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Hobbiest edit station
Hi guys,
I am a hobbyist/semiprofessional videographer/engineer/developer. We have 14+ years of priceless family photo/video media stored backed up to a RAID1 (4TB NewerTech Maximus). I want to move into the FCPX realm and hope to have enough fast storage to have access to our entire library, since we like to reference events in the past. Editing has just become so cumbersome and I don’t feel secure having it only in one place, even though it is mirrored.
We are centralizing standard Time Machine/business/document backups to either a Synology DS415+ NAS or some sort of DAS connected to a centrally located Mac Mini I already have.
I use a MacBook Pro for editing, and am looking for a large, fast means of storing the Lightroom/FCP library for editing as well as an initial location to import into.
What would you guys recommend? I had looked at LaCie 5big, Pegasus2, and OWC ThunderBay. What workflow makes sense for import, then backup of the source files? Do you back up your entire FCPX library (clone the RAID to the NAS/DAS via the network?) or just the raw source files? Will RAID5 be fast enough on these for my purposes so I have some “realtime” security between making changes and running the backup?
Thanks all!
Patrick -
1 Reply
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Hello.
If your source media coming from standard camcorders and you’re not editing anything really “heavy”, like color correction and effect applied to several clip at once, the speed of any RAID 5 array is more than enough. I build rough cuts on the field from a single USB3 2.5″ external drives connected to a MBPr, and never experience lags or problems of any kind. Once back to my office, I copy the active projects and media onto a RAID0 USB3 array, but I hardly notice a difference editing plain documentary style. Safety is a serious problem with modern tapeless media, but HD space price has dropped quite a bit. I keep all of my media I often need to reference to in a 5 bay RAID5 array. The media is divided in libraries and events, each clip detailed in the “notes” field with a description. So if I need a sunset, I can run a search and get all the sunsets at once. I can restrict the search to “2013” library only, if I want, so I don’t need to load all the stuff. I keep a copy of each year’s media library on a dedicated HD I keep home for extra safety for theft or fire in my office. I also build fcparch’s of each card coming from my camcorders on another RAID5 NAS. I don’t know how familiar you are with FCPX, but there’s a wide range of uses that can be more or less fit for your needs, like keeping media external or contained within a library. I keep them external, so I can backup libraries and projects on another RAID 1 USB3 array, as they are pretty small. A RAID5 alone is not a really safe way to store sensible material, and I’d suggest building separate copies on single 2TB drives anyway. A docking station is cheap, so you don’t need to buy several boxes. Depending on how much storage you need, you could buy a RAID 5 for all of your editing (media+libraries), use your 4TB RAID 1 for TM backup of your MBP and libraries alone (no media), then a few single drives for safe copies.Fabrizio D’Agnano
Rome, Italy
early 2008 MacPro, BM Intensity Pro, early 2008 iMac, 2014 MacBook Pro Retina, Blackmagic UltraStudio Mini Monitor, FCP7, FCPX, OSX 10.9.4
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