Alan Okey
5
COW Coins
2
DaVinci Coins
Forum Replies Created
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[Nicholastoth] “i was wondering if it would be intelligent to:
Raid 2 drives together for the main OS, mirrored to a backup drive. And run windows off a 10k Raptor.”
First of all, read about RAID terminology. There’s plenty of good information out there about RAID – educate yourself before you go any further.
Striping (RAID 0) spans data across two or more disks simultaneously to increase read/write speeds.
Mirroring (RAID 1) duplicates the same data on two volumes for redundancy in case one drive goes bad.
Higher level RAID numbers combine striping and data parity to deliver increased throughput as well as redundancy.
FYI: disks or partitions in a striped set need to be the same size. Disks, partitions or volumes in a mirrored pair need to be the same size.
It sounds like you are asking about using a striped disk pair (RAID 0) mirrored to a third drive (RAID 1) for your OS volume. This could work in theory, but I don’t think it would be optimal to mirror a striped volume to a single drive. Read/write speed in such a configuration is most likely limited to the speed of the single drive in the mirror, negating the speed benefit of using a striped set.
You’re probably more concerned with fast reads from an OS volume than fast writes, so you could configure two drives in a mirror (RAID 1) and select the “enable striped reads” option. This would allow you to benefit from both faster read access and redundancy, although write speed to a RAID 1 volume suffers a slight speed penalty compared to write speed to a non-RAID volume.
RAID 10 (two mirrored volumes striped together, needs a minimum of 4 disks) would ordinarily be a good option, but not in your case. Boot Camp won’t work on OS X RAID partitions, so you’re stuck with needing a single internal drive for Windows.
You could set up RAID 10 if you had three internal drives plus one external drive for OS X and a fourth internal drive for Windows.
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Sorry, duplicate post – please delete.
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[Rick Brown] “I am sitting here with ONE computer station, some editing and effects software, a couple of DV cameras, some audio and lighting bits and a scanner.”
[Rick Brown] “If I want to do some videos and tv commercials, edit some movies/ programs for broadcast, how much STUFF do I really need?”
I would be less concerned with how much “stuff” you need and more concerned with in which area you would prefer to concentrate. The odds that you have the time, money, skill and talent to be a first-class salesman, producer, director, DP, audio field recording engineer, editor, colorist, motion graphics artist and audio mix engineer are incredibly slim. If you want to produce television commericals of any real quality, I would highly recommend partnering with some other talented people in your area with whom you can work. Before you even talk about gear, you should first decide in which aspect of the business you would most like to specialize.
As for the gear, many of the respective jobs listed above have a wide gamut of tools required for various levels of production, ranging from just-adequate bare bones setups to comprehensive packages. Since you are posting to the Final Cut Pro forum, I will assume that editing is your intended niche.
Forget about lights and cameras and production gear – hire talented specialists in those areas and rent the gear. As for your editing system, if you are planning on doing broadcast-quality commerical work, you may want to invest in a good set of hardware scopes, or at least a dedicated PC with realtime scope software (the name of which eludes me at the moment). You can’t risk delivering an out of spec product to a client if you want to get hired again. You already mentioned the broadcast monitor, but you should also consider a good set of nearfield or midfield audio monitors. Even if you aren’t planning on doing final audio sweetening/mixing yourself, you will need a decent client monitoring system in order to best represent your work for client approvals.
I’m not sure if video editing is currently a hobby for you or if you aspire to be doing it full-time professionally, but in either case the bad news is that there aren’t many other hobbies/career paths that call for a greater financial investment in setting yourself up. Airplane pilot, race car driver, yacht captain and corporate robber baron come to mind, but it’s a relatively short list compared with other occupations. The good news is, the equipment is all much cheaper than it was 10 or even 5 years ago, especially in postproduction.
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I think it’s accurate to say that it’s easier to grow upwards with Final Cut Pro than with Avid. With FCP, you can simply add new hardware to work with higher end formats, while the software remains the same. Avid limits its software to operate within predefined price levels, so if you want to move up to a higher end format (i.e. DV to uncompressed HD) then you must upgrade to a whole new Avid hardware/software system. Two different approaches by two different companies, just ask yourself which makes more sense to you.
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Fibre Channel isn’t going away, and here’s why:
Enterprise storage.
The number of Fibre Channel installations used by video post facilities pales in comparison to that of major IT installations for big businesses. Ask an enterprise IT manager if Fibre Channel is dead, and he’d laugh in your face.
The reason SATA/SAS options are so popular is for one reason only: price.
Fibre Channel is currently the only point-to-point storage connection protocol (non-IP based) that supports the use of fiber optic cable, which is a dealbreaker when you want your storage located more than a few meters away from your CPU.
Fibre Channel also isn’t standing still. 8Gbit Fibre Channel is currently in the process of being ratified. In short, you have nothing to worry about if you invest in Fibre Channel storage today.
Plenty of info here:
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[Shane Ross] “But because that monitor was discontinued, and is a GREAT monitor ($5000 new, BTW) that is a great price.”
Actually, you could get the PVM-20L5/1 new from B&H for right around $3K back when they still had stock.
It’s funny, but the 20L5 has actually appreciated in value since its discontinuation. You can find them selling on eBay selling for $4500 or more.
Crazy.
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[David Roth Weiss] “Your entire online/offline “diatribe” is irrelevant to the conversation”
If two short paragraphs constitutes a “diatribe,” then you must have a very, very short attention span.
I wrote about offline editing because the term appeared in both the original poster’s thread title and in the post itself. While he did not explicitly say so, I took his reference to mean that he might have thought that he needed to do an offline/proxy edit of the HD material on his lower spec editing system. If I misunderstood, then your delicate sensibilities will just have to deal with it.
As to what constitutes a germaine” discussion in a public forum, who appointed you Holy Lord of Forum Content? You’re not even listed as a moderator of this forum. Get over yourself.
Your initial response to the poster was condescending and unhelpful.
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[carrcs] “My self-proclaimed ignorance on the topic of offline editing techniques puts me in the same boat as the aforementioned professional editors before they LEARNED. It’s my understanding that posting here gives one an opportunity to do just that- learn, so that he or she may then pass the knowledge along to another neophytes rather than criticizing them for not paying to have it done.”
Outstanding response to a stupid comment.
David, many newer editors have not learned the legacy offline/online technique of editing because today’s hardware and acquisition formats frequently make the offline process irrelevant. Offlining may still be useful in certain situations, i.e. editing on laptops, editing long form projects where there is a ton of footage to review or editing HD projects where working with proxy footage speeds up cutting. Outside of high end broadcast or commerical work, the bulk of projects these days are being shot on DV or HDV.
The days of Betacam SP, SCSI RAIDs and ridiculously priced AVID systems for SD work are behind us. Budgets are getting smaller, and people are expecting more. Cheaper, faster, smarter is today’s reality. That does not necessarily preclude high quality, as long as care is taken along the way. Bob Zelin has made some great posts recently regarding the current state of the industry – I encourage you to read them.
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Sorry, I just read the recent post regarding the Imagineer Systems forum not meeting minimum traffic requirements.
However, that doesn’t explain the inability to search archives of the forum, or the disappearance of recent posts regarding product specials…
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[BrianT] “SETTINGS: Mac OSX 10.4.9, drives are checked to ‘put hard drives to sleep when possible'”
That’s your problem right there. You DON’T want your drives to go to sleep, which is why you hear them spinning down and why you have to wait for them to spin up when accessing them.
Uncheck the “put hard drives to sleep when possible” box. Honestly, the constant spinup/spindown cycles that your drives are currently going through will probably cause them more wear in the long run than letting them run constantly.