FCP 7 playout off NFS mount

[Matt Geier]

Hi Jason,

In terms of Apple performance, NFS and Final Cut don’t really seem to work well together. A few things to point out;

NFS is a memory hog, it uses huge amounts of memory. This will be very detrimental to your Real Time playback. Here’s a thread off discussions.apple that may help understand this. From (2007) https://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1214948

NFS works fine for some things in Final Cut but not everything that Final Cut needs for you to run properly in RT. There are some issues with file naming. FCP has trouble opening and saving files on NFS. It’s believed to be a resource fork issue. For example, FCP usually won’t let you select an NFS volume to use as scratch.

I see another thing that concerns me. You said you wanted to run 220MB/sec for Pro Res HQ. The problem with that is Gigabit will not allow you to go that fast. Gigabit on a Mac will allow you to run full blast at about 90-100MB/sec … HOWEVER, when using Pro Res in real time, you should expect it to be unstable / unreliable for anything beyond 2 streams at about 15 FPS (30MB/sec). Comfortably you should be able to fit two streams on the wire which would really be about 60MB/sec of bandwidth moving across…..

The AJA tool is not a good test application for real time performance of your RAID…it’s only going to tell you how fast the RAID is reading / writing in terms of MB/sec. You cannot and should not rely soley on that number, because it often has little bearing on actual capabilities of real time performance of your RAID / Network environment.

I hope this is helpful to you somewhat.

Thanks,

Matt G
Small Tree

[Jason Watkins]

Thanks Matt, just to clarify, it is 220Mb/sec (bits). So, that throughput does make it under the GigE spec. I will definitely look into the other concerns you mentioned. Thanks again, I really appreciate it.

[Bob Zelin]

Jason –
ProRes422 is 20MB/sec, ProRes422HQ is 30MB/sec (220mb/sec).

You can run either over AFP, SMB or NFS. NFS will NOT help you with playback speeds. It is a Unix format, and if you have files called –
big car.mov
it won’t see the file, because Unix doesn’t like spaces and special characters.

We only use NFS for .r3d RedCineX transcoding, and to get over the 10 client limit for non server os demands. If you install OS-X Server, you don’t need NFS, as you have “unlimited” clients.

Since I answered your questions, please describe your system – what kind of drive arrays and ethernet cards are you using ?

Bob Zelin

[Jason Watkins]

Been tracking down the specifics, here are the basics:
The FCP clients are mounting NFS through the Company network over the Mac Pro’s onboard NIC. The Linux server is connected to the storage over 8Gb fiber (4Gb x2), and connected to the Company network over 10Gb uplink. So, the bottleneck in the chain is the GigE from the Company network to the client. They are using this workflow just for playout of ProRes Quicktimes through FCP–not for any complicated editing with lots of files.

I have tested throughput with Avids Path Diagnostic. It is showing real steady reads around 80MB/sec, with lower and choppier throughput for writes. But, we aren’t too concerned with writes…yet. Furthermore, FCP isn’t dropping frames on playout when we stress the network and storage.

In learning about this NFS stuff, it looks as though the real problems with NFS arise with higher bandwidth requirements and more complex sequences (permissions and tracking files). Since our workflow couldn’t be more basic, it looks like we are good to go forward with NFS mounts in this case.

[Matt Geier]

If you are truly using Quick Time — It’s my understanding that it will act “jerky” — In Final Cut if you were “Editing” in Real Time, those Jerks would be equivalent to likely dropped frames in the playback.

I also know you can adjust Final Cut to not drop frames if it were to occur… I’m not an FCP expert.

If you’re not concerned with the performance you see; great; keep going until you get concerned. We can all discuss it more then! 🙂

Just a couple of thoughts.