What do I need to make multiclips run smoother on my Mac Pro?

[Jeremy Garchow]

[Zane Barker] “I know of no codec exists that will let you play 16 streams of video from one hard drive.”

Funny you mention that. I have been doing some testing as this thread piqued a bit of interest and I have nothing to do today.

I made some offline rt from SD ProRes HQ with footage I had on my system. I played the offline rt from my desktop and the ProResHQ from my raid. I can play both in 16up multi-clip. The offline rt is much harder to see as the image is so degraded, but it DOES work off of my desktop hard drive.

I then tried it with 16 channels of 720p23.98 ProResHQ and it’s having trouble and that’s coming off of my raid as well so it definitely won’t do it on a slower drive.

SO I guess offline rt would work, just make sure that you have managed your media properly so you can do a conform later on and it looks like shite, but it does work.

Good call, Michael.

Jeremy

[Michael Gossen]

Hmmmm…Sweet validation. I guess it looks like I do get it, huh?

There are elegant technical solutions to let people do what they want creatively. The days when you have to buy new expensive equipment to do what you want are waning, but I guess all that thinking isn’t.

Michael Gossen
Helium Digital Media

[Zane Barker]

[Michael Gossen] “Hmmmm…Sweet validation.”

Did you not see that he said [Jeremy Garchow] “The offline rt is much harder to see as the image is so degraded”

I would hardly call that validation. Even if you are going to take it back to full res later, it is still painful editing at such a low quality.

I would say the it would be best to convert the video into a not so compressed codec and use a cheep 2 disk raid.

Lets also keep in mind how ling it will take to convert or even recapture the video from 16 cameras. If the project has a tight deadline then he will have to invest in a nice raid to get it done on time.

There are no “technical solutions” to your “artistic problems”.
Don’t let technology get in the way of your creativity!

[Jeremy Garchow]

[Michael Gossen] “Hmmmm…Sweet validation. I guess it looks like I do get it, huh? “

Yep. The nice thing about Photo JPEG is that you can just bring the slider up to gain more quality. i had it at approximately 35% as that’s what FCPs offline rt is set to. I bet you could go up to 75% and have a great data rate and a great looking picture without too much hassle. I’d imagine you’d need at least two satas striped together for it. Much better than editing 384×216 or whatever it was I tested. It was pretty bad.

ANother problem with Photo JPEG is no rt effects at all. Considering that and from a media management standpoint and since the the footage is HDV, I’d probably just use the deck to do a down convert to dv and do it that way. 16 streams of dv won’t be too bad. A 2 drive array should do it. After the edit, collapse the multi-clips and media manage to whatever HD codec you want to finish to, cc, mix and master.

Offline rt will most definitely work, but it’d be hard to get through the edit, for me anyway.

It was a good suggestion, Michael. I don’t want to get into any contests here. Business is competitive enough.

Jeremy

[Michael Gossen]

[Zane Barker] “it is still painful editing at such a low quality. “

If it’s a matter of working or not, OfflineRT will do just fine. I have been cutting with it for over 4 years. It works well, it looks crappy compared to anything else, but for a reason (bandwidth). It is low quality, but you can still see what is going on, thats what you need.

That being said, I totally agree the best solution is to have a RAID and cut native and fly through it. I would much rather cut that way and I would suggest if it is affordable to others to do the same. That being said, it is not the only solution. And it doesn’t solve anyones problems to resort to saying they have to go buy something. Again, I like to give people suggestions that let them work.

[Zane Barker] “Lets also keep in mind how ling it will take to convert or even recapture the video from 16 cameras. “

If he started recompressing over night tonight, he could probably be cutting by the morning, most likely earlier than the electronics store opens to buy a couple hard drives, install them, RAID them, transfer the media, re-connect, realize multiclips have reconnection issues, remake the multiclips, and start cutting. Obviously recapturing would be more babysitting, but could also probably be done with a long night of chugging tapes while watching a movie or two.

But as Jeremy said, 16 streams play just fine off one drive, now we know I am not full of 5*!+. Thanks again for the slow day so Jeremy could help. Best of luck Simon.

Michael Gossen
Helium Digital Media

[Scott]

Another possibility.

Split up the clips to different physical drives. Yes, I know this means money, but you can put several clips on each drive and then pull from them.

Even a USB2 portable drive will sustain around 28megs a second. Just a matter of doing the math.

Scott

[Simon Dybeck]

I tried this too. I have 4 drives in the computer and tried splitting it up but there was no difference. I thought that was really odd because I reconnected the different clips to different harddrives but it came out with the same result. I tried restarting FCP but it was still the result in quality and framerate. Why?

[Jeremy Garchow]

[Simon Dybeck] “Why?”

Because single drives don’t have that much power. The speed comes from striping multiple drives together.

Simon, what kind of drives do you have? Are they all internal?

[Simon Dybeck]

i dont know the exact names, but all are internal at 7200rpm

[Jeremy Garchow]

If they are all the same size, it’d be best to back all of them up, then stripe them all together to get a big, fast pool of drives. It will help your 16 stream multicam tremendously.

Jeremy