Recommended hardware configurations
Mistika Workflows is designed to run on even the smallest computers, but depending on the usage it may also use all the resources available to it (especially when used for heavy transcoding). The following are the important considerations:
RAM: 8GB is the minimum recommended for general purpose. But when transcoding complicated formats at high resolutions 32GB are recommended, or even more RAM if the server has many cores and you plan to run more processes in parallel.
Transcoding uncompressed formats (such as DPX, EXR uncompressed, or Tiff16): use storage devices which are as fast as possible, and if possible work with local intermediate copies rather than cloud storage directly.
Compressed formats (such as EXR compressed, H264/H265, j2k, XAVC, Apple ProRes ...): In general these formats depend mainly on the system's CPU
In some particular cases the GPU can be used instead, which is much faster. Specifically, at the date of this document:
- The decoding of R3D files and the encoding of H264/h265 can be done by GPU on Wndows & Linux, when having an NVidia GPU.
- Arri raw decoding is supported on NVidia GPUs.
We recommend using the OS Task Manager or similar tools to discover where hardware bottlenecks exist for your particular case.
Minimum Configuration Required for Mistika Workflows:
This is the absolute minimum:
- Number of processors: 1
- Number of cores: 2
- RAM: 8 GB
- Display resolution: A minimum of 1920x1080 is recommended for the GUI. 1920x1200 is a better option.
- Graphics card model: NVIDIA is recommended as it is the certified manufacturer for Mistika Workflows. . Please note that many Mistika Workflows tasks are image processing oriented , and for this reason Mistika Workflows requires a discrete GPU installed.
Supported OS distributions
- Windows: Windows 10 (64bit), Windows 11 (64bit).
- Mac: Sierra, High Sierra, Mojave, Catalina and Big Sur
(Note: Operating system versions prior to macOS Sierra and computers older than 2013 are known to crash the application).
- Linux: CentOS 7.4 / RedHat 7.4. An automatic installer is provided for CentOS 7.4 and compatible distributions. Other distributions may also work, but the installation process can be complicated and they are currently unsupported. (You may need to solve package dependencies, daemon differences and typical linux issues...). However this document is intended for the first version of Mistika Workflows, and we expect to add official support for more linux distributions in forthcoming versions.
Extended recommendations for selecting optimal hardware:
- GPU: Part of the Mistika Workflows's processing is carried out by the GPU: Geometry adjustments, Color adjustments, NVidia encoder, etc., so this is an important component. A modern NVidia board is recommended.
- CPUs: The processes that are carried out by CPUs are the decoding of input codecs and encoding of rendered codecs, but there are important exceptions that use the GPU as said.
If you want to take advantage of the NVidia transcoder we recommend a Pascal generation or later NVidia model, as older models can not be used for hardware encoding or only at low resolutions (For more details see NVIDIA VIDEO CODEC SDK).
CPU based tasks of common usage: Apple ProRes. EXR compressed (DWA, ZIP, PIZ). J2K (JPEG2000). JPEG. Compressed tar (zip/tgz). MD5 checksums. H264/H25 decoding.
Storage and network bandwidth: Uncompressed formats do not require significant GPU or CPU, but they do need a great deal of disk speed and fast networks!
Mistika Workflows is not multiGPU, so extra speed is cannot be expected by having two or more GPUs.