raid advice

[Craig Seeman]

RAID isn’t going to get you much as hard drive speed is not the bottleneck.

Create a QMaster cluster. It can range from multiple cores to multiple computers.
Also consider file based FTP delivery and skip the heavily compressed and burned DVD.
Compare the speed of third party encoders to Compressor, such as Telestream Episode or Squeeze for example.

BTW the subject might not attract the best attention because I don’t think you need raid advice at all. It’s best not to make assumption and just ask the question, “how to speed encoding and delivery”

[Jeff Greenberg]

A raid really won’t make a significant difference; the bottleneck is the MPEG2 compression;

I’m not sure that Toast is using all the processors. You should check by running toast and also running Activity Monitor (which has a gauge to show off processor performance.) You may find that using Compressor, using multiple cores provides a faster encode than Toast does. I don’t know if Toast will know to not reconvert valid MPEG-2 files when making a DVD

Best,

Jeff G

Apple Master Trainer
Avid Cert. Instructor DS/MC
Avid & Color Videos Vasst.com
Compressor Essentials Lynda.com

[George Sloan]

Thanks Craig,

I am currently using a qmaster cluster with good results over 4 cores. JUst wondering what would be a significant step up from here. Currently using a firewire800 connection woud a sata card help much
or perhaps a bigger raid?
george

George Sloan Productions
http://www.sloanmotion.com
“Music Mountain” Channel 4 Windstream Cable TV
Cannon Xh A1 1080i>FCP7>ProRes>SD DVD>Delivery on DVD to Broadcast and DVD distribution

[George Sloan]

Thanks Jeff,

I’ll run a ck on toast as you said. As for reencode. Toast has a “never” setting.That I am using.
George

George Sloan Productions
http://www.sloanmotion.com
“Music Mountain” Channel 4 Windstream Cable TV
Cannon Xh A1 1080i>FCP7>ProRes>SD DVD>Delivery on DVD to Broadcast and DVD distribution

[Craig Seeman]

I don’t think going from firewire800 to sata would help all though much. Hard drive throughput is not the bottleneck. The best bet would be to expand the cluster to other computers IMHO. Alternately a hardware accelerator. For H.264 I’d recommend Matrox CompressHD or MXO2 with MAX but it seems you’re trying to speed up MPEG2 encoding.