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Premiere Pro CS5 + P2 Media + SAN environment
Is anyone aware of issues with using editing P2 media in Premiere Pro CS5 on a SAN? I’m working with P2 media on Premiere Pro CS5 connected to a 24 TB SAN with an 8gb fiber optic connection, and there’s a long delay anytime I jump out of Premiere and then try to get back in to it. I’ve moved projects to a local drive and everything is fine, I can edit with no problems. I only have issues when I edit on the SAN. Does anyone know of a fix for this, (other than editing on a local drive)?
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20 Replies
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Corey,
I’ve been having some issues. I’m trying out premiere for a 5 edit suite studio – I edit over XSAN/fibre and seem to get a lot of lag. I’m not sure, though, if I am setting up my metadata caches correctly – does anyone have any info on this? Typically, I like to have my editors all work off of the SAN and not locally since we like to pass projects around – is this going to be a problem? Where should we put our caches? And should we tell it to save the metadata files right beside the dSLR originals? This starts to look pretty messy…
Max
Test System – 8 core intel MacPro, 8gb ram, XSAN 2gb fibre
Max Kaiser
Director
Hand Crank Films
https://www.handcrankfilms.comVarious Intel
FCP 7
OS 10.5
RED/XDCAM/7D -
Premiere works great on local drives, but I’ve run into issues when trying to run it on the SAN. I’ve got 4 workstations, running 3.2 GHz Xeon quad processors with 16 gb ram, over an 8gb fiber connection to a 24 TB SAN.
In speaking with Adobe tech support they don’t recommend editing from the SAN with P2 media. They said it’s a known issue… and that’s where we’re experiencing the lag. Again, I have no problems editing on local drives, but that’s not how we planned our workflow.
As for the cache, the tech support guys still recommended that I put the media cache on a separate drive.
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Corey,
What SAN?
Alex
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A SAN is a storage area network with a very high data transfer rate. It’s a central storage location that multiple edit suites can be networked to. We have projects that go to different editors for different stages or segments of editing/graphics work. In some instances we share footage across different projects, so the SAN is supposed to offer us an easy way to share/transfer media and projects.
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Sorry…I know what a SAN is….
I meant what kind of SAN.
I used both Facilis and SAN MP.
Is it all Fibre or Fibre/Ether combo?
Alex
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Anyone have experience with XSAN and dSLR footage on Intel mac? Just looking for some pointers on organizing all those pesky metadata files for best archiving/consolidation of projects and, of course, speed.
Max Kaiser
Director
Hand Crank Films
https://www.handcrankfilms.comVarious Intel
FCP 7
OS 10.5
RED/XDCAM/7D -
We’re using a Facilis Terrablock 24D with the Fibre/Ethernet combo. It’s been very reliable.
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Here is my guess…the SAN you are using is based on a metadata controller that uses ethernet connectivity and video stream playback topology that uses your 8gb fibre topology.
when you make a request to play clip on the SAN, that request goes thru the Metadata controller (MDC)…i.e. ethernet to queue the playback over the fibre.
with normal media this is fine…because the clip is at worst broken into video and audio separately.
with P2 media, the file and all it’s metadata is spread across multiple folders from the folder structure of the P2 media. therefore everytime you make a request, the MDC has to navigate the complete folder structure, to compile the clip essences, this is likely the source of the delay…mind you this is merely an educated guess.
The only likely solution I see is that you develop a workflow system to transcode media to a normal media file container on the way to placing it on the SAN from P2 and prior to importing into Premiere. While this negates PPro’s powerful native playback, it will smooth things out as you leave media in place on the SAN and pass projects to different editors.
Imagine products might have something that will help you with that. Or you might look and see if you can set up something with Adobe media encoder.
does that help?
Alex
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OK…
I was using a Facilis, but all fibre, no ethernet.
Are you experiencing the problem on fibre attached clients or ether attached clients?
or both?
Alex
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We’re set up to use fibre for the data transfer during editing. Supposedly, ethernet is not in play when we edit, and we’re using that when we flip completed projects to our playback server. But your comment about the metadata controller using ethernet makes sense and I’ll look into that. Thanks!
Corey
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