AJA LHe or Second Editing Workstation?

[Richard Eary]

In the past, I thought about purchasing a notebook as a second machine. Al though, I figured I would have to spend at least $1800 to get a decent notebook. Add a little more money and one could put together a dual Xeon machine.

Thank you again for your advice.

[Richard Eary]

Avid Liquid Chrome Xe only cost about $600 to upgrade from Liquid Pro and would allow the use of a AJA LHe card. I am not sure if Avid Liquid Pro supports uncompressed HD video. I will have to check.

[Jeron Coolman]

If you want to edit uncompressed HD, you are going to need a very fast raid array. Remember that when pricing your machine. It is really hard to find a decent raid controller for under $800. The ones around $500 are very “hit and miss” (usually a miss).

[Richard Eary]

I have found when using the Adaptec SATA II 8-port raid that the computer is able to keep up. Al though, I would highly recommend a 16-port raid card if using SATA II drives at 7200rpm.

The only issue that I ran into is that 2TB is not nearly enough space for uncompressed video. It would cost at least 6k to build an internal raid that would provide around 16TB. Oh, you can’t exclude the 18 bay case and 1000w power supply.

Cineform Prospect 2K seems to be fine with 2TB, but you lose some of the realtime previews when adding effects.

[Jeron Coolman]

There is a big difference when it comes to resources when comparing Cineform which is compressed and uncompressed HD.

It is easier to find a controller to handle a RAID 0 solution than it is to handle a RAID 5, but RAID 0 should handle it.

Another issue is that the built-in motherboard RAID controllers don’t offload any of the work from the CPU and they still use a lot of system resources. Where a lot of the time they will do the job, they might be doing so at the cost of something else (e.g. CPU cycles).

I’ve got a 16 bay case and a 1000 watt power supply with only 4TB of RAID 0, really good Areca controller, and it still isn’t enough in terms of space. It is plenty fast though! 🙂

I’d be running Cineform, if I could use Boris, Magic Bullet and Adobe’s Color Correction tools with the preset forcing me to render everything 🙁

[Richard Eary]

Yes, there is a big difference with compressed and uncompressed. I figured I would need at least 16TB to work in an uncompressed environment without running in space issues. The good news is that SATA 3.0 drives are larger and cheaper now. Raid 5 or 6 is good.

I almost did not purchase Cineform until I found that I could preview unrendered video using control-spacebar. Of course, it leaves out frames but it gives me a clue on how the effect might look.

[Jeron Coolman]

Yeah, actually I think I used the shift+JKL keys for the preview when evaluating Cineform. It basically just uses the PPro engine instead of the Cineform one. Scrubbing with a jog shuttle was better for preview in the Cineform preset, because using the PPro engine was too slow compared to just using uncompressed or compressed like HDV.

What I don’t understand is, why the Cineform preset can keep up rendering each frame with non-RT effects when I’m scrubbing, even if I scrub faster than real-time. Obviously if it can keep up rendering each frame with the non-RT effects when scrubbing, why can’t it just play them back when I hit the space bar?

I think Cineform’s developers need to revisit the preset. I suspect some of this logic has been there since the days of the single core chips. I’m sure they can “fix” it to work with non-RT effects, especially on my dual quad core machine.

[Richard Eary]

That is a question that I don’t have an answer. Good reason why not to use compressed codecs and stick to the uncompressed format that AJA supports.