Blackmagic HD system – recommendations for Visual FX?

[Ajpaterson]

As no-one replied to my original message, I decided to take the plunge and answer the questions myself through experimentation.

1) Monitoring – We have an existing Sony KV34-XS955 34″ directview tube display – Is there any combination of Blackmagic products that can drive this 1080i display with 1080-24p source material? Multibridge extreme or Decklink HD extreme and HDlink?

I can happily report the KV34-XS955 works well with the MBE when connected to the component outputs, even when displaying 24p originated material. This works by creating a 1080-60i project in Premiere, and then importing 24p avis into the timeline. Premiere appears to handle the frame rate conversion internally – I don’t have to do anything beyond pressing play, which lets me view my 1080-24p in full resolution.

2) Also Monitoring – has anyone tried driving a Westinghouse 42″ 1080p LCD panel or other large 1080p panel from Multibridge extreme or decklink HD extreme and HDlink?

Haven’t tried this yet.

3) Storage – has anyone tried dual PCI-X SATA controllers striped in raid 50 (one raid 5 on each controller, then striped together into a raid 0 set) to maximize throughput? This seems like it might maximize the use of the hardware parity write on each controller, while benefiting from the bandwidth of both for reading.

4) Also Storage – any drive preference? – I’m about to buy 12 SATA drives. Anyone using 10k raptor drives seeing benefit/problems?

I can happily also report that running raid 50 has the desired bandwidth improvement effect. The array is made up of 12 Western Digital Raptor WD-1500ADFD 10k rpm SATA drives, connected as two sets of 6 drive raid 5 sets to two 3ware 9550sx-8lp PCI-X controllers, and then software striped in Windows xp32 to a raid50 volume. The controllers are installed in 2 100MHz PCI-X slots on a Tyan Thunder 2895 K8WE 2x dual-core opteron 270 motherboard with 4 gigs of ram. The array can tolerate a failure of 1 out of 6 drives without loosing data. The theory is that using two controllers increases read bandwidth slightly, but dramatically increases write bandwidth, because the controllers are sharing the write parity calculation load. This bears out in Blackmagic’s Disk Speed Test – Read is 565 MBytes/s (a 30% improvement over a single raid 5 array) and write is 446 MBytes/s. (almost a 70% improvement). The K8WE supports 133 Mhz on one PCI-X slot, but the array was unreliable when one controller ran at 133, and the other ran at 100 Mhz.

-Anthony Paterson