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CatDV painfully slow clip access on PC workstations
CatDV Enterprise, Mac clients are 9.0.6 and Mac server is 6.07.
We have a Mac formatted, 48 TB RAID, journal formatted, with a Mac OS 10.6 workstation acting as server for four Mac Pro workstations and two Mac Laptops (i5’s and i7’s).
We have been using CatDV in this setup for a couple years and generally it has performed fine. However, we are considering swapping our our Mac Pros for HP workstations. We have a demo. HP Z820 right now and it is having fits with CatDV.
Per usual, I had to setup “media paths” for the proxies because on a Mac they are located in /Volumes/maxxraid1/CatDV_Previews but, of course, from the PC it is 192.168.2.3maxxraid1CatDV_Previews. I set up the same exceptions for the location of the original media. All that seems to be working fine because all my catalogs show the media connected and the proxies are found.
However, whenever CatDV is “looking” at clips from our RAID the access time is extremely slow. Specifically, I will click a clip and it take 6-10 seconds for the proxy to appear in the video playback window and be playable. Once it has “loaded” everything seems to be fine. It plays and I can scrub it. But MAN it takes a long time to load. If I drag clips into the catalog from the RAID the access time is improved ut it is still 5-8 seconds. If I drag clips in from the local workstation CatDV plays them back instantly, no problem.
I can also access the files on RAID at the OS level no problem… if I double-click a clip it comes up in Windows Media player instantly and plays. If I play it with Quicktime it takes 5-10 seconds for the player to load (Quicktime has always done this on any PC) but plays after that.
To try to narrow down the problem we hooked up a PC laptop to the system and it was the same issue with CatDV. A little worse, I assume because the machine is slower but the same issue. This makes me suspect CatDV server or the RAID server and not the HP workstation itself.
We have the latest Java, Quicktime, client and server. I have ensured that in preferences, under Import and Media playback that we have “Quicktime” checked and “Prefer Quicktime”. Our proxies are either 1080p .movs that were re-wrapped from AVCHD .MTS by Clipwrap or H.264 MP4’s at 640×480. Nothing ridiculous.
We use the Adobe Suite and I did notice that when I was reconnecting files in Premiere projects created on the Macs that access time to the folders was super slow as well… it eventually shows the folder and clips inside but it just take 5-8 seconds. What is weird is that I can edit just fine… there doesn’t seem to be any lag time to files then. I have also been using Audition and it has had no problems either.
Any thoughts anyone has would be appreciated.
Thanks,
Jeff -
3 Replies
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Do you have a lot of media search path entries? If so, what you may be seeing is that Windows network file access can be very slow if CatDV has to search a lot of locations before it locates the proxy file. In CatDV 10.0.6 (due out imminently) we’ve changed it so it no longer searches all the intermediate locations when location a proxy.
Currently to find the proxy for /A/B/C/D/E/F.mov it will search /CatDVProxies/A/B/C/D/E/F.mov, /CatDVProxies/B/C/D/E/F.mov, /CatDVProxies/C/D/E/F.mov, /CatDVProxies/D/E/F.mov, /CatDVProxies/E/F.mov, and /CatDVProxies/F.mov. If you have several entries like * => /CatDVProxies1, * => /CatDVProxies2 etc. then you can very quickly be searching lots of possible locations, which can add up and introduce a noticeable delay.
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Rolf,
Thank you for the information. We tracked it down to being a problem with a translation between SMB and AFP network protocols. We switched our PC workstation to talk to our RAID over the NFS protocol and this, for the most part, resolved the issue. Access time is slightly delayed but it is liveable for now.
We are searching two different locations for proxies so the next release will improve our speed as you mentioned. However, it seems our real problem is trying to integrate a PC into a system that was really designed for Macs and AFP.
Thanks,
Jeff
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