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Is my external storage my bottleneck?
I produce and edit an unscripted web series that involves a live event where we shoot around 9 cameras in varying formats and frame rates. I’ll describe them more below. I have two external storage devices:
– OWC ThunderBay 4 w 4 x HDs in RAID 0 and connected via Thunderbolt 3. It runs around 600 MB/s read and write.
– Oyen RAID 0 using 2 x SATAIII SDDs connected via USB C and runs more like 850MB/s read & write.I think I can tell a definite difference b/t these options as the Oyen seems snappier. But, I don’t understand how this can be the case given that I don’t think the OWC Thunderbay is being overloaded. Given that the Thunderbay is supposed to be running at around 600 MB/s and the total MB/s for all these video sources should be 364 MB/s, I wouldn’t think the Thunderbay would be the bottleneck. I’d think it comes more down to CPU or GPU power on my 2017 iMac. And yet, I’m pretty sure I can tell a difference when I edit off the Thunderbay vs the Oyen on the same iMac.
So, any thoughts? Is my math off? Am I misunderstanding something?
Here’s how I calculated that given the cameras we use:
Panasonic EVA1 running 108 frames a sec in v-log at 46.6 Mb/s = 5.825 MB/s
– I had two of these cameras running but sped them up to around 450% to play at real time. Accordingly, I raised the MB/s by 4.5, so that = 26.2 MB/s. Two of them = 52.4 MB/s
Panasonic EVA1 in 24p = 402 Mb/s = 50.25 MB/s
Sony FS700 1776 mb/s = 222 MB/s
Nikon d7000 = 19.2 Mb/s = 2.5 MB/s
Panasonic GH2 = 33/5 Mb/s = 4.2 MB/s
Drone = 60 Mb/s = 7.5 MB/s
2 x GoPro 6 Black = 66.3 Mb/s = 8.3 MB/s each. So, 16.6 MB/s total.
Canon 7D = 41.4 Mb/s = 5.2 MB/s
iPhone 8 = 17.3 Mb/s = 2.6 MB/s
total = 364-ish MB/s.