Best option to build a RAID, Drobo Pro is to slow.

[Bob Zelin]

why do you want to edit uncompressed HD. Almost everyone – including the TV Networks – edit with compressed HD – ProRes422 for FCP or DNxHD for AVID. Why uncompressed HD ?

If you want to spend zero money, put three 2TB SATA drives in your MAC Pro. You can get these drives for under $300 each. If you want a professional RAID array, like an 8TB drive array that is RAID 5, that can do uncompressed HD, you will spend between $4000 – $5000 for this.

Bob Zelin

[Brenda Delv]

This is a complete feature film, I will like to do color correction and graphics. And at the end I will like to get for my self and online copy uncompress. without use any post production house.

[John Heagy]

Why uncompressed HD? That was my thought as well after reading your post. A few facts:

below are all in Megabits/sec (Mb)

uncompressed HD 10bit 1300
uncompressed HD 8bit 1000
Sony HDCam SR 440
Digital Cinema JPEG2000 250
ProRes (HQ) 220
ProRes (SQ) 140
HD BluRay Max 36
HD Broadcast Max 19

Avatar was shot with HDCamSR

What is your camera original file format/data rate and your deliverable format?

Unless it’s Arri RAW or DPX film scans with tons of green screen work, there’s no perceived benefit to uncompressed after the deliverable is made. Even with vfx work I’d recommend ProRes 4444 over uncompressed. I’d also recommend ProRes (HQ) or (SQ) over 8bit uncompressed due to ProRes being 10bit.

Working in uncompressed sounds better than it looks after all the costs associated with it.

Avoid “turning it to 11”

John Heagy

[Bob Zelin]

If this is a complete feature film, then surely you have $5000 to spend on a professional RAID 5 array, which will easily let you edit with uncompressed HD. And if this is a super low budget feature film, then you can put 3 two TB SATA drives in your MAC Pro, and RAID0 them together, and have 6TB of storage that can do uncompressed HD. And if this is still too expensive, then you can do use your drobo, or cheap FW drives, and do a low res proxy of the film, and edit the film, and simply rent out a place for a few days to use their equipment to reconform the film in uncompressed HD.

However, if you say “look, this is low budget, I have no money, and I want to do an uncompressed HD conform of a feature film, I can’t afford to rent anything, I can’t afford to go anywhere, and I need a ton of storage to do this – what can I do” – this is the answer – YOU CANT DO IT. YOU LOSE.

Bob Zelin

[Walter Soyka]

[Bob Zelin] “If this is a complete feature film, then surely you have $5000 to spend on a professional RAID 5 array, which will easily let you edit with uncompressed HD.”

If Brenda really has 20 TB (!) of footage as mentioned in the first post (which is what, a 20:1 shooting ratio?) — a $5,000 RAID array won’t hold it all.

Like all the other posters, I’d use compressed HD. The difference between uncompressed HD and ProRes 4444 is negligible, even for VFX and color work.

At a minimum, consider an offline/online workflow if you feel you must go back to the original uncompressed media.

Out of curiosity, what did you shoot on and how did you acquire?

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events

[Dave Barnard]

Your best low cost option for this is probably an external eSATA RAID 5 system with a PCIe controller card in the Mac Pro, using Multi Lane rather than Port Multipler eSATA will give higher speed which may benefit your workflow

If you have more that one person working on it at the same time, then use Fibre Channel storage and a SAN, though this is much more expensive.

If you have shot on HDCAM and digitized at 8 bit uncompressed, you will do better converting it to a 10 bit format to get the best results in colour grading & VFX.

ProRes 4444 would be a good choice, it gives very high quality at reasonable data rates

Working uncompressed can be a good workflow, especially if you have VFX or grading work being done on a non-Mac system, as only Macs can write Pro-Res files. We used this recently on the Swedish animated feature film Metropia, and also have recently built a portable uncompressed recording system for a VFX supervisor here in London.

20TB is not really that much storage these days, we currently have 48TB hired out to a client who are upgrading their SAN and 20TB of current and archived production work.

If you are based in Europe and are looking for some suitable storage for the film I’d be happy discuss options

Dave Barnard

cinedigital
London, UK

dave@cinedigital.co.uk

[David Gagne]

20TB? Uncompressed? Get a real enterprise grade raid, like an Active Storage or NexSan SataBoy. You’ll need a fiber card or 10gb nic. Then you’ll get the kind of speeds and storage capacity you need. Somewhere in the 20-30k range.

I’m sure there’s some other raids you can get in the $15k range, but I wouldn’t mess with anything less than that unless your requirements are lowered (compressed footage).

Or! If you have lots of time, keep your drobo, build an internal raid, and then just copy it back and forth in chunks. A horrible workflow, but big money savings.

[Steve Modica]

You should give us (Small Tree) a call. If you are going to edit from this array using 10bit uncompressed and it’s a feature film (so you will have a complex timeline) you need to be sure the raid operates with low enough latency to sustain the IO in realtime.

I agree with Bob that your life would be a lot easier using Pro Res. If you do this, we could put that same raid on a server and you could have several people editing using the media at once.

Steve

Steve Modica
CTO, Small Tree Communications