Mistika Review is designed to run even on the smallest computers. But it will also use all the resources that you can throw to it. These are the important bits:


Hardware considerations:


RAM: If possible, Install enough RAM as to permit to cache the longest shots that you plan to use. For simple formats it is not important as they can be read and decoded in realtime. But when using difficult formats then the RAM  is the most important component for Mistika Review. If a shot fits in memory  the first playback will be slow, but once it is cached on RAM  the second and further playbacks will be realtime, and also scrubbing actions. The bigger the RAM the better.


GPU:  A modern GPU is recommended. We can distinguish two cases:


Media Files:  When working with media files, the GPU is only used for the color and framing processing of the Review Controls. This can be done with average GPU models, a  high performance GPU is only  important for decoding some specific formats like R3D that use the GPU more intensively.  But not otherwise.


Mistika effects: In this case, when reading a Mistika script (for example a MistikaVR timeline) the effects will need to be processed on the fly, so for this particular workflows a high performance GPU can be highly recommended.


In any case, official support is offered for all NVidia boards from Kepler generation (2012) up to current models, as it is what our engineers have for testing and support services.  But other GPU models from other manufacturers will also work, as long as they are not very old.


Format dependant considerations:


Uncompressed formats (DPX, EXR uncompressed, Tiff16..):  These formats require  storage devices as fast as possible (SSD NVMe or disk arrays). For complex cases, please note that SGO provides storage solutions that permit to playback up to 8K uncompressed in realtime.


Compressed formats (EXR compressed, H264/H265, R3D, Prores, j2k ..,): Those formats mainly depend on the CPUs of the system, although in some cases like R3D the GPU is also used. We recommend to use the OS task manager or similar tools to study where are the hardware bottlenecks for your particular case. In general Mistika is able to decode these formats in parallel, so it will use all the cores available to the system.


OS platforms:


Mistika Review is supported on the following operating systems:


Windows 10


Linux: RedHat / CentOS.  Versions 7.xxx


Note: Mistika Review may also work in other modern Linux distributions. However, the license server daemon is only auto-configured at installation time if the system has the systemd daemon manager running. Linux users not having systemd will need to start the sgoLicenseServer.bin process on their own.


Mac OSX  (High Sierra and Mojave)