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Editing Uncompressed High Def?
Hi guys,
We are intending to capture uncompressed Hi Def Video via SDI into a Quad PowerPC G5(woodcrest), with 8 gigs of RAM. We have the a 1.5 year old Xserve RAID, 2.73Tb, and were looking to capture with the Blackmagic HD Extreme Card.
Do you guys foresee any problems/dropped frames/crashes/etc?
Any help would be greatly appreciated! Thanks!
Joe
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10 Replies
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The Blackmagic Disk Speed Test app will tell you if your drives have the bandwidth to handle the media. Your box is fast enough and 8GB of RAM is sufficient. If your system chokes it will be with your RAID.
Matt
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My humble G5 dual 2.5 with Decklink Pro card, 4 gigs RAM and an ATTO fibre channel 4TB RAID has been doing that for two years. Uncompressed is easy on the computer but hard on the RAID. I have been capturing 1080 50i 422 uncompressed with V4.5 – V6 FCP
Use the Decklink speed disk to check your RAID speed. It will tell you if there is a problem with potential drop frames. In theory you should be fine. In my experience, a RAID that small will fill mighty quick on long form work, especially when you start to render color grades etc.
You might want to experiment with ProRes. There are heaps of posts on this so search away.
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We have a similar setup (blackmagic, macpro quad core, 6gig ram, 5tb raid) and we run uncompressed fine, 10bit for something short like a music video or a commercial, 8bit for anything longer than about 4 minutes. In your case i’d run 8bit just to be safe, but otherwise sounds fine!
“This is post, you can’t fix it after this.”
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Tom, I have used 10bit for long form docos up to 90 mins duration. I assume you are using 8 bit for space.
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Your Raid might not take it well in an XSAN environment. But if it’s just an XRAID hooked up, you *should* be ok. the older XRAID was never noted for exceptional speed.
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Thanks for the help, one and all! I appreciate it greatly!!!!!
Joe
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The RAID is, indeed, hooked directly to the computer.
Thanks,
Joe -
Yes, ProRes or DVCpro HD seems the way to go.
From what I understand, ProRes will work on the G5 Quad, although it will be a bit more sluggish.
Also, from what I understand, the Kona Card 3 will down convert to ProRes on the fly? Wouldn’t this be much faster/safer than downconverting in FCP after transfer through Blackmagic?
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Capturing to ProRes via the Kona is best. No point in capturing uncompress and then converting.
I am about to update from my G5 so I haven’t tested ProRes but many here have and could best handle your queries about Kona & your config. I am using Decklink.
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Just run the Blackmagic disk test utility – it should give you the numbers on what that bad boy can handle
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