

The other icons near Overwrite are to insert (making space) or paste on top (similar result to a replace but you don't lose the original clip).  In all cases you can also use the yellow marks in the source monitor ( "i" and "o" hotkeys ) to define which part of the incoming clip you want to insert. Or just type its In / Out timecodes in there as you seem to prefer. 

Regarding the interface, we are working in new capabilities to make it more scalable (for example to better support  4K GUI monitors). For example I think you could use a new scaling feature to mach the bottom screen of your laptop to the bottom part of the Mistika interface (menu panels in general), an let the upper screen for a clean view of the Timeline and Visual editor images. This scaling feature is still in development, but I belive a raugh version is already operative in your Mistika version (i suppose  you have 8.10, the one in our website ). It would work as follows: 

1 - In Windows, define a single continuous desktop with one screen on top of the other

2 - While in MistikaConfig-> General->AdvancedOptions,   select the Interface->Use Scaling button, and for Mon-1  select the scaling factor as neccesary to fit the Mistika botton panel in the bottom display of the laptop  (But do not activate "Two Monitors", as this proposal is a for a single (but elongated) monitor.

This scaling feature is in development, in your version it can still have some refresh issues and some low res and aliasing at non integer scale factors in some widgets, but we hope to solve all this for next version 8.11.

Please let me know if it works, I am curious. Sadly I do not have such wonderful laptop to try by myself. That  dual screen laptop seems to be a nice one!

Javier

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On 12/16/2019 at 2:16 AM, Rakesh Malik said:

Conforming in Mistika is kind of a pain. That has actually been the main impediment for me in using it on more projects. The tools are all there, but they're clunky as all hell, so generally I don't much like conforming in Mistika. There's no elegant way to view the reference video along side or over the raw video, and there doesn't appear to be a particularly straightforward way to simply replace a clip. In Scratch, you select the replace mode, hunt down the clip you want to replace the erroneous clip with, and drop it in place. Then you just type the right timecode into the "in" field for the clip, and Bob's your uncle. I wish it were that easy in Mistika. Hopefully there's a nifty trick there that I don't know about yet... 

Most of the time however I can get a pretty clean conform from Resolve using AAF, so for dicey conforms I sometimes just do the tedious part of it in Resolve which has by far the best editing toolkit of the three (no surprise) and export an AAF. That's usually almost 100% spot on, and saves a lot of work, though I think it's a bit comical to be using Resolve as a conforming tool ?

I can't offer any comparison to Scratch. I've maxed out on the number applications I can juggle mentally due to non-color workflows I also do.

But I can offer that it took me being committed to Mistika and having now done two dozen client projects to finally get more comfortable and knowing all the tricks that make you efficient. I think there are reasonable equivalents for all the things you're listing. I've had to do some manual clip replacement for a conform and it is all there. I think because Mistika's UI is so different from traditional NLEs it's less intuitive the first time around.

Mistika shines if you make it your tool of choice and commit the time to it. But it's definitely not a good choice for the occasional user, or someone that turns to it for certain jobs because they do like a specific feature. I've started becoming more fluent and found it to be quite powerful and more productive than Resolve.

That said, there definitely are quirks in the UI that could use refinement to even things out, make things more efficient. The UI is still very much centric to a system that is always setup a certain way due to the previous closed nature of Ultimate. The adjustment to a more diverse user base in terms of hardware/software configurations will take some time, but be critical to the success of that user base, and is also somewhat urgent to take advantage of the opportunity and not turning off too many potential adopters like yourself.

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