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FCP 7 playout from NFS
I know this is a touchy subject for some, but I am looking for advice from users who have experience with FCP playback from NFS mounts within the past year. I need to test playback of ProResHQ (220 Mb/sec) files off an NFS mount–I understand that one successful test does not give the workflow a green light, so I am looking for advice of what to look out for other than dropped frames.
What issues have you experienced in playing back from NFS? Success or failure stories appreciated.
I know a lot of users will say, DON’T DO IT, GET A PROPER RAID. But I need real life examples of user’s experience. We are talking about a couple FCP systems going at once. Thanks!
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4 Replies
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Can we get more info? What is the NFS mount on – GigE? 10 GigE? Single or Bonded? Is there a switch – if so, what kind? How many drives is the media sitting on that you are pulling from? Is the NFS mount another CPU or a self contained NAS?
I’ve seen it done dozens, if not a hundred, times. Sustained guaranteed throughput is the issue, and a generic NAS or NFS mount that is not optimized will have no reliability or predictability. Think of it like USB: yes, the bandwidth is technically there, but in burst.
I’d also recommend talking to Bob Zelin about this in the SAN Forum. https://forums.creativecow.net/sanetworks
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One thing to watch out for is permissions. NFS handles permissions very differently. This can cause weird stuff. We had an issue where capturing to an NFS mount with improper permissions created strange file errors (in the metadata). Our frame sizes and aspect ratio came out REAL weird. It was a pain to isolate the problem, but when we fixed the permissions, it fixed the video.
The other thing to watch out for is your mount scripts… this has been a pain for us at times…
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Thanks for the help so far. How did you repair the permissions– individually or through Disk Utility? Also, can you explain mount scripts and what the issues are?
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Check this forum post to see some of our issues and how they were resolved:
https://www.xsanity.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=7663&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=15&sid=367f1650a6c72bbd3827096175dfd6afWe cannot use centralized directory for this because it is for a mobile media trailer…
I still don’t totally understand what’s going on with it, to be honest. We currently have nfs users mapped to nobody and it works. Any other config resulted in broken files.
In any case, read up on some FCP best practices.
As for mount scripts, we use applescripts that are either set to run on startup or manually depending on the situation.
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