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Will ethernet HD over GigE work for video?
Going into post on a doc, 6tb of footage, 2-3 editing stations.
Shot on HDV. Our footage was captured at native Sony HDV 25 mbits/s or 3.125Mbytes/s. With 3 stations running we will barely get to 10Mbytes/s or 10% of GigE capacity.
If we just get a GigE drive and run it over GigE network – will it work for Read Only access for editing? Still need to aggregate? What are the potential downfalls? Is/why server is better?
Thanks
Sergei Krasikau -
3 Replies
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no, it won’t work. But don’t take my word for it. Go to Office Depot, Best Buy, etc. and buy a $60 8 port Gigabit ethernet card. Turn on File Sharing on one of your MACs. Play a FCP file. Go to your other MAC, and using GO>Connect To Server, open up the first MAC. Look – there is the first’s MAC disk drive. Open up the same file, and hit play. Watch what happens. The odds are, both systems will crash. You will probably notice that when you stop the first system, and then play the second system (with media from the first MAC), it WILL play. But both playing at the same time – NOPE.
Believe me, I’ve done exactly this, before learning about link agg, and all this crap I write about all the time.
If you are not willing to spend $60 to buy a small Gig E switch to try this out, or are not willing to spend the time to “screw around” with all of this stuff (and you just want it to work, because you are too busy to deal with any of this), my advice to you is to NOT BUILD ANYTHING. It takes time and concentration to make this stuff work. Even if you have the money, and are willing to buy a turnkey solution, unless you pay a dealer to come in and help you, and train you, it will take TIME to figure out how all of this stuff works.
Shared video storage is not “plug and play” – no matter what anyone tells you.Bob Zelin
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Sergie,
After reading your post, and then Bob’s post, I think there’s confusion here.
If you are trying to do HD Uncompressed over GigE that will not work.
However, I THINK what you are trying to do is HDV and that is only about 3-5MB/sec requirement and yes, it will work over Gb Ethernet.
There are some things that I would suggest, such as implementing a Shared Storage environment by putting in a Mac Pro or an Xserve, then Install a Multi Port Ethernet card from Small Tree.
You don’t really need Link Aggregation in this case, because what you can do is connect each client system directly to a port on the server using the multi port card.
After you do that, you’d set up Jumbo Frames and dedicate your FCP editing to that portion of the network.
Let me know if you’d like to discuss this in detail.
Thanks,
Matt G
Small Tree
651-209-6509 x 1Matt G.
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[sergei krasikau] “With 3 stations running we will barely get to 10Mbytes/s or 10% of GigE capacity.”
Something’s wrong there. It shouldn’t be that poor. Are you using a router as your switch??? Most of those are not gigabit.
Sean
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