Alex Gerulaitis
Forum Replies Created
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[Andy Kreutzberg] “Does a super-expensive quadro or tesla system actually make sense for AE and Media Encoder or is that just a waste of money because the programs don’t make use of the card(s)?”
They do make use of the cards (in certain tasks – follow Todd’s links for more info) – however purely on BFTB ratio GeForce cards win (GTX-660 Ti, 670, etc.). In other words, no need to get Teslas or Quadros for CS purposes.
i7 systems wins on BFTB as well, over Xeon-based ones. It’s when you’re hitting the performance ceiling, memory and PCIe lanes limitations inherent with i7, and/or need enterprise class support, you’d want to consider Xeon-based single or dual socket systems, be it DIY, customs (Boxx, Promax) or Tier 1 (HP, Dell).
Alex Gerulaitis
Systems Engineer
DV411 – Los Angeles, CA -
I believe only the OP (and maybe a moderator) has the option of “kudos” and “solution”.
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I hope good folks from Small Tree will chime in if I badly put a foot in my mouth… The only turnkey shared storage solution I see on their site is GraniteSTOR Titanium4 and supports sharing out of the box with four GbE ports. Very cool product. All the other products under “storage” seem to be DAS (direct-attached storage) boxes that aren’t shared storage out of the box – they still need that NAS component to make it so.
I believe Small Tree’s specialty that made them famous (and hopefully rich) is networking equipment – switches, cards, I/O modules and their drivers – optimized for high bandwidth low latency applications like collaborative video editing.
GB Labs products on the other hand are all shared storage solutions – video-optimized NAS servers. They do nothing else.
Alex Gerulaitis
Systems Engineer
DV411 – Los Angeles, CA -
I’ll be working at slomo.tv booth SL14205, please say “hi” if you happen to be in the vicinity.
Totally up for a meet up after the show.
Possible venues:
– our booth (beer served) Tue or Wed at the end of the show. Must “moo” or no beer.
– good micro-brewery? Any recommendations? (Too bad Holy Cow Brewery closed). -
Tom,
Have you (or anyone else) tried to set affinity on the qt32 process in task manager? That’s a way to limit the virtual cores the process is using without changing anything in BIOS.
Alex Gerulaitis
Systems Engineer
DV411 – Los Angeles, CA -
[Alex Vargas] “My boot drive would be the Accelsior E2 PCIe card (please refer to links on the original post) at much higher speeds than SATA II allows”
The SATA II limitation only applies to drives connected directly to Mac Pro SATA ports. None of your drives will be. In addition, even if they were, the limitation is only for individual links, not aggregated for multiple SATA connections. Bottom line, nothing to worry about here. 🙂
[Alex Vargas] “will all this work out to be faster and stable with FCP7? Or are there any known incompatibilities? “
I don’t know whether and how does FCP7 handle raw BMD CNG files… Does it do it well? Other than that, and purely on the storage side, I can’t think of any potential problems except heat and serviceability.
Heat: those are fast drives and having six of them in a chassis not designed to handle that many drives may cause heat build up.
Serviceability: having them all internally means (1) not being able to see individual activity lights, (2) needing to open the tower to access the drives. What it means is that it may be a bear to determine which drive failed and needs replacement if it happened to fail. With external storage towers, it’s easy. This is why I always try to find the budget (and space) for an external storage box even if the budget (and space) is tight.
Alex Gerulaitis
Systems Engineer
DV411 – Los Angeles, CA -
[Ryan Holmes] “Your question seems to be more with Adobe’s rendering of color space, pixel mapping, etc. than with a video card.”
My question was more, what are the good reasons to use a video I/O card with Premiere Pro.
If Pr computer monitoring is: (1) not color accurate, (2) not frame accurate, and (3) scaled – that’s three good reasons for it, which answers the OP’s question.
Alex Gerulaitis
Systems Engineer
DV411 – Los Angeles, CA -
[Walter Soyka] “Premiere Pro is not color-managed, so accuracy is out.”
Thanks Walter. Would that make a good case for still using a video I/O card for those editors who just want to be sure of the WYSIWYG part of monitoring with Pr?
[Walter Soyka] “Accurate viewing of frame rate will depend at least in part on monitor refresh settings; for most users running at 60 Hz, 24p cannot be perfectly evaluated. There’s no way I know of to accurately monitor interlacing on a computer monitor.”
So we have at least two reasons to use a video I/O card for monitoring in Pr:
1. color accuracy
2. frame rate accuracyIs there a way to force AE to playback at exactly, say, 23.976fps, to a computer monitor? (I am not aware of it.) If not, can we really call AE playback frame accurate? (Video I/O cards can do serve 23.976 up natively and it’s up to the monitor to handle it or not… right?)
It is also my understanding that Pr playback (to a computer monitor) depends on a lot of variables including how the codec handles decoding. I.e. there is no way to be sure that what you see on the computer monitor is actually in the video because:
– the codec may choose to to only serve 1/2 the resolution (the case with some Cineform codecs?),
– the playback mechanism may skip frames without reporting it,
– there is no way to get true 1:1 image (no re-scaling)… ?Would that make it another good reason one would want a video I/O card with Premiere Pro?
Alex Gerulaitis
Systems Engineer
DV411 – Los Angeles, CA -
[Alex Vargas] “4 x 2TB SATA III enterprise drives, plus two more of the same in my optical drive’s empty space.”
Am I hearing you right that you plan to have six of those drives in RAID5 plus hot spare, on R608? (Equivalent to five drives in RAID5.)
I think it’ll give you speeds of around 400MBs (when empty) going down to around 200MB/s at 90% full. This is enough to handle BMD 2.5K raw (about 150MB/s at 30fps if I am not mistaken). What I would change is set the drives up in RAID6 instead – which should increase the speeds a little bit. If my hunch is right, and RAID6 is slightly faster, then you also get the benefit of better redundancy.
HTH.
Alex Gerulaitis
Systems Engineer
DV411 – Los Angeles, CA -
[Matthew Freed] “Do your suggestions have internal controllers? because that would negate the need for a tower, I suppose.”
Yes they do, and you’re right, that makes them portable, “plug-n-play”, compatible with any computer that has the right connectivity (like USB 3.0).