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HD WorkFlow vs Hard Drives.
Hi,
For the past few years we have been editing 8/10bit SD PAL. The time has come for us to upgrade our workflow and kit to enable us to work HD. I have read endless amounts of threads on HD, Hard-drive speeds and new Pro codecs, these have been great sources of information but have now managed to clog my thought process and I cant seem to make any decisions without panicking if its going to be the right one.As far as im aware I think we need to ramp up our dual 2gb G5 to a new 8 core G5 with plenty of ram, we also need drives fat and fast enough to run uncompressed HD so I started speccing a 3.5tb XRaid with fiber going back to the G5. Im getting a little confused on the workflow here as people are now saying that you dont need to edit HD uncompressed when you can do the same on a mac book pro using a ProRes codec.
So what do we do? Down spec the kit slightly, switch the XRaid for a cheaper set of drives? and run all HD through the new ProRes codecs?
To save me waffling on any more and embarrassing myself, can anyone shed some light on the sort of workflow and kit I will need to get to produce HD short form programs.
biggest thanks.
[enzo]
enzo rocket
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http://www.skyskraper.net -
3 Replies
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enzo,
A coincidence in that I was thinking about drives today in relation to HD production. It seems on the one hand a forgone conclusion that for HD anything you need the fastest arrays possible, but then, as you mention, with all the new codecs and whatnot, what are the REAL needs?
I just recently upgraded to Studio 2, and got ProRes along with it, at the same time I got an HDV camera and started trying to figure out the best way to use it with all the new stuff.
Speaking of ProRes, there are two papers here that are must-reads. But as things shook out for me, the best workflow is to capture HDV native via FireWier, and put it in a ProRes timeline. From there it can go out to anything, and only get one render hit in the process. Since your post is about drives, my 2 TB SATA RAID0 is more than fast enough so far.
BTW, most folks here do not work with uncompressed HD in any flavor, from what I have seen, most have been working in DVCproHD, until now, that is!
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If you’re going to be doing 1080i 29.97 or 23.98 10-bit uncompressed you’d probably want two Xserve RAIDs to get the data rate high enough.
720/24P uncompressed runs fine on a single fully populated Xserve RAID.
You might just start with ProRes and see if that’s good enough for you and your clients.
-Russ
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thanks for your help guys.
couple more questions at you…1.
The bulk of our work is for the video games industry so sequences are normally already quicktime files – meaning we dont have to capture stuff. Assuming this, would I be able to re-export the footage they supply into the ProRes codec, edit on the G5 we already have and re-export as either ProRes or uncompressed HD?2.
Would I need an XRaid to do the above or would something smaller/cheaper suffice? We already have 2 lacie 250gb SATA drives as raid 0 running with our Blackmagic decklink pro cards, I could never get true performance out of them as they seemed to temperamental and continually dropped frames so im a bit worried about having to go down this route again…excuse the long explanations, I just want to get to the bottom of a workflow that will allow us to work HD with the best outlay from day 1.
thanks – enzo.
enzo rocket
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http://www.skyskraper.net
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