Chris Gordon
Forum Replies Created
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I’ll just reiterate what Michael has said.
1. This isn’t cheap. Do it right the first time (spend the money) or what you spend will all be wasted and you’ll spending even more when you have to redo things the right way.
2. Get help. There is an entire profession of Storage Architects and Storage Administrators. These professions exist because this stuff can be complex. The various vendors can help design solutions and either have professional services people to do the work or should be able to point you to local consultants to help out. Get designs/quotes from several if you can to help ensure you’re getting a good solution and a good price. -
You’re best off if you can create the logo video at the same settings as your sequence and not have to resize anything.
Also, you mentioned Final Cut express and “text”. Is the logo just simple animated text? Could you do it in LiveType (at the same resolution as your sequence) and bring it in that way?
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Where are you viewing the interlaced output? On a computer monitor or on a video (TV) device?
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Can you clarify exactly what your issue is? Is it just the speed at which files are actually copied? Are these copies to different locations on the same machine or across a network?
You could look at some of the Finder alternatives (like Path Finder), but I’m not sure if any of them will fundamentally be any better than Finder or Bridge — I’ve not used any of them.
I’m fundamentally a UNIX geek, so I do many/most things from the command line. What exactly do you mean that doing things from the command line are “clumsy” or “risky”? I’m not trying to be combative, but just trying to better understand the problem so I can try to help with a solution.
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The important thing, where the rubber meets the road, is if you have the IO performance to do the work you want.
In this specific case, like David said, you’re seeing that eSATA (a 3 Gbps connection with better connections inside the machine) is much faster than Firewire (800 Mbps). You also have a much newer, faster disk in the toaster than I’m guessing are in your FW enclosure. My 2008 MacPro came with a WD blue 7200 RPM disk (WD3200AAJS-41VWA1) as the system disk and I recently (in 2010) added a 1TB 7200 WD Black disk (WD1001FALS-00E8B0). AJA disk test tool shows the older Blue disk getting around 60 MB/sec and the newer Black disk doing about 100 MB/sec.
Now why should you be cautious with this:
1. That disk is physically exposed to the world, including the PCB with the controller chips and such on it. Don’t feel bad when something physically damages it. In the northern hemisphere, winter is upon us with heaters running, drying out the air and everyone getting static shocks — not so nice for the electronics. I’d at least get a decent eSATA enclosure to protect that disk.
2. You have no redundancy with this single drive solution. If (ok, WHEN) that disk has a problem, you’re starting over from your most recent backup (you are backing things up, right?). With RAID0, 5, 6 or 10 you get redundancy to survive a disk failure and keep working (this doesn’t replace backups, though). Typically time is money.
3. Obviously you’re fine with that single disk and the data rate of the files you currently have. I was assuming that at some point you might have files with higher data rate video in them and that rate would be more than a single disk will do.
4. Don’t forget rendering your work at some point. That means you need to read all of those data streams and then write out the result. With one disk, you’ll start to really thrash it doing both the high volumes of reads and writes. You’ll eventually want to spread that work out across more spindles to improve your render times.
5. As disks fill up, their performance goes down. When you fill that drive to 75%, don’t expect it to perform as well as it does at 10% full.Again, if this works for you now then go with it — we all would prefer to have money in our pockets instead of someone else’s — just understand your limitations.
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It’s actually the video card itself that won’t support three displays, not final cut. Otherwise you’re correct — another card (and more $$$) to get the real TV out signal.
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I’m assuming you have one of the video cards that has 2 x display port connections and 1 x DVI. The card only supports 2 displays at a time. Even if the machine knows something is plugged into all three ports, only two will be used.
I’ll also assume you’re doing this only because you want to use the presumably larger TV as a computer display and not for the purpose of an external video display for color grading or seeing the quality that would ultimately be shown on a TV. In the case of your video/graphics card, your TV acts just like another computer monitor and not as a TV. You’ll need a special card to output an actual TV signal (or if it’s all SD, you could go through a camcorder).
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What exactly do you mean by “toaster”? I’m familiar with that as slang for NetApp storage arrays, but I know that’s what you mean. I’m guessing for the “VoyageQ” you’re referring to adapters that allow you to plug a bare drive in.
As for uses, these things are great for archiving (copy data to the disk, put the disk on the shelf in a decent case, periodically spin up the disk and refresh the data). As far as using this for editing, you’re really limited to the performance of the disk you put in there (bandwidth, IOPS, etc). What was the data rate of the files you were testing with? I’m going to guess that any HD files with any appreciable data rate are going to be far more than any single drive is going to service, and you’ll need multiple drive in some kind of stripe set.
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I got curious how this was addressed in the current (2010) Mac Pros and the first PCIe slot (where the vid card normally goes) is a double wide slot. That made me look at my 2008 machine (same as yours). I haven’t cracked the case, but the manual indicates the slot is double wide and looking at the back, I have openings for5 cards, though there are 4 PCIe slots on the motherboard. Short of cracking open my case, I’m pretty sure that card could work AND not take away any of your already occupied slots.
That said, it has 2 Mini Display Port and 1 DVI connector that you can use in any combination of 3. Assuming you have 2 monitors now, you may need to upgrade one (or maybe both) to something with Display Port.
Good luck. I’m curious to hear what you end up doing.
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Just remember you need to periodically spin up the disks on your shelf and verify their content. Besides the somewhat obvious mechanical failures that can occur, magnetic media can and does suffer “bit rot” where, for any number of reasons, buts on the media get flipped and you end up with lost/corrupted data. If you’re serious about your data, keep a copy on site and a copy off site somewhere sufficiently far enough away from the other copy so your favorite disaster (fire, tornado, flooding, Godzilla attack) is very unlikely to destroy both copies. Then periodically refresh the data (rotate disks or something like that) to make sure everything is good.
This bit of paranoia can be expensive and time consume, so you need to balance that with the value of the data you’re archiving. How bad would it be to lose some/all of it? Some cases it would be a significant (business ending?) problem, some a minor inconvenience and some you probably wouldn’t even notice (we all tend to be pack rats at times).