Throughput required to capture 1080i uncompressed 8 bit and 10 bit

[Walter Biscardi]

If you do a search on this forum for 1080i uncompressed you’ll find multiple threads with this information. 200MB/s+ is minimum.

Walter Biscardi, Jr.
https://www.biscardicreative.com
HD Editorial & Animation for Food Network’s “Good Eats”
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“I reject your reality and substitute my own!” – Adam Savage, Mythbusters

[Shane Ross]

This comes from the HDFORINDIES.com FAQ:

https://www.hdforindies.com/2005/05/hd-for-indies-frequently-asked

Editing Uncompressed HD – What’s required?

DO YOU WANT TO DO UNCOMPRESED HD? Then you need very fast storage, on the order of 200 MB/sec for 1080i work. If you’re just doing 720p24 work, you can get by with under 80 MB/sec under certain circumstances, carefully prepped, etc. etc. disclaimer disclaimer. Read up on SATA RAID (using the Google bar at top of page), I’ve written tons on this stuff. SATA cards from Sonnet, Firmtek, Highpoint (beware that one for now!) and others coming to market make it possible to do uncompressed HD work, albeit with RAID 0, which means if any one drive fails the whole RAID volume goes down with it. But it’s cheap, in the $1-$2/GB range. Fault tolerant storage is out there and works, but is much more expensive – see Apple’s XServe RAID, and products from Huge and Medea. These solutions are in the $4-$8/GB range. Again, I’ve written extensively on the blog before about these issues.

You will need a RAID capable of sustained 200MB/s. It would be good to get one that has some wiggle room, like at least 250MB/s so that you are ensured not to drop frames. This is only for 1 or two streams of video. For more you need more. A 10-drive RAID stripe can get you 450MB/s and many streams of uncompressed HD for good realtime playback.

Shane

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[Earthworm]

An inexpensive solution for capturing 1080i Uncompressed 8-bit 4:2:2 is to use a 4-bay external eSATA chassis. We use Firmtek’s (about $500). You have to also purchase a PCI-X card to connect to your system (about $120). The chassis doesnt come with drives so you populate them on your own (which tends to be cheaper anyway) but after you populate it and stripe the drives RAID 0 you can capture uncompressed 1080i 8bit 4:2:2. Another benefit is the drives are easily swappable so you can put your RAID 0 striped drives aside and use the chassis for other drives when switching between projects.
I haven’t tried 4:4:4 uncompressed nor 4:2:2 10bit yet but I’ve been told you can do it with two of these chassis and cards all striped together RAID 0.

This isn’t the best solution but it works and is much less expensive than most other setups I’ve looked at.

[Nikolas T]

Tony,

I think you are talking about the enclosure needs four individual eSATA cable to hook up four HDD. It may be inexpensive but you’ll need at least 8 drives to edit 10 bit uncompressed HD. Because eSATA connector is bit sensitive, It’s big hastle dealing with 4 or 8 cables.

I’ve been using CalDigit S2VR HD for 10 bit 1080/59.94i editing for 3 months now. And it’s the only external SATA storage that supports 10 bit HD as long as I know. And it’s 100% Mac Pro compatible too.

I think field proven reliability and single vendor support worth much more than saving penny by trying to build inexpensive SATA storage.

[Earthworm]

I checked out the CalDigit RAID. Looks great and definitely worth the money.
The only reason i brought up the Firmtek is because it works well for 8bit 1080 and is inexpensive. I use them just because we already had some and all we needed was 8bit at the time. I agree, having 8 of those eSATA cables would be a hassle, it still beats a $5000-$10000 RAID.

Thanks for the info. I’ll definitely consider it when I need uncompressed 10bit HD.

[Gary Adcock]

[Tony Alznauer] “I haven’t tried 4:4:4 uncompressed nor 4:2:2 10bit yet but I’ve been told you can do it with two of these chassis and cards all striped together RAID 0.”

But you have no protection should one of those non warranted products dies on you. –
At Raid 0 EVERYTHING would be lost if something happens to your homemade array.

gary adcock
Studio37
HD & Film Consultation
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