SAN Rendering

[Greg Leuenberger]

I’ve harped on this before and it still makes ZERO sense to me. There’s nothing about rendering from After FX, Final Cut Studio or a number of 3D render stations that should require anywhere near the network bandwidth or drive array speed that capturing footage or playing back footage in real-time needs…even for modest codecs.

Rendering in After FX will only write a few frames a second at most (and most likely it will take a few seconds per frame instead)…that’s only a few megs per second even at 1080 uncompressed. Similarly a 3D station will save out one frame (a few megs) every few minutes. I simply have not seen a satisfactory answer why you can conceivably have 3 or 4 people reading and writing to an array+network capable of handling 200-400+ megs/second without issues and suddenly somebody needs to render out an After FX animation of a couple megs a second and everything is out of wack. Even rendering out of FCP you are still not rendering/writing in real-time…why can’t you render to the SAN?

Is it that the RAID can’t handle writing a small file like a single HD frame (or small bits of a larger quicktime) intermittently while also serving a constant flow of 34-40 megs/sec to two other places simultaneously?

There are people here saying they have no problem with it – and why should they? I don’t understand which systems can’t handle it and which can – what’s the defining factor? I get the feeling nobody here knows.

The fact is that people want to read and write to the same SAN weather it’s FCP, AE, a 3D render or an audio mix….copying over a PDF script…whatever! People want to organize ongoing productions in ONE place for simplicity, organizational and archiving purposes.

What is it about writing out a small amount of data per second or intermittently (single HD frames or small bits of a larger quicktime) that interrupts an otherwise capable system’s throughput?

-Greg

Greg Leuenberger
CEO
Sabertooth Productions, Inc.
http://www.sabpro.com