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Blackmagic RAW CPU and GPU Options
The Blackmagic SDK can support CPU, OpenCL, CUDA, and Metal decoders, as selected in the BLACKMAGIC RAW section of preferences. CUDA requires an nVidia GPU card (on macOS, on 10.13 only). Metal is a macOS-only technology.
NOTE : The Blackmagic GPU preference is set to CPU-only by default! You will want to adjust the settings to the best ones for your system, based on its GPU performance and amount of GPU RAM GPUs with only 1-2GB RAM may be usable only if you decrease the settings; if you try to do too much you’ll start seeing empty black frames.
Important! If you have a fast CPU with 8 or more cores, CPU decoding may be faster than GPU decoding! Similarly, OpenCL can be faster than Metal. You’ll have to try it to find out.
Warning: Handling 12K files requires major amounts of CPU memory, and GPU memory too if you try using the GPU. You’ll want a machine with 64+GB and for GPU, probably 8+ GB.
In CPU mode, the BRAW decoder itself produces 8-bit, 16-bit, or floating-point results. Floating results are converted to half if selected.
In a GPU mode, the BRAW decoder itself produces 16-bit/channel results, which are converted to the desired format by SynthEyes. This approach is taken because the GPU decoder configures itself to produce only a single output format; we have chosen 16 bits as a tradeoff between accuracy and time.
The other preferences control how much parallelism is used when reading Blackmagic RAW files. See the tooltips for details. If your GPU is running out of memory, you should reduce the Number of Buffers value especially.
Increasing the Frames in Flight may increase performance, but might need to be reduced (especially for CPU decoding) to improve user interface responsiveness when scrubbing.
See also the Frames in flight and Reads in flight controls in the Image Input section, which are upper limits to the values here.
There are also two communications Window Size controls at the end of the Image Input section that affect performance and RAM usage for both ARRI and Blackmagic RAW files.
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