Swiftdata 200 + BlackMagic = Ideal low cost solution??

[Carey Dissmore]

I haven’t been doing 4:4:4 work, but I have been using a Swift Data 200 since over a year ago in a dual 2.0ghz G5 with a Decklink SP. I do 10-bit uncompressed…lots and lots of streams. My system benchmarks well into the 220+MB/sec category using Blackmagic Disk Speed Test. I have four 250GB Hitachi drives in a RAID-0 on the Sonnet card.

Carey

[Kaspar Kallas]

for most of the satements AMEN

in the last 10% of the drive the preformance goes down quite fast but is still around 180 MB/s

-Kaspar

[Chris Borjis]

so if I’m doing an hour+ worth of 4:4:4 1080i editing and
the array holds that hour+ i could run into trouble
going the sata route?

But no trouble with apple xserve right?

That what I really need to know.

and thanks for the responses. 🙂

[Kaspar Kallas]

if you have only one hour of footage and 400GB drives you MIGHT pull it off 1h should be someweher around 700-750 GB
The thing is what exactly are you planning to cut in 4:4:4 what is the source (Viper/F950/Orgin?)
You know that in RGB mode you cannot do anything in FCP other than cuts only? otherwise you end up with 8 bit render…
If you are doing something for TV output that might end up on film then I would recomand doing a short test and see how the different cog’s will work for you, because there is a long way from 4:4:4 quictime to film out (not so much technically any more, especially with Kinetta film recorder that works on G5 and even quictime files) but you still have to work out some quirks (like when shooting raw data, then getting the right log curves to work) also Color Correction to have the most on film, monitoring the CC

If you are not sure about the film part then use 10 bit 4:2:2 because your workflow will be lot less demanding and you dont loose that much – or anything if you shoot F900 and capture staright to disk
If you use (Viper/F950/Orgin) then make it video gamma and CC before the edit and fine tune the CC afterwards and you should be OK

Just dont jump in the water when you don’t know exatly what is in the bottom – meaning don’t make a full feature lenght film just to find out there was logical flaw in your workflows premise

And consider this with adding extra drives inside your mack will cost you 400+(4×262)=1148
if you do most deffinatly need 4:4:4 blayback in RT for more than an hour there is an ugly way to do it cheap pull out of yer mac extra power cord and disks on top of yer tower then you can have up to 10 disk’s “inside” yer mac or buy a burly box what is quite cheap you end up spending about 2-2.5K to whole system and get more preformance then you can imagine

the problem will be no data redunancy – so if you dont have the orignal media on something backet up – it will be pretty much russian rulette, then again add sonnet 8 extrenal port drives and for 1K you can get extranal 8 drive solution then you could do raid10 on tiger

it will not be a neat as X-Raid but it will be cheaper – you just have do decide what is the price of your effort that you will end up investing into this system will the price difference cover for time you loose on makeing something like that?

just “few” ideas on the subject – I have tring to achive something like this for last year and a half – eding up with the system that can pull it off, just to find there are no clients for something like this in this part of the world

-Kaspar