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Strategy for Sharing Media Between Mac and Windows Premiere Pro
I’m hoping I’m posting in the correct forum, it was either here or in the hardware forum.
I’m going to be taking the plunge and getting a fairly high end PC to augment my aging Mac Pro for Premiere Pro CS 5.5 (and probably CS 6 as soon as the kinks are worked out). Right now my online media resides on several fast eSATA RAID 5 drives, plugged into my Mac Pro through some eSATA PCI cards. It works well and I have pretty good bandwidth, from 200MBS to 250MBS using this method, I think enough speed for the type of media I use in my edits, a combination of XDCAM EX, AVCHD, Canon H.264 with perhaps 4-5 streams at once in Multicam edits.
Adding my PC to the mix will complicate things. I want to be able to access the media on my eSATA drives, which are currently formatted for Mac, using the HFS+ file system. I have heard the Mac Drive can make Windows read this filesystem well.
The issue is sharing this media on the drives fast enough for both systems to be able to edit / access them simultaneously. I do have Gigabit ethernet, but I don’t think that would be fast enough, I think practically it tops out around 70MB /second. I probably need more speed.
Also the Mac can share as SMB, but the current Mac OS 10.7 doesn’t seem to share SMB all that well but I have to test it with Windows. I know for my various media player boxes it doesn’t work very well or at all at this point accessing my Mac 10.7 system via SMB. In addition, SMB seems to be a really slow networking protocol. I can share via AFP or NFS, and I think NFS has the speed necesary, not sure if Windows out of the box can deal with that protocol.
I know there is such a thing as ‘fiber channel’ and other tech to essentially create a fast network, the Mac can also network over Firewire, but I don’t think that will be fast enough either. I suppose I could see if there is a faster than Gigabit ethernet protocol using Cat 6 or whatever is the latest type of ethernet cable. I’m trying to do a shortcut here and see if the vast number of people out there have done this and what they think works best.
Thanks for any and all advice here.
Regards,
-Keith
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18 Replies
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Cat5 1gb is really surprisingly fast. I would look into this first, just because all other options are exponentially more expensive and difficult to run. Fiber Channel gets very expensive and difficult to run. There’s a shared media storage forum here at COW, try poking around there.
Ryan
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Thanks, that’s good to know. I already have a Gigabit ethernet network so hopefully this will suffice. I’ve done some tests and it tops out at around 70MB/second. I have not gotten my PC yet to test but I’ll report back my findings here or on the other forum.
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I’d take a look and see how much overhead you are using in real time in one of your more complicated edits now.
Utilizing all these compressed formats really puts the stress on the cpu and not so much on the drives or the networking…
Ethernet may work out just fine.
Alex
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I read a while back that Walter Biscardi used Ethernet for his suites, at least for a while. As I recall the key was to turn on something called “fat bits”.
Chris Paul
POV -
Yeah, I think it’s called “Jumbo Packets” and it sounds great if it works, I’ll let you all know.
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[Chris Paul] “I read a while back that Walter Biscardi used Ethernet for his suites, at least for a while. As I recall the key was to turn on something called “fat bits”.”
It’s jumbo frames, but I like “fat bits” way better.
There are a bunch of Ethernet-based file sharing systems that will work for editorial, and as the other posters have mentioned, 70 MB/s is usually enough, especially for highly-compressed media.
Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events -
The term you’re looking for is “Jumbo Frames.” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jumbo_frame)
Now, here’s an additional suggestion to take the GbE discussion up in bandwidth. I fully agree, that with the increase in compressed footage acquisition, GbE (single links) are more than adequate for lots of editing requirements these days, especially when coupled with PrPro’s excellent native playback capabilities.
But you can increase speeds further, especially if you intend to keep the files on the Mac Pro and use the storage across multiple-clients. Now, I’m going to ignore file system issues and only talk about network infrastructure here.
The Mac Pro has two GbE ports and they can be aggregated to create a 2Gb link provided your switch also supports LACP. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Link_aggregation)
Until 10GBase T (10Gig over copper) becomes more affordable, LACP is a pretty effective way to increase bandwidth using existing Cat5e LAN infrastructure and GbE hardware, especially on shared storage sources like a Mac Pro (we do the same – though our infrastructure is all Mac at the moment.)
We use a setup like this from one Mac Pro with a large storage array to another Mac Pro and an iMac without speed issues. Currently all the machines use local media caches and preview/render locations to keep that traffic off the network.
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There is no intuitive interface, not even the nipple. It’s all learned. – Bruce Ediger -
Thanks Petros, that’s awesome. Is there software or hardware that you use in particular?
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I am going to make a very quick “Link Aggregation for Mac Pros” Howto an post a link to that here.
But to directly answer your question…
Here’s what you need:
– LACP-capable GbE Switch
– 2 Cat 5e or Cat 6 cables to connect to the switchThat’s it! OS X has had link aggregation capabilities for a while and it’s a very simple affair as you’ll see in a few minutes!
Regarding the switch we’re using, it’s a basic 24-port managed GbE switch, purchased about 5 years ago because it was pretty cheap and although it sounds like a hairdryer (it’s in a server closet) it’s been trouble-free – not requiring a single reboot.
We’ve since upgraded all other switches to HP ProCurve as they have a lifetime warranty and if I had to buy one today that was a basic, managed switch I’d pick this one up: https://www.cdw.com/shop/products/HP-V1810-24G-Switch-Smart-Buy/1837433.aspx – I still can’t believe HP offers lifetime warranties on networking equipment!
I’ll post a quick video in a few hours.
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There is no intuitive interface, not even the nipple. It’s all learned. – Bruce Ediger -
And here it is: https://slrdwrds.shiftfocus.ca/2012/06/21/link-aggregation-on-a-mac-pro-os-x/
I didn’t have a ton of time today but I did my best!
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There is no intuitive interface, not even the nipple. It’s all learned. – Bruce Ediger
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