Sharing Data/Drives between iMac i7 & Macbook Pro

Apple Final Cut Pro Legacy

Sharing Data/Drives between iMac i7 & Macbook Pro

Posted by Max Frank on January 5, 2011 at 11:57 am

Hi,

Sorry if this has been answered. I’ve searched and read many posts, including the ones about Jumbo Frames over at https://forums.creativecow.net/thread/8/1084302#1084332 and there is just a little too much techno-speak for my little brain.

Can someone please enlighten me how I could economically have an iMac i7 & a MBP share data coming from a few FW800 drives daisy chained together.

Previously, I was doing this with an old G5 2.0& the MBP over Ethernet using DV material and it worked just fine.
The main machine [MBP] had full realtime performance, and the secondary machine [G5] had less than real-time, but adequate resolution.

Now we’ll be using all ProRes SQ material so I doubt the old Ethernet Route will work, correct?

What’s the most cost effective way to do this?

And, again, only the main machine [iMac] will need to have full resolution. The MBP could be a little slower/lower resolution – it would mainly be for logging, etc.

Thanks in advance,

Wayne

Ben Holmes replied 15 years, 4 months ago 3 Members · 4 Replies
4 Replies

Steve Eisen
January 5, 2011 at 12:33 pm

I’m sure you mean ProRes HQ. ProRes HQ won’t work on FW800 drives. You need a very fast RAID with very high sustained data rates. ProRes LT or Proxy might be your alternative.

Steve Eisen
Eisen Video Productions
Vice President
Chicago Final Cut Pro Users Group
Max Frank
January 5, 2011 at 12:40 pm

My mistake, I meant the ‘regular, standard’ ProRes 422 [147Mbps] – not HQ.

Thanks,

Wayne
Steve Eisen
January 6, 2011 at 1:01 am

applies to ProRess 422. It has a very high data rate.

Steve Eisen
Eisen Video Productions
Vice President
Chicago Final Cut Pro Users Group
Ben Holmes
January 6, 2011 at 11:21 am

I’ve regularly captured ProRes 422 and ProRes 422 HQ at 1080i50 to G-Raid drives, and other external FW800 raid enclosures. It’s my standard setup using a MBP and MXO2.

The data rates are around 17MB/s and 26 MB/s – not sure why that should be the issue here. These codecs were designed to give acceptable data rates to accomodate this kind of storage.

You can share ProRes over Ethernet, but you won’t find it’s as easy to do on the cheap as DV was. You might like to look at some of the Drobo products, as I believe they offer something in this area. More usually, this is accomplished with a Gig-E switch, and a 8-bay+ drive array, then something like MetaSAN to manage it. It’s a lot cheaper to do than it used to be however – but don’t expect shared storage to be cheap and easy – that’s the holy grail of video editing, and just doesn’t exist yet.

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