Alex Gerulaitis
Forum Replies Created
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$1200 is a bit low for a decent Premiere Pro CS5 system with GPU acceleration: it must have one of the supported NVidia GPUs, or least one that has to be “hacked” for it, and the power supply must have enough juice to support such a GPU. The least expensive officially supported GPU is GTX-470, street price around $280; power supplies that support it – $100. Dell Studio desktops can’t support those cards.
If you look at integrated systems with GTX-470 included, they start at $1600 for base configurations (no monitors, no 2nd HDDs).
Without GPU acceleration, $1200 will get you a decent configuration with 8GB RAM and a mid-range CPU, but don’t expect it to be optimized for Premiere Pro performance.
Alex (DV411)
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7200rpm, the larger the buffer size the better – if you can spring for the enterprise class drives (70-100% more money) – go for them.
In my own limited testing, I found that 2TB Black Caviars were the fastest and the most reliable among desktop drives – at 140MB/s r/w rates individually, with fast benchmarks in various RAID levels as well.
Alex (DV411)
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[Lindsay Simpson] ”
https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/598248-REG/Blackmagic_Design_BDLKSDI_DeckLink_SDI_PCI_Express.htmlWould this or something like it allow for capture?”
Not analog sources – that card is for digital only. Among Decklink cards, Decklink Studio is the one that does both digital and component analog.
As Steve Brame suggested, MXO2 Mini, Intensity Pro and Intensity Shuttle will also work (and are less expensive) if you don’t need SDI or XLR.
[Lindsay Simpson] “We are looking at getting a new tower to run the new system, but are considering reusing our Avid tower if possible which would definitely require hardware like the above. Is there a new tower that might include the A/D converter built in? Any recommendations?”
Either option will work. You can equip your existing system with Decklink Studio or a similar option, or you can order a tower from a systems integrator that already has it built-in.
Alex (DV411)
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John, what is the preset you are using, exactly? Please check the preset settings: video resolution, fps, target and max encoding rate.
Bottom line, Pr/AME standard YouTube preset should not produce huge files – at its target bitrate of 6Mbit/s, a 10 minute video should be around 450MB if my calculations are correct.
I just checked my Pr (and AME) CS5 and the only Youtube preset I could find was H.264/YouTube WideScreen HD and it’s 1-pass 720p24 with 6/9Mbs target/max bitrate.
Did I miss a 1080p one? If not, I’d change the standard preset to 1920×1080 2-pass leaving other settings intact. If your video is relatively complex (amount of detail, scene changing and motion), I’d change the max rate to 12MBit/s. The encoded 10-minute file should be between 450MB and about 1GB.
(3 Mbit/s has been the optimal 720p30 bitrate on the average for me in 2009; 1080p is roughly twice the bandwidth; I’d shoot for 6 Mbit/s target and 12Mbit/s max bit-rate.)
Alex (DV411)
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[Ricardo Reyes] “Which USB 3.0 card do you recommend? I could never turn away a challenge. =)”
Way to go! 🙂
That’s a great question. I could never properly test the cards I had (like https://www1.hp.com/wwpc/us/en/sm/WF06c/A10-51210-332469-3965933-332469-4144076-4144077-4144079.html“>HP USB 3.0 SuperSpeed PCIe x1 Card (BM867AA)) because I never had a USB 3.0 device that’s fast enough. Nor could I find any reviews that properly benchmarked any USB 3.0 cards.
So I don’t have a recommendation other than using a PCIe adapter with more than one lane. There is Asus U3S6, that I haven’t tried yet. It’s a PCIe 2.0 4x combo of 6G eSATA and USB 3.0 and should get close to 400MB/s in DMA transfers. I have it if you are in the area and would like to borrow it.
Alex (DV411)
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If you start with an 8-bay system, populate it with 4 drives and need to add 2 or 4 more drives down the road – you do not need to re-format it when you use a decent controller (like the ATTO and Areca ones I mentioned) that supports online volume expansion.
FYI, any single spinning drive drops to about 50% of its performance when full or heavily fragmented.
RAID10 is generally faster than RAID5 or 6. RAID6 is one of the safest RAID levels – but only makes sense on 5+ drives.
It all depending on drives, controller, desired performance and features.
MiniSAS is the fastest DAS (Direct Attached Storage) technology for the moment – and it’s relatively cheap. A single 3G MiniSAS connection has a theoretical throughput of 12Gbit/s, 6G – 24Gbit/s. It’s way fast.
Alex (DV411)
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[Tylor Larson] “I’m doing research on building my first raid. I need to build one that has expansion space for more drive.. i need to start small and expand later with more drives”
How many drives do you want to start with, how many – to expand later to, and what is the initial budget?
eSATA tin cans (as Bob Zelin put it) – 4-drive boxes – from $150 to $500. Max speed you will get out of them in RAID5 – around 250MB/s – more likely it’ll be around 200MB/s when empty, down to 100MB/s when full.
Cineraid has a super-cool looking 4-bay box with multiple RAID levels (incl 5) and USB 3.0 and eSATA ports for only $230 SRP. They say it’s for “Data backup, Home/small office Photo/Audio libraries, Light photo, SD or compressed HD editing” – which I take means – don’t use it for anything heavy duty. I’d love to test it out though to see how it performs in RAID0 over USB 3.0. It might do 400MB/s!
What you probably really want is an 8-bay 6G SAS/SATA box and the right RAID HBA for it.
Decent quality 8-bay boxes like Stardom ST8-U5 SOHOTANK, iStoragePro (Ci Design) iT8SAE6G, Cineraid EditPRO are $600-1500 without drives. A good 6G SAS/SATA RAID controller – $700-950 (I vouch for Areca and ATTO). Add drives and you are all set.
The more expensive “expander type” of these boxes like iT8SAE6G (about $1500) will allow you to hook up additional enclosures and thus add more drives to the same controller. Can’t do that with non-expander boxes like ST8-U5. Speeds – 700MB/s in RAID5/6, possibly more.
Alex (DV411)
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Christopher,
Where are you located?
Do you already have a SAN switch and a metadata controller?
If so, it’s a matter of choosing any decent (optimized for latency and bandwidth) Fibre Optical storage system (Promise, Caen, JMR, etc.), i.e. it doesn’t have to be one of the systems you listed.
Alex (DV411)
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If this is not religious (grin), you can run robocopy from Win7 VM (Parallels or Fusion). I am sure though there is a Unix shell command in OSX that has a similar functionality to robocopy.
Alex (DV411)