Best VOLUME locking SAN for use with PictureReady and FCP on Mac

[Floh Peters]

FibreJet from Commandsoft.com. Very easy to set up, very reliable, uses standard MacOSX HFS+ volumes. I haven

[Nate Cooper]

I work for SNS, makers of SANmp, so I guess you could say I have a biased opinion ;). But, I’ve used PictureReady with SANmp many times before. It works great with our Sync feature which updates read only volumes without the need to unmount and remount the volume. In fact if you have the PictureReady clip in a time line of a FCP project and use the Sync feature, FCP will auto update the file with the newly captured infomation. Pretty sweet.

[Christopher Tay]

Hi Nate…does the Sync feature unmount & remounts the volume again or is it a dynamic update of the volume ?

And how much performance hit does it inflict with the AutoSync enabled ?

-chrispy

[Nate Cooper]

Hey Chirspy, the Sync feature automatically updates mounted volumes. This is accomplished without unmounting/remounting a volume, allowing the user to keep applications like Final Cut Pro open while sycing.

As far as performance hits the OS takes, it depends on many facts such as how many files are on the drive and the size of the drive and what kind of computer you have. In general it takes up processing resources for half a second to three seconds. So when an editor runs a ‘sync’ feature, by the time they are back in their main application the sync has completed.

[Christopher Tay]

Hi Nate,

Thanks for your update.

Can the Sync feature be set to update a particular volume or volume(s) at a set interval ?

Say if one system is doing a capture and another system does a Sync on the same volume, will it affect the system doing the capturing ?

-chrispy

[Nate Cooper]

Yes, the sync feature is per volume, you can have sync enabled on a single volume and not on any others. This can be set at whatever interval the admin chooses. The SANmp Client application also has a ‘sync’ button which allows user to force a sync command if the admin has not set up auto sync.

As far as performance hits, it is generally on the workstation that has the volume mounted Read Only. I have had several customers that ran the sync command during captures on other workstations with no dropped frames.

However, that being said, it of course depends on your hardware. In other words if your running the capture on an old G4 with a single JBOD drive, you’re much more likely to have issues than if you have a Dual/Quad G5 with a FC to SATA array behind it.

[Francois Stark]

Hi Chrispy and Nate

I feel I have to come in here. We’ve had SanMP for about 17 months now – 4 FCP suites and 3 Pro Tools suites.

When we started out, on Panther (os X.3) Sync was working. But autosync on one station would always stop any capture or playback on that system when it syncs, so we disabled it. Manual sync is more efficient – you know when the system syncs, and you do it when not capturing or playing out.

Then sync stopped working in Tiger for os X.4.1 to X.4.5. Recently SanMP released a software update (V1.6) that works from os X.4.6, with sync re-enabled again. I’ve had some problems installing this update, and I’m still not sure if the actual update or a seperate hardware problem caused
the problems. I’m starting a seperate thread on this issue.

I have not tried it with Pictureready, but it seems like this would work quite well. You should be able to edit from the clip being captured, and every time you hit sync, you get more material to work with.

Regards
Francois