Alex Gerulaitis
Forum Replies Created
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[Brandon Davidson] “On the 3 drive raid 5, I’m not very familiar with hard drives and how they work except that a raid is supposed to be redundant to help not lose data. Is there a different setup you might recommend?”
One of the most popular configuration for After Effects consists of two volumes:
– (1) an SSD for OS and apps, with a folder dedicated to After Effects CS6 Global Performance Cache
– (2) a media volume (single drive, RAID0, 1 or 5) for, well, media.A 3-drive RAID5 may be OK but isn’t optimal – in terms of both performance and usable capacity. RAID5 setups usually start at 4 drives. I’d look into RAID1 for redundancy or RAID0 for performance if regular backups to external drives are a possibility.
I haven’t yet researched those Envy desktops yet – but from the many years working with HP servers and workstations, I know they don’t offer all possible (and sometimes necessary) configurations so you just have to get what you can, and then add the necessary items yourself. My business is basically built on the fact that HP, being the enterprise behemoth they are, just aren’t flexible enough to offer the right configurations for video editing.
HP Envy Phoenix desktops seem to have three drive and two optical bays limiting your storage configuration. The easiest option is then to choose a 256GB SSD as the primary drive, and two 3TB drives configured either in RAID1 or RAID0.
If you’re up to a little tinkering, you could install one more drive into the available optical bay.
Hope this helps.
Alex Gerulaitis
Systems Engineer
DV411 – Los Angeles, CA -
[Tom Daigon] “At this point, in my experience, all reports of Mac malware and viruses are theoretical at best.”
Word. The hundreds of thousands of infected Mac users can now relax about the dangers that Sophos and Kaspersky were touting. Word.
[Tom Daigon] “Usually propagated by PC folks who hate to hear how easy it is to use Mac without the need of installing anti virus or anti malware programs.”
Among those – Kaspersky, Sophos, McAfee, other security researchers. Oh, and Apple, too. Weird! 🙂
Alex Gerulaitis
Systems Engineer
DV411 – Los Angeles, CA -
To be honest, it doesn’t do it for me. I’d love to hear more of a “broadcast engineer” perspective on it, and was hoping to hear from Todd, as I am sure he has a thing or two to say about it, but may be bound by Adobe’s partnerships.
For one, desktop monitoring doesn’t lock in the frame rate. If your video is 24fps, can you be sure it’s shown as such on the desktop? If not, how is it “broadcast quality”? Can you be sure the video is not scaled and is true pixel-to-pixel? … and so on…
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[Brandon Davidson] “HP ENVY Phoenix h9-1440t Desktop PC”
I haven’t worked with Envy desktops but they look like a good buy, especially that they come with a 2-year warranty. Not sure if that 3-drive RAID5 is a good idea – but then again, I haven’t worked with it.
How’s HP’s return policy on these systems? Perhaps you could get one, test the heck out of it and see if you’re happy?
If you end up getting one, please share your findings – I am very curious how it holds up.
Alex Gerulaitis
Systems Engineer
DV411 – Los Angeles, CA -
Todd,
Would you be willing to pinpoint scenarios where a dedicated video I/O card would be preferable to a graphics card / CS output, for monitoring purposes?
The video quality difference that I saw (and mentioned above), is it something inherent to the graphics card output? Or was it just a fluke in my testing?
Thanks.
Alex Gerulaitis
Systems Engineer
DV411 – Los Angeles, CA -
When playing back HD material via a graphics card in CS6, I observed tearing and fuzziness in the picture even when set to full resolution playback. That fuzziness and tearing wasn’t there when the same video was played back via a BMD card. So it seems to me that monitoring via a graphics card isn’t quite the true video you could get out of a dedicated video I/O card. Or was it just me?
Alex Gerulaitis
Systems Engineer
DV411 – Los Angeles, CA -
The first thing to do (usually) is to check what’s going on with the system when that lagging starts happening: disk or CPU activity, large memory footprint, and what’s causing it, which processes. Possibly Premiere Pro starts something in the background, or there is some other system process that slows down the system or causing issues.
Alex Gerulaitis
Systems Engineer
DV411 – Los Angeles, CA -
in addition to what Rainer and Mike said:
The choice of the RAID controller heavily depends on what your hard disk configuration is or will be, performance goals, future expansion plans. It’s possible you do not need a dedicated RAID controller if, for example, you only need RAID0 on up to six drives, or may be OK with the performance and limitations of on-board RAID5 controllers that exist on some systems.
If you only plan to stripe four internal drives in RAID0, you do not need a RAID controller – use the OS striping functionality.
If you need to add SATA ports to your system, there is no need to buy a $400 SAS HBA either. Here is Addonics ADMSGPX2 that adds four ports for $55 (plus a $29 cable):
https://www.addonics.com/products/adms6gpx2.php
Alex Gerulaitis
Systems Engineer
DV411 – Los Angeles, CA -
Good point about image headers and metadata, Sareesh.
Most “unpacked” file formats (if not all) that don’t evenly fit with 8-bit boundaries, are “padded” to those boundaries, i.e. there’s a good possibility a 30-bit (3x 10-bit) DPX pixel does take 32 bits.
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[Tim Jones] “AJA System test reports 1664MB/sec write, 1821MB/sec read on my array drive”
Strange numbers for a 4-drive array with Windows striping – I’d expect them to be in the 500-600MB/s range.
You didn’t say: fresh Windows install? Fully patched? CS6 updated? Tried running AE from a different user account? Playback and rendering in Premiere Pro?