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Routing my Capture Device and Scratch Disk through a Firewire Hub
I work in a multimedia lab at a large private school where we’ll be purchasing new Macs for our editing suites next summer. We’ve got PowerMac G5 Towers and we will theoretically be upgrading to MacPros. However, as is the case everywhere, we expect to have our budgets slashed so I’m looking at getting iMacs instead of the MacPros. From what I hear the quad core iMac is a powerful beast capable handling HDV video and Hi-Def compression without a hic-up. The only problem with them is that they only have 1 FireWire port. We capture our tapes through FW and our Lacie Rugged Drives also connect through FW. Can I rely on a hub to both capture and save my footage? It would seem to me this might cause a problem. Here’s our info:
HDV footage shot on Canon HV40s 1080i
Final Cut Pro 6
Lacie Rugged Drives 7200RPM (FW400,800, & USB 2.0) We use 800 to connect.I’m just wondering if that one port will handle simultaneous upload and download.
If so any hub suggestions would be appreciated. Thanks.
-Mike
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10 Replies
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A hub’s not going to save you in this case. You can either spend some money on an ethernet based storage environment, or get a couple of capture stations (MacPros) and have a bunch of iMacs for editing.
Jeremy
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I routinely daisy-chain my personal hdv camera and a lacie drive through fw400 on my laptop. The FW hub, though, may give you a bottleneck.
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Crap. That’s what I thought.
Well I’m going to give it some tests anyways. But I think you guys are right. Who knows maybe we’ll still get our funding.
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[Mike Ebner] “Who knows maybe we’ll still get our funding.”
I’m rootin’ for ya.
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[Jeremy Garchow] “You can either spend some money on an ethernet based storage environment, or get a couple of capture stations (MacPros) and have a bunch of iMacs for editing.”
Agreed those would be the best options.
I myself an planing on on getting a new i7 Quad core iMac myself and will be switching from esata storage to gigabit ethernet storage.
[Dennis Leppell] ” routinely daisy-chain my personal hdv camera and a lacie drive through fw400 on my laptop. The FW hub, though, may give you a bottleneck. “
The bottleneck would have absolutely nothing to do with a hub, it would have everything to do with the fact that the computer has only one firewire buss (not port but buss they are VARY different)
I myself have had issues when connecting a camera/deck to the dame firewire buss as media drives. Dropped frames on capture, and when going back to tape are quite common.
Anyway a gigabit ethernet storage is going to be much faster then even firewire 800 so that alone will give you much better storage.
There are no “technical solutions” to your “artistic problems”.
Don’t let technology get in the way of your creativity! -
Gigabit ethernet is at most 125MB/s, whereas FW800 is 100MB/s.
From my limited research, in actual implementation an use, it appears that the current crop of NAS ethernet HDD systems are maxing out at ~40MB/s. A FW800 Raid or single disk can easily do 75MB/s or twice as fast.
rick
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Cancelled my post
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A friend of mind uses a NewTech Ministack and has his camera hooked into one of the ports and it works well for him, he is cutting corporate stuff on a shoestring budget
C. David Miller
CN8/Comcast Network Television
Central Pennsylvania Region
1050 East King Street
York, PA 17403
717-451-0138
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What about a server based solution? We have a gigabit network at the school would it be possible to capture to a server? I’ve tried just setting my scratch disk to a share on our network before but I didnt have much luck.
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Just an update here…
We went ahead and purchased a Kramer FW800 hub (https://tinyurl.com/y8dlg42) from B&H a few weeks ago just to test out the situation. We anticipate having our renewal budget slashed next fiscal year so we need to cover our assess when the Trustees ask why we need expensive MacPros. In other words we need proof that this setup will not work.
It’s been about 3 weeks now and so far so good. We hooked it up to a 20″ imac (2008) and have had the students use it every day to capture HDV footage to their LaCie rugged drives. I’ve informed the advanced class to let me know if anything weird happens, dropped frames, crashes, stuttering, but nothing yet. I’m not saying it won’t happen but I figure you guys might be interested in how we fare. I’ll keep updating this as it goes on.
I’ll be trying capturing from HDV to ProRes next.
Thanks again for the input.
-Mike
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