[Alex Udell]

Adam…

this was a really cool way to do a review. I really enjoyed how you put in context as opposed to a typical laundry list of yes and no.

thanks for this!

Alex

Alex Udell
Editing, Motion Graphics, and Visual FX
Chumney & Assoc. Advertising

[Alex Udell]

Out of curiosity, have you tried any other flavors of media PPro supports on the SAN besides media from P2? I just want to know that it’s specific to P2.

Alex

[Alex Udell]

Here’s the Thread:

”
Re: Premiere Pro CS5 stable enough for long-form documentary?
by Todd Kopriva on Jan 3, 2011 at 8:26:27 pm

> The ONE problem I have with PPro is that when your project has a lot of footage in it (even just 10 hours), it takes a long time to load (5 to 15 minutes) and if you click off the program to check email and the click back on to edit, there is often a delay of a minute or two while the project reloads. Now, I have only 8GB of RAM so it’s possible this delay time would go away if I upped my RAM, but I don’t know and I do know that FCP does not have this problem.

It sounds like you don’t have quite enough RAM for both Premiere Pro and your other applications to be running simultaneously. I am guessing that what is happening is that the contents of the RAM are being swapped to the hard disk so that the email program (or whatever) can load its information into RAM; then, when you switch back, the Premiere Pro data has to be read back into RAM from the hard disk. This can be greatly slowed down by virus-protection/security software that aggressively checks each write operation.

So, what might help? Getting more RAM is the obvious first suggestion. Turning off your anti-virus software is another option (though be careful if this computer is connected to the Internet at the time!). Another option—and I know that this is going to sound counterintuitive—is to reserve more RAM for other applications in the Memory preferences. By telling Premiere Pro to not use quite so much RAM, you’d make it so that the email program (or whatever) has enough RAM to itself already, so the OS won’t be forced to swap RAM contents to the hard disk to switch contexts to the email program.

Oh, and be sure to install the recent updates. There are a lot of performance and stability improvements in the recent updates.

———————————————————————————————————
Todd Kopriva, Adobe Systems Incorporated
Technical Support for professional video software
After Effects Help & Support
Premiere Pro Help & Support”

[Alex Udell]

Hi Corey…

I made that comment before I knew you were using Facilis. As Direct attached fibre virtual volumes there’s no metadata controller in the picture here. These should be seen and perform just like local drives. So that leaves me scratching my head a bit.

You describe the problem as “when you jump out of premiere and then back in again.” so this is more like when switching applications? Not dropping frames once playback has started.

Check memory prefs of Premeiere….it may be hogging all your ram…so when you switch out and then switch back again your doing a disk swap of huge chunks of ram just to bring the app to the foreground again. This is due to the 64 bit architecture of the app. There was a thread on the cow on this, but I can’t seem to find it.

Please let me know what you find.

Alex

[Alex Udell]

OK…

I was using a Facilis, but all fibre, no ethernet.

Are you experiencing the problem on fibre attached clients or ether attached clients?

or both?

Alex

[Alex Udell]

I have used PPro on a SAN.

We had some volumes on the SAN set up as Libraries for common elements of video and audio. These were typically set up as “READ ONLY” so that people wouldn’t accidentally delete things that other were dependent on in the library.

Our workflow was project based.
So a producer would create a project and offline the edit and then the online editor would pick up the volume and complete the edit. In this instance we decided that the Projects would live on the SAN and we set Premiere up to create the media caches “Same as Project.”

We were doing this on the PC so we had the a minor issue of driver letter path assignments not always matching up when we moved a volume from one workstation to another. The mac shouldn’t have that issue at all.

So I guess the best way to look at it is as how to organize the Media Data as the center and how the various projects interact with that data. We worked in a serial fashion. Project Specific media was paired with the projects, common media was externally referenced.

You could, for example, make general libraries for common media elements.

then you could have media by project or by format.

then you could create volumes per project, set the media caches pref, per project, but the project files would import media from the other two volumes into that project.

All of the above living on the SAN so it’s always accessible from any station you choose to work at.

Of course, some of the lower level concern is about how robust the SAN is, how you set up your spindle groups so you don’t drop frames, things like that.

Happy to chat more about it if I can be of some assistance.

Alex

[Alex Udell]

Here is my guess…the SAN you are using is based on a metadata controller that uses ethernet connectivity and video stream playback topology that uses your 8gb fibre topology.

when you make a request to play clip on the SAN, that request goes thru the Metadata controller (MDC)…i.e. ethernet to queue the playback over the fibre.

with normal media this is fine…because the clip is at worst broken into video and audio separately.

with P2 media, the file and all it’s metadata is spread across multiple folders from the folder structure of the P2 media. therefore everytime you make a request, the MDC has to navigate the complete folder structure, to compile the clip essences, this is likely the source of the delay…mind you this is merely an educated guess.

The only likely solution I see is that you develop a workflow system to transcode media to a normal media file container on the way to placing it on the SAN from P2 and prior to importing into Premiere. While this negates PPro’s powerful native playback, it will smooth things out as you leave media in place on the SAN and pass projects to different editors.

Imagine products might have something that will help you with that. Or you might look and see if you can set up something with Adobe media encoder.

does that help?

Alex

[Alex Udell]

Sorry…I know what a SAN is….

I meant what kind of SAN.

I used both Facilis and SAN MP.

Is it all Fibre or Fibre/Ether combo?

Alex

[Alex Udell]

Corey,

What SAN?

Alex

[Alex Udell]

How complex of edits are we talking about? News docu style or multi-layer fx heavy stuff?

Alex