Looking for a way to centralize studio’s footage

[Daniel Hatch]

Apace Systems’ vStor v2100-2U6T can offer the best form factor and fit for doing occasional collaborative SD video editing real-time, while offering 6TB of storage to consolidate all your data. The system can support 2 10-bit SD stream editing or 4 DvcPro-HD editing for your reference. Also with Apace’s vShare software package you can sync and backup all your data from internal direct attached storage into vStor, and with Apace’s Capture assist module for FCP you can consolidated direct ingest for collaborative use into the vStor shared storage in one pass. This storage building block can further be upgraded to run Apace’s MAM for interactive data management and distribution and even remote editing with yet another package fro Apace called ViEW for global remote editing.

For 10+ Streams of concurrent SD editing you can consider larger vStor system from Apace. All the accesses to the vStor are via Multi-GE or in higher end models 10GE and they are file based accesses, with no need for complex SAN management software. The benefit of vStor is that as a storage server which can be a building block for consolidating, distributing your content via IP based networks, locally and remotely while offering you a place to park your shared data, they also can offer you a built in FTP server in the machine as well.

Dan Hatch
Laird Telemedia
danh@towerpower.com
845-339-9555 x7377

[Chris Blair]

I’d second Dan’s recommendation. We’re a post company with 4 edit stations editing primarily DVCPro50 quality SD video, the occasional HD project and a few uncompressed SD projects. We have an Apace vStor with 4TB of storage, and it works beautifully. Our 3 VelocityQ systems and one Blackmagic Decklink HD with Premiere CS3 can handle 4 streams of real-time video at uncompressed resolution…although as mentioned, most video we work with is captured & stored at DVCPro50 resolutions.

That said, we can have all 4 edit systems running simultaneously, each editing fast-paced TV spots or long-form videos, and there’s nary a hiccup. We use 2 suites as capture stations, and each can capture uncompressed. One of the suites only has a single processor and 1GB of RAM, so it’s unable to capture long clips uncompressed. Again..not a big issue with us since we rarely do anything uncompressed. But it’s the PC’s fault, not the vStor’s, and the other suite has a dual-processor, 2GB RAM workstation which can capture uncompressed clips of any length, anytime. So…the power of your workstations DOES contribute to their ability to process incoming and outgoing requests for data. Both of these suites report the exact same data rates reading and writing to the vStor…but because one has less horsepower so to speak, it will drop a frame when doing uncompressed after 15-20 seconds.

Lastly…DON’T try to do this yourself using off-the-shelf components. It won’t work, you’ll waste money and time, and you’ll drive yourself batty with esoteric networking jargon and settings. Worse…you’ll figure out after reading 100 different opinions, that NO-ONE agrees on the best DIY method for setting up a shared video editing hard drive array.

It is possible to do it yourself, but follow the advice of people who have DONE the trial and error, like Bob Zelin on this list. And lastly…if you do it yourself and it breaks, YOU have to fix it. If you buy from a company like Apace and it breaks or doesn’t work…they have TRAINED engineers that work on these things all day every day. They’ll help you…and I can attest that Apace’s service is the best I’ve ever seen.

Hope that helps.

Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com

[Bob Zelin]

I have read your post. I have also made an estimation of your knowlege (perhaps unfairly) based on your comments of what you are thinking of doing. My advice is to follow the advice of Dan and Chris, because if you attempt what you are stating, you will fail.

There are other solutions, but if you think you are going to buy a $600 PC, stick 2 TB of hard drives in it, hookup a Gig E switch, and have shared storage – well, you are dreaming. It’s not gonna work. I could go into further details, but since you don’t want to consider buying a dedicated MAC for your project (because it’s too expensive),and you own all MAC workstations – just buy an off the shelf solution, like Apace, and save yourself a lot of aggrivation.

You should state what you expect to spend financially on this project before you ask for more input – it will be helpful to determine what you can and cannot purchase (or afford). Shared storage is not expensive like it used to be ($60,000 and up), but it’s still not cheap.

Bob zelin

[Sean Oneil]

Chris,

How does vstor work exactly? I’m intrigued that there is no client software, and no SAN software. Is it just a high-performance NAS? Do you connect to it using “Command-K?”

Sean

[Chris Blair]

How does vstor work exactly? I’m intrigued that there is no client software, and no SAN software. Is it just a high-performance NAS? Do you connect to it using “Command-K?”

Sean,

It’s a relatively simple device. It’s basically a Linux based server using an embedded OS (I suppose it’s on a chip but I don’t know enough about the hardware to say for sure). It has a relatively fast processor, several GB of RAM, a display card etc. All this controls the RAID, which is made up of 8 SATA II drives striped in a RAID 5 array. This allows for high speed read/writes and provides redundancy in case of 1 drive failure, meaning the data can be rebuilt if one drive fails.

Our unit has 4 Gig-E ports and each edit station is connected via dedicated ethernet card to 1 port through a 48 port managed GigE switch. The ports on the client PC’s are given unique static IP addresses so nothing else conflicts with the data that’s moving back and forth across that connection. Each workstation also has a second ethernet card that’s connected to the rest of our general network through the switch. The rest of the network doesn’t have access to the vStor, but you can set it up so 1 client PC allows sharing of vStor assets if you like. This will marginally slow the one client PC, so it needs to be a non-critical edit station, meaning you wouldn’t want to designate a capture station as the client that allows sharing.

You administer the vStor through a GUI that’s accessible via your internet browser from any of the client PC’s. You can also hook a monitor, keyboard and mouse to the vStor and do it direct if you prefer, but it’s not necessary.

In terms of formatting and actual use, it’s very easy. You just decide how many separate volumes you want on the vStor (we have two, one for video and one for audio), then set up each client PC to automatically connect to those volumes at boot up, and then you’re off and editing. It works identical to our direct attached setup, and is actually as fast or faster in terms of throughput.

You can keep project files on it as well as audio and video and you can set up your volumes and folders however you like. As it turns out, we should’ve just created one volume and kept both video and audio files in the same project folders as there’s no benefit to keeping them separate. We did it because our VelocityQ editing systems always kept video on one dedicated SCSI drive array, and audio on another to improve performance. But there’s no performance increase or decrease by setting up separate volumes on the same array…so we just did it out of habit.

The only thing that was complicated was setting up all the IP stuff, but Apace literally did it all for us via “go to meeting” sessions. If you’re not familiar with it, they set up a meeting, you call, then log into a website, then they take over your PC and set it all up for you. It’s very cool. You DO need to pay attention and write all the information down so you can access the vStor later, but if I can do it anybody can.

We also bought a NAS based backup drive (a LaCie 4TB rack-mount network drive) as well as a separate LaCie 2TB rack-mount that we keep project files on. But like I said, we should’ve just kept project files on the vStor too, as it doesn’t significantly impact throughput…and most people using it with Final Cut and Avid keep all their video, audio and project stuff on the vStor.

It’s amazing how much time we save using shared storage in terms of scheduling, file management, and especially backup. We used to constantly pull our hair out over all the duplication on our backups, which were individual drives attached to each workstation. Not to mention all the duplication of video and audio files on the direct attached SCSI arrays. Using the vStor eliminates all that.

The only drawback to the unit is that it’s huge and it’s loud. VERY loud. Ours is in our server closet where all our phone and other networking equipment is kept, and even with quite a bit of sound absorption and dampening material on the walls and doors, you can still hear the thing. It’s not objectionable, but if you’re into the whole “noise pollution” thing, it can be annoying. So you need to plan for where you’d put the thing and plan to sound proof some.

If you have more questions I haven’t answered, let me know.

Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com