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hard drives and video
So I’m still looking at switching over from Avid to FCP. My question is this; Is it still necessary to have big external raid/scsi drives? Or can you just load up a MacPro with four 750 gig drives and go from there? I’m freelancing at ESPN now and I notice that while footage is backed up on servers the footage that your working on now is on the local drive of the machine itself. Whenever I have done any freelance work in the early 90’s it was always external drives but now it seems more and more local/internal. Seems as though the way of the external drive is slowly going away??
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10 Replies
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The answer to your questions in both yes and no. Yes, you can use an internal drive RAID. That works fine, but you are limited to resolution with SATA. You can do Uncompressed SD, HDV and DVCProHD, but not Uncompressed HD. That’s the ‘No’ part. For that, you need to use an expensive Fibre channel RAID like the Apple XServe RAID for those large files and speed.
Ernie Santella
Santella Film/Video Productions
http://www.santellaproductions.com -
Ok that makes sense. Considering I’m old school with SD I’m looking at “future proofing” myself. So I know the differences between 720, 1080i, 1080p, etc. but what is the difference between HDV, DVCProHD and just HD that warrents different drives?? I’m looking at the Panasonic HDX500 because it can shoot both SD and HD but I’m concerned with what type of hard drives I’ll need.
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Considering the X Serve is so expensive what are some recommended solutions? Lacie, some other company?
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The difference between HDV, DVCProHD and Uncompressed HD is data rate. The higher the data rate, the faster the drive needs to be to pull it off in real-time.
HDV is and easy format to work with as is DVCProHD which the Panny camera uses. You can easily work with SATA drives which are cheap and fast enough. It’s the higher-end Uncompressed HD formats that require the superfast XServe speeds.
Sorry, I am not up on alternatives to XServe that will future-proof you for 1080p workflows.
Ernie Santella
Santella Film/Video Productions
http://www.santellaproductions.com -
HDV and DVCPro HD are both compressed formats, so they take up less space/bandwidth. If you are using the HPX500, then you will likely be working with DVCPro HD files. The quality is pretty good, so you don’t have to convert it to uncompressed HD unless you really want to or you plan to put the footage through several processing generations.
For lower cost RAID solutions, you can build your own system. Basically, you need an enclosure (they have them for 2-12 disk drives), a RAID controller card (recommend Highpoint or Sonnet), and a bunch of hard drives. Most people use RAID level 0 for speed, but make sure you have backup, because if 1 drive fails, everything goes. RAID level 3 or 5 will be able to recover if 1 drive fails, but they’re a little slower and you tie up 1 drive for parity data. Check out the Arizona Mac Users’ Group (AMUG) website – they’ve done a lot of testing on these products.
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Hi folks,
the XserveRaid is the best raid I’ve ever had. Rock solid, worth every pence. I hate unstable systems, I love reliability. If you think of sata raid be aware, that you work on Raid level 0. With external raid systems (Huge, Xraid or equivalent) you are on Raid 5.
Rainer
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Thanks for the info! I know from reading Sonnet is well recieved but now I’m reading about CalDigital which seems to have good solutions. And boy have I/O boxes been reduced in size. The Avid I/O box is big and clunky. I’m liking that new I/O HD box that AJA has coming out in July. I really need to catch up on technology although I think these days its nearly impossible.
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At the moment with the avid I have 4 Ultra 160/LVD rS73’s stacked up. Good drives but they were pricey at the time, around 1200 a piece but now there are so many options it akes my head spin. But as I said before it looks like CalDigital makes a good solution.
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That’s exactly why I never went AVID. They had you by the Cohones as far as forcing you to buy their drives.
I can highly recommend the Sonnet gear. I have a Fusion500 bay, and Sonnet E4P SATA card. All has worked flawlessly since installed.
I just saw they now have a Fusion800 8 Drive bay that can handle Uncompressed 1080. You could install 4 drives now and then more when you need more speed.
https://www.sonnettech.com/product/fusiond800raid.html
Ernie Santella
Santella Film/Video Productions
http://www.santellaproductions.com -
If you like Sonnet, then you might also want to look at Enhance Technology’s boxes. They OEM for Sonnet, so you might be able to get a better deal on basically the same thing. Looks like Sonnet is moving towards selling full systems with disk drives now, so it might be hard to find just the boxes. Also, check out Highpoint’s RocketRaid 2314 card, which is one of the few cards that support Raid 5 right now.
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