Blackmagic 10bit editing from firewire drive

[Luke Maslen]

Hi,

Yes it can work for standard definition but definitely not for high definition. We often use LaCie Big disk drives connected to the Firewire 800 port of the Mac. These Firewire drives contain two hard disks which I think are striped together and work surprisingly well for 10-bit capture and playback. If you have complex edits and effects, you might well encounter speed issues, ie dropped frames. However this solution does work well for 10-bit SD capture and play back and might be adequate for your needs. It’s pretty handy to be able to pick up a Firewire drive with 500 GB or more of 10-bit captures on such a portable solution.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Hamish Boyd]

Thanks for your reply Luke.
Thats pretty impressive! Makes me rethink on how I go about build my new edit suite. I do a lot of TVC’s at home 15sec to 30sec. Basically I leave it all in aftereffects and render out to animation, burn disc and off to the stations, but I have a job coming in with footage on digibeta. I need a blackmagic card obviously, but if I can get away with using just a firewire, then DAMN! thats AWESOME! I mean for such short form work it must be a go.

So you haven’t run into any troubles digitising 10bit standard def to a firewire 800? I would imagine thats where some problems would come if any, rather than just the reading of the files while editing.

cheers

[Luke Maslen]

Hi,

You’re right – it is amazing that a Firewire 800 drive will keep up with 10-bit SD capture and playback. I recall many people stating that you would get much better performance by using a Firewire 800 PCI card compared with the built-in Firewire 800 port on the Mac. However I found quite the opposite and the Mac port was much faster in my testing. I don’t know why some people found the PCI cards to provide better performance but I recommend you start by using the built-in Firewire 800 port on your Mac and then see it it works fast enough.

In regards to Firewire drives, you will need one that has 2 hard disks in it in order to achieve adequate seek times and data throughput. A single disk in a Firewire chassis will NOT be fast enough. That’s why you need one of the Firewire drives that looks a little thicker as it contains 2 hard drives.

We’ve always used LaCie drives and they’ve been most reliable, fast and quiet. However I’m sure that there are other brands that would also be fine.

I don’t know how much space you need and whether a Firewire 800 drive is going to provide enough space for you compared with a big and more expensive external disk array. It does sound to me as though the Firewire 800 drive will be fine for your purposes and it would be interesting to hear from anyone else in this forum who is working the same way that you are going to do.

Capture to disk is less demanding than play back. So if you are mainly capturing to disk, performing some renders and then burning to disc, I think the Firewire 800 drive may be the perfect and inexpensive solution for you.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Hamish Boyd]

Well this is interesting. I’m definately going to be exploring that route. I have alot of commercials to get through in the next few weeks, I’m getting a macpro with blackmagic to do it with. But if this saves a few pennies and gets the same results then I’m all for giving it a go. For such short form work, even if I did come accross some speed issues its not going to be the end of me or a job stopper. So its worth a go. I’ve got a lacie big disk myself, so will do some testing.
I’ll keep you posted!

Cheers

[Luke Maslen]

Hi,

Given that you already have a LaCie disk, you’ve got nothing to lose by trying. If you find your work demands more disk speed than can be provided via Firewire, you can always look at other options.

If portability is not an issue for you, then you could use the built-in RAID facility in the Mac Pro. The Mac Pro has 4 disk bays with plug-in disk carriers. You can bolt a SATA II disk to the carrier and push it into place without needing to fiddle with any power or data cables. It’s a very clever design.

We ran some tests on this in our lab and mounted 3 x 500 GB SATA II disks into the three empty bays, and striped them with RAID 0 for a 1.5 Terabyte internal disk array. We only used three disks because the fourth disk is used as the Mac OS X system disk. Testing was conducted using the following model of hard disk: Seagate 500Gb 7200rpm 16Mb 3.5″ SATA II [ST3500641AS].

Blackmagic Disk Speed Test reported about 170 MB/sec which was easily fast enough for HD uncompressed 10 bit. However this three-disk internal solution is more suited to people needing simple capture and playback of HD, such as designers and effects artists. They just want simple clip capture and playback and the built-in three-disk array is a great solution for them. There are also newer 750 GB disks, which are faster, and so performance could increase further.

For editors who have hundreds of cuts and/or effects in their projects, we would strongly recommend an external disk array with multiple disks.

You’re only working in SD so I’m sure the 3 disk array would be fine for your purposes. However if you want portability, then the Firewire drive would be nice.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Sameer Shrivastava]

hi,
I would like to report that i have been using a non lacie single disk firewire 400 disk on a fcp @ 10 bit, just to capture and then bring the footage to my decklink pc sucessefully for quite some time now. so even a single drive is also just good enough for capture and simple palyback. with my decklink speed test i used to get around 32 mbs. though for complex timeline and edits it’s better to have raid as you get better seek time.

sameer