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Need advice on HD Edit Suite
We are venturing into the HD editing world and looking for opinions. We know we will be Mac based FCP Suite 2, editing mostly from DVCPRO HD.
The big questions come from storage and input/output. What do you recommend for RAID? We are looking at both fibre channel and SATA, with interest in room for expansion in the future. Also, have considered AJA I/O HD and Kona3 for in & out, but looking for professional guidance. I would be happy to elaborate on any questions or comments.Thanks!
Mike Kren -
3 Replies
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What tape format are you shooting on and delivering on?
Sean
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We are anticipating most of what we will be getting will be DVCPRO HD (we do some shooting, but mostly we are editing and based on the region DVCPRO HD is what is popular). Outputting the same. We would be interested in the most flexible system to allow other formats as well (HDCAM if we were to rent a deck, for example).
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Well for end to end DVCProHD, all I/O should be firewire. No question about it. But you’ll still want SDI for monitoring and for when you rent an HDCam deck.
The Kona 3 may be overkill, unless you plan on upconverting a lot of SD stuff, or if you want 4:4:4 HDCam SR capability. If neither of those are the case, I would get the LHE or a Blackmagic card and save a lot.
As far as drives. There are a lot of options out there. FC is a ton of money. SANs are great for certain types of projects with lots of editors. Good chance you won’t need it. SATA is faster and a lot cheaper.
There’s a bunch of vendors who sell external SATA solutions. Firmtek, Sonnet, Calldigit, Highpoint, 3ware. Some have RAID 5 (wikipedia if you don’t know what it is) which is great. Some are quieter than others. Some cost a ridicluous amount more than others. But they all essentially do the same thing.
I myself just bought four 400GB drives for $95 each, and put them inside our new Mac Pro. The Mac Pro only has slots for 3 additional drives, but there are extra SATA conenctors on the motherboard. So I put the 4th drive in the optical bay using a bracket kit.
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