6 desperate motion designers

[Bob Zelin]

you work in uncompressed HD, have 6 design stations, and want a shared storage system for under 10,000 pounds ?

Not going to happen. And WE are the cheap guys. And your body is not worth that much money. If you work with files that have a data rate of under 90Mb/sec – then you can do it for the money you want to spend. But uncompressed HD needs 160Mb/sec – 200Mb/sec to work reliably, and for SIX systems – you need fibre. As you know, this is not cheap.

Bob Zelin

[Jason Myres]

It’s a little unclear what your needs are bandwidth-wise…

The size of your projects is also important to consider. If you are creating motion graphics for the web and your projects are basically short 30-60s spots, you could keep your media on a file server and copy your projects locally as you need them. Provided each station has full gigabit ethernet bandwidth available (see below) you could perform transcoding of compressed formats across your network, forgoing the need to copy first.

Each Station would need:
-Local internal or external RAID5 for uncompressed playback.
-A gigabit connection to the server for fast copies to the local RAID or for transcoding. To keep things fast you’ll need a direct connection to the server, or the server will need a 10 gigabit link to your ethernet switch.

Some possibilities:

File Server:
https://www.dell.com/us/en/business/servers/poweredge-r510/pd.aspx?refid=poweredge-r510
or
https://tiny.cc/uQURc

Local RAID:
https://maxxdigital.com/shop/index.php?cPath=144
or
https://www.g-technology.com/products/g-speed-es.cfm

If you are doing a good bit of actual uncompressed video editing, then your best bet is to dedicate one or two stations to all of your uncompressed work, and outfit them with larger RAIDs that can provide you with the bandwidth and storage you need for the duration of your projects. You can use the other stations for low-bandwidth content creation, and send those files to the uncompressed workstations for finishing and final output. You could archive to Blu-Ray if you need a cheap solution for getting data off of your RAIDs once a project is complete.

Large Local RAID:
https://maxxdigital.com/shop/index.php?cPath=132_104

Hope this helps.

JM

[Bob Zelin]

I am giving this another shot. This question is educational to me, and I am using AJA DataCalc to help answer this question (THANKS AJA !).

you write –
We are 6 motion designers in a medium webagency and we are desperate about our network solution.

REPLY – ok, 6 systems –

And our network specialist is lost in his server trying to organize the storage and archive process.
REPLY – your IT guy knows nothing about hi speed shared storage.

We are on our own and we ask the COW for advice :
REPLY – maybe I can help a little better this time –

We need a solution in order to work together with HD files (Cineform, mjpeg and sometimes uncompressed 720p ). We are on windows and we use After Effects a lot and sometimes Premiere.

REPLY –
the bandwidth is not as bad as I thought, even though my system – Final Share – cannot help you. Others can. Cineform is only 18 – 36Mb/sec (about the same as Apple ProRes422HQ). There is no such thing as uncompressed 720p – 720p means you are working with DVCProHD media, and this is COMPRESSED – the data rate is 14.4Mb/sec, it’s not uncompressed. So ethernet (cheap) shared storage can work for this.

For example, last week, a big client send us 400go of Canon 5d damn h264 files. We had to transcode the thing (it took eons), put the files on a fast internal hardrive, then, plug the hd and make copies on every other rigs…

REPLY – transcoding Canon 5d files takes a long time – period.
No matter what you buy, you are dealing with this crap. Same with RED – that is why RED ROCKET exists for RED. Canon has released a new Codec for FCP to speed things up, and make it native, but YOU ARE ON WINDOWS PC – so you are screwed. It’s easy for me to switch to MAC, but you won’t have the budget. If you were on MAC, you would now have a native Codec for the Canon media for FCP, and I could have a cheap shared storage system for you, THAT WOULD WORK. But you are on WinPC, so you will tie up a system transcoding your Canon 5D footage. No shared storage system is going to speed up this process.

But once you have your media transcoded, you can use ethernet shared storage. Our system is MAC ONLY, not PC. Your budget is 10,000 pounds, which means that EditShare is too expensive for you. So you can only look at Apace Systems (and maybe 1Beyond). There are LOTS of solutions if you have more money (or if you are on MAC), but you don’t have any money (only 10,000 pounds), so contact Apace Systems.

Bob Zelin

[Micha Noname]

hi and thank you and jason for answering our questions !

Reading your answers i now understand a little better what we need.

I think i can give some more precise infos.

The workflow I’m trying to achieve is the following :

Our clients send us a lot of different source materials, in order to work or edit these files we need to convert them in an intraframe format.
Because of compatibility issues we juggle between mjpeg, animation quicktime and cineform
I’m looking for, and i hope the DNxHD will simplify and unify this part but i can’t find a way to batch-process the transcoding for this great Avid codec…(AME seems to don’t like it and i can’t batch with quicktime pro)

Clients’s sources files need to be kept on a reliable and secure server but don’t need any access other than transcoding.

Transcoded files on the contrary, should be accessed at highspeed by all stations simultaneously.
Either for editing (we do editing but always with intraframe codecs and never above 720p resolutions) or net render (3d, fluid simulations and heavy post-processing)

We use uncompressed movie (TGA or PSD sequences, sometimes in crazy resolutions) only for very short 3d sequences and special effects.
Those files don’t need realtime playback over the network, they only need to be transfered from one station to another for local use.

Thanks to you, i now think we can avoid the $$$ optic fiber solutions

Before you shared with us your insight i had a look over Terrablock’s solution as it seemed quite easy to implement and manage. But the initial cost is quite high and i suppose we’ll have to had card, fiber cable and other pricy stuffs to it… won’t we ?

Pardon my english 😉

Michael.