Alex Gerulaitis
Forum Replies Created
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[Joakim Vrangum] “My VCR only has RCA (for audio) and SCART out.
Am I right in thinking that the way to get the best quality possible would be to get a Scart-to-COMPONENT cable, and connect this to the COMPONENT IN (wire 7,8 & 9) on my card? I also assume I need adapters to connect to the BNC ends?”You’re right that component has the best analog quality, but it’s unlikely a consumer VHS player will have component out; S-Video at best.
Alex Gerulaitis
Systems Integrator
DV411 – Los Angeles, CA -
Second Ryan’s recommendation for Quadro 4000. It’s in fact the only currently sold nVidia card supported by both Adobe and Apple. It’ll work on any Intel Mac Pro (including 2008) but AFAIK must run OS X 10.6 or later.
[Steven Belcher] “We’re considering adding a supported NVIDIA card to our MacPro in addition to our ATI Radeon HD 5770”
Not sure it’s possible; could anyone confirm? Shouldn’t the nVidia card be the primary one for GPU accel to work?
Alex Gerulaitis
Systems Integrator
DV411 – Los Angeles, CA -
[Alex Gerulaitis] “Neither FC nor iSCSI define SAN. They actually have nothing to do with it.”
Technically that’s not correct: iSCSI is a “SAN” protocol although, like FC, it’s purely block-level access, and only allows direct one-on-one relationships. Nothing is shared until file-level locking is implemented.
The reason I say “technically” is because among creative professionals, SAN often equals “sharing”. Since iSCSI or FC are not shared storage solutions by themselves (without that secret sauce) – they don’t quite qualify as SANs for our purposes.
I hope I didn’t confuse the bejesus out of you… 🙂
Alex Gerulaitis
Systems Integrator
DV411 – Los Angeles, CA -
[Tom Elgin] “I also came across a device called a data router. It appears as if it is some type of “protocol converter”, because it allows you to connect a SCSI device to an FC device in a SAN. So, if I understand it correctly, you can initiate via an IP network, but the storage array can be in a FC SAN. Does that sound right?”
Let’s forget about about the “AN” part of “SAN” for a second.
SAS, FC, iSCSI devices are all the same in one respect: they are SCSI devices. They can’t be shared without a secret sharing sauce that Bob Zelin is about to trade you for your Cisco CLI secret sauce.
Neither FC nor iSCSI define SAN. They actually have nothing to do with it. They just happened to have some properties that make them a good fit for SAN (the “AN” part – the networking and sharing part). Assume that an FC device or an iSCSI device is just a target storage device, much like a simple SATA hard disk. To share it, you have to use some sort of a layer on of it top that would allow concurrent processes to have their ways to access data, without data corruption. That layer can be SAN (management software on each client, possibly a lightweight server) or NAS (file serving OS right on top of that target storage device).
Once we establish that, the data router you mentioned becomes simply a protocol converter (with routing capabilities), like, say, e.g. from SCSI over IP to SCSI over FC and back. It has nothing to do with SAN, although, like iSCSI and FC, it can be integrated to be a part of it.
Alex Gerulaitis
Systems Integrator
DV411 – Los Angeles, CA -
[Tom Elgin] “I never came across anything that definitively said it was both a physical spec, as well as a spec for how data was transferred. “
Tom, was the Wikipedia article on SCSI confusing? It seems to say that right off the bat.
Alex Gerulaitis
Systems Integrator
DV411 – Los Angeles, CA -
[Tom Elgin] “In a SAN, devices are identified by their WWN.”
I don’t believe that’s the case. WWN is used in Fibre Channel, ATA, SAS. In themselves, those aren’t SANs.
[Tom Elgin] “So, how does an IP host communicate with a server in a SAN, when the server doesn’t speak IP?”
You could also ask, “how does an IP host communicate with a hard disk on a server when the hard disk doesn’t speak IP”?
That’s what the server OS is for, and in case of SAN, a SAN management system.
SAN is a marriage of storage devices with a mechanism to allow shared access to them on a client side. (NAS and file servers – on a server side.) That mechanism is the one responsible for translating file access requests to storage I/O and back, and carry that I/O over the network. In case of iSCSI, file access requests are translated to SCSI I/O and carried over the network, and specifically, translates IP and IQN addresses to each other.
For the record, IP (TCP/IP) is not required for SAN – it can be any other networking protocol. IP just happens to be so ubiquitous, it’s nearly a synonym of “networking”.
Does this help?
Alex Gerulaitis
Systems Integrator
DV411 – Los Angeles, CA -
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[Tom Elgin] “Does the SCSI protocol have anything to do with SCSI drives? If so, in what respect?”
SCSI “…is a set of standards for physically connecting and transferring data between computers and peripheral devices”, mostly hard drives. So there is a direct link between SCSI as a standard, and SCSI hard drives.
SCSI in its parallel form (SCSI-1, Fast-, Wide-, Ultra-SCSI, etc.) is largely extinct, replaced by SAS (Serial Attached SCSI).
Alex Gerulaitis
Systems Integrator
DV411 – Los Angeles, CA -
[Bob Zelin] ” I am sure that you are a very nice guy, but your company is run by morons, just like many companies, that would rather waste money, than hire the right people to do the job, and get their purchase working properly.”
Bob, something in your coffee today?
The above sounds rather uncalled for given how little we know of that gentleman’s company.
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Like Shane said, it’s either the data rate, the complexity (CPU load) or both.
30MB/s is still roughly 10 times faster than you video datarate, so that alone doesn’t explain it, even with dual streams.
To eliminate that possibility (of the media drive being too slow), you could place the clips on your boot drive (probably faster even if it’s 5400rpm – benchmarked it?) and test from there.
What’s your CPU usage during the tests?
I’d try to simplify the test to death before purchasing anything. Although PATA drives should be on a 5-mile restraining order against approaching CS5+ editing systems. To simplify the test and zero down on the actual culprit, use really short clips, trash Pr preferences, try different transitions and effects…
Alex Gerulaitis
Systems Integrator
DV411 – Los Angeles, CA