-
can’t play feature length?
hey all, but i guess more specifically Bob and Walter
i’ve been reading posts here and on Walter’s blog about the difficulties with playing out a feature length piece on an ethernet SAN. i’m wondering if i can get more info on this. i have a client thats going to begin cutting a 70-80 min piece soon and i’m wondering about stability.
is the problem playing the full feature length timeline? does making a Reference movie or Self-Contained Quicktime for viewing get around this problem? what about nested sequences? has a magic number been reached – is it 90 min on the nose?
any info would be appreciated. we’ll have probably one editor on one system cutting the full piece, but editors on other systems using the same media for teasers, shorts, behind-the-scenes, etc. so i don’t think local storage would be the answer, unless it’s just a perfect clone of the same media that everyone else is using on the SAN.
thanks
e
Eric Hansen – The Audio Visual Plumber – http://www.avplumber.com
-
6 Replies
-
We’ve never had these issues with our Gigabit SAN, if it’s well set up and everything is rendered it should play out just fine. We have 90 minute shows with hundreds of cuts.
Admittedly this is doco land so no major nesting and/or layers…
If you check the comments to his article you’ll see that it might have been an audio issue.
-
Jacob Altman is lucky. We can’t play out 90 minutes either. We can do a loop of 30 minutes for over 3 hours without issue, but one continuous stream of ProRes422HQ for 90 minutes without choking – I have not seen this work with an ethernet system. I don’t have the answer.
Bob Zelin
-
Maybe Jacob isn’t on Final Cut? We’ve played out really long 60-90 minute timelines on our system (VelocityQ) on a GB NAS based system without issue.
Could this be a Mac/Final Cut related issue and not a SAN/NAS specific one?
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com -
I can’t belive that anyone is still using DPS Velocity !
Can it be a FCP issue – sure, maybe it can. I don’t know. We see ALL KINDS of wacky behavior directly related to FCP, that does not happen if you simply exit FCP, and do the same file transfer in OS-X (not using FCP’s log and transfer or file import).Bob Zelin
-
Yup..we have 3 VelocityQ systems running strong and an older Velocity system. The VelocityQ’s give us 4 real-time video channels, 4 real-time DVE effects and 6 real-time graphics. We almost never have to render anything in a timeline. Of course they’re all still SD, but we only do a few HD projects a year and we do those on our Blackmagic HD Extreme based system, either in Premiere CS3, After Effects (if it’s heavily composited) or Sony Vegas.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com -
it could definitely be a FCP issue. when i installed my first Ethernet-based SAN, we had capturing issues. whenever the capture hit 2GB, Final Cut would stop capturing. exactly 2GB. i was stumped, Small Tree was stumped. we switched the capture systems over to NFS sharing instead of AFP and the problem went away. that was on FCP 6.0.6 i believe.
the next Ethernet SAN i installed was all FCP 7 clients. no 2GB limit on captures over AFP. some Leopard, some Snow Leopard, but all FCP 7. that’s why i think its a bug in Final Cut and not an OS thing.
i’m not a dentist, but i think it might have something to do with Final Cut’s prefetch. when you’re capturing, Final Cut has to make sure that all that storage you’re about to use is available. i believe with AFP, Final Cut can prefetch, but with NFS it can’t. so when the prefetch wasnt working with AFP, it would just stop capturing at 2GB. with NFS, it doesnt have the ability to prefetch, so it doesn’t, and there’s no error. there might be a similar thing going on with long timelines/quicktimes. i must reiterate that i don’t know much about this stuff and i really have no basis for this conjecture. but based on this previous capturing problem, i have to think that it’s related to Final Cut. Final Cut is used to using local storage. to Final Cut, even Xsan is local storage. but using ethernet with AFP or NFS is a totally new thing for Final Cut. i can imagine we’re pushing this now very old FCP code.
e
Eric Hansen – The Audio Visual Plumber – http://www.avplumber.com
Reply to this Discussion! Login or Sign Up