Storage and raid quesion for ideal AE 1080p workflow.

[Brendan Coots]

The G5 only has two spare drive bays, so “filling them up” won’t be too tough. The only way to meet your space needs (2-3TB) is to use the largest drives you can get these days, 1TB. As a result, you can have a maximum of 2TB space which falls at the low end of your space needs.

As for working with 1920×1080 uncompressed 8-bit HD, the datarate for a single layer of this footage is 120MBps (that’s megabytes). Two drives striped together in RAID 0 might get you 80MBps on a good day, but that speed will drop quickly as the drives fill up with footage. This 2-drive setup falls far short of your speed requirements, and that’s only for one layer. If you expect to have several layers of HD footage in Final Cut Pro, the requirements go up.

This setup WILL “handle” uncompressed HD footage in FCP, but it will be slow and certainly won’t play back full quality in real-time. This is why people buy those expensive RAID boxes you mentioned. On that note, OSX only does RAID 0 and 1, you can’t do RAID 5 without a controller card which starts at around $400. RAID 5 also requires a minimum of three drives, which is out of your capacity range without a separate drive enclosure. I should add that RAID 0 is highly risky unless you plan to do daily backups of your project and source materials, which will require you to have another 1-2TB worth of external drives handy.

With After Effects, the hard drive speed plays a smaller role since so much of your work in AE involves RAM previews, not real-time disk previews. If you plan to do 1920×1080 uncompressed HD work in AE, it’s RAM that you will need, and a lot of it (think 6-8GB).

Brendan Coots
Splitvision Digital
http://www.splitvisiondigital.com

[Jimmy Brunger]

Have you got an Intel box (Mac Pro) or a G5? They are two different machines. You might have space in the Mac Pro (new one) if you use the spare optical drive bay aswell (I *think* you can fit 2 more drives in there) There is a comany who makes a kit to do this…

I remember when I was looking to setup an all-in-one HD playback in FCP & AE machine all contained in tower it was doable in RAID5. you’ll need something like a CalDigit hardware RAID controller, a bunch of fast drives and then you should get 1-2 streams of uncompressed HD depending on your setup. Many more layers than that and you’ll need to look at an external box.

Look up ‘hardware raid’ or ‘uncompressed HD raid’ or something like that here on the cow and you should find my posts/threads about this. I haven’t got time to search myself at the mo.

AE7 Pro – Nucleo – Mocha v1.2.0 – PS CS3 – FCP 5.1.4
MacPro Quad 3GHz / ATI 1900XT / 8GB RAM / OSX 10.4.11
30″ ACD / Wacom Intuos 3 A4 / XServe RAID
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Production Studio CS2 – Combustion 3 – Mocha v1.0.1
Win XP Pro 32 / Intel P4 3GHz / 2GB RAM / GeForce FX5200 / DeckLink Pro / Roland DS-5s / Sony BVM-20G1E / 2 x Dell 2007FP / Wacom Intuos 3 A4 / 110GB/80GB/600GB RAID-0