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BIG project coming along, any words of wisdom?
Looking for any advice, but heres the skinny,
I’ve got the biggest project I’ve ever had coming my way in a couple weeks and I’m trying to cover all my bases whilst engineering the set-up and organization of over 200 hours of footage ranging to 720p P2 stuff to the JVC HDV stuff and some 16mm footy as well.
What I’m working with is basically 1 dual 2.0 g5 and an older g5 w/ single 2.0. Have everything right now dumped onto about 4TB of space of daisy chained drives. No cash for SAN yet, so any advice here is welcome. Running FCP2 and everything seems ok. Before I get started I was considering the Blackmagic card, run my limited processor soley on rendering instead of compression. Sound right?
Basically trying not get too bogged down later on. I reallize with feature length, it is gonna get slow, but trying to avoid as much delay from the dreaded blue bar as possible. Anything else I should look into?
My experience is mostly comericial and short films. First project over 20 min. I saw the cow dvd “Getting Organized” on here so I figure what the hay, I’ll give it a look, but is there anything I should expect to encounter or maybe any longform techniques to check into?
Thanks sorry for the long windedness
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7 Replies
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I dont like daisy chaining FW drives….much prefer SATA raids. You might want to look at buying or building a RAID. It’s less expensive than you think.
Even though FCP 6 can work with mixed formats, that feature will not perform all that well with your older computers. If you can convert the HDV and other formats to DVCPRO HD, that would be much less taxing on your systems. With a Decklink or Kona Card you can capture everything to DVCPRO HD. I’ve seen a few used Kona 2 cards being sold cheap. Its worth looking into. The Kona handles the anamorphic scaling of DVCPRO HD in hardware, taking some of the load off your G5 processors.
Be warned though…. if you buy a capture card for your G5’s you will not be able to migrate it to a new MacPro system down the road, as they use PCIe slots instead of PCI-X.
Be very organized from the beginning and stick to it. Back everything up that you can along the way.
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MY DVD is a good place to start for project organization…and organization on large projects is VERY important, and time saving.
And I agree with John…avoid multiple firewire drives and get yourself a SATA Raid. CalDigit, MacGurus, Sonnet…5 drive plus.
Shane
Littlefrog Post
http://www.lfhd.net -
[Shane Ross] ”
MY DVD is a good place to start for project organization…and organization on large projects is VERY important, and time saving.”And how! And the bonus track of Shane in the……. oh wait….. not for public discussion…… almost forgot about the restraining order……. nevermind.
[Shane Ross] “And I agree with John…avoid multiple firewire drives and get yourself a SATA Raid. CalDigit, MacGurus, Sonnet…5 drive plus.”
Absolutely agree. Daisy chained FW drives on a long project are almost guaranteed to cause an issue. Corruption of media, dropped frames, etc… The more you get into the edit, the more likely you are set up for a failure.
If the project is that big, you should be able to put some of that money towards a large SATA array. MaxxDigital is my company of choice right now as we have just installed two of their units here. Sonnet and Dulce are two other suggestions.
Walter Biscardi, Jr.
https://www.biscardicreative.com
HD Editorial & Animation for Broadcast and independent productions.All Things Apple Podcast! https://cowcast.creativecow.net/all_things_apple/index.html
Read my blog! https://blogs.creativecow.net/WalterBiscardi
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Gotta chime in here. I’d not risk 4tb of media on daisy chained drives. I think you’re asking for trouble – it’s the sort of situation where you may be fine for 99% of the time, but the 1% will be where it screws up, and it’s more likely to be at the end rather than the beginning. I’d go for a RAID 5 if you can pony up for it.
Also – backup RELIGIOUSLY!! Do NOT leave a big project to chance. I’ve a 2 gig USB stick, and I usually copy the project on to a separate drive as well. It takes a few minutes, but it’s real easy to forget at the end of the day and think ‘Naah, it’ll be OK.’ That’s the night when the boot disk pixies come along and **** in your hard drive.
Oh, and be real anal, I’m talking near OCD levels, about logging and digitising. Oversee it all if you can, make sure no TC breaks occur, or if they do they’re clearly labelled on clip and tape – and try to avoid the ‘take a whole tape and subclip’ approach. Honestly – even if it extends the logging time by a week, you’ll reap the benefits later. You won’t realise this at the time, but you will look back and think ‘that wasn’t so bad…’
Jason
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Walter, can the MaxxDigital RAIDs be used in any RAID configuration? I won’t be getting one soon, but I’m keeping these high end storage solutions on the back stove. Oh, and for RAID 5, what is the ratio of physical storage space to ACTUAL usable storage space once everything has been backed up, etc.?
Thanks,
Alexander Gao
USC School of Cinematic Arts
John C. Hench D.A.D.A. -
Oh, and I realize that this kind of storage is intended for a high-end desktop workstation, but is there a card that would allow for a RAID system like the MaxxDigital to be used in accordance with a Macbook Pro?
Thanks,
Alexander Gao
USC School of Cinematic Arts
John C. Hench D.A.D.A. -
[thewanggao] “Walter, can the MaxxDigital RAIDs be used in any RAID configuration?”
Yep, they come with the Atto R380 Host Bus Adapter and I believe the options are RAID 0 – 10. Though it might be RAID 0-6 right now.
[thewanggao] “Oh, and for RAID 5, what is the ratio of physical storage space to ACTUAL usable storage space once everything has been backed up, etc.?”
Our 8TB arrays have 6.35TB of useable storage in RAID 5.
Walter Biscardi, Jr.
https://www.biscardicreative.com
HD Editorial & Animation for Broadcast and independent productions.All Things Apple Podcast! https://cowcast.creativecow.net/all_things_apple/index.html
Read my blog! https://blogs.creativecow.net/WalterBiscardi
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