Dave Klee
Forum Replies Created
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Hey Stephen, nice work!
Is this with that Opteka timer you were looking at earlier? You happy with it?
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Have you tried exporting a batch list and cleaning it up in a spreadsheet program like Excel?
If you highlight all the clips you want to include from your FCP bin, right click on any of them in your bin, then select Export > Batch List, it will create a fairly standard tab-delimited text file with all the clip data. Excel opens this file as a spreadsheet, and then you can delete all the columns except the ones that are useful to you. Various things can be done to make it more readable once in Excel.
I wouldn’t be surprised to see that someone has an easier way, but this is typically how I have printed out log sheets for producers and also exported the data into other programs for tape cataloging. Perhaps it’ll work for you!
Dave
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Hey Tim, glad it’s working.
[Tim Ward] “Would you need a real server to manage accounts and permissions?”
Not really, but permissions on any system with multiple users can get tricky. As it sounds like you know, there are three basic types of permissions in OS X for a file or folder: owner, group, and everyone. By default, when a user creates a new file or folder, they are the “owner” of that file or folder and have read/write access. Also by default, pretty much everyone else (group and everyone) gets read-only access.
There are ways to change this default behavior or add extra permissions through Access Control Lists (ACLs), but all have plusses and minuses. Sounds like all you need is to get read/write access to all the files, so by logging in with the exact same user account when you connect from the second machine (client) you should get access to all the files — because you’re logging in as the same user (once locally, and once over the network).
A downside here is that you won’t have the ability to limit permissions if you’re logging in as the same user. So, if you ever wanted to limit the access that a user gets from “System B” to read-only, it would be difficult to do without creating another user account for “System B” to use as a login username and password (or using the guest account). There’s also the possibility for overwriting and messing up each other’s files when they’re accessed on two different systems. It sounds like you have thought out your workflow, but just know there are risks if someone gets confused and saves over the wrong file or deletes something they shouldn’t have.
So, long story short, the same user will get the same access to the same files — whether they’re logging in locally or over a network connection. If that’s all you need, then you should be good to go. If you ever want to add more users and groups, I think you’ll find that you can do a fair amount without getting the “server” version of OS X, but just know that it can get complicated.
Good luck, and please post back with any questions.
Dave
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When “System B” (the client) connects to “System A” (the server), are you using the same username and password to connect as the username and password that you need for the user account on System A that is doing all the editing locally?
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Hey Steve, you’ll probably have to completely uninstall all Drobo software from your wife’s iMac, and might consider plugging the DroboPro in over FireWire 800 if you’re working on a MacBook Pro.
There are a couple big things at play here:
First, when you install the DroboPro software, it goes through the zero configuration iSCSI setup to make your DroboPro “magically” connect to your computer (I don’t think whether the Drobo Dashboard is running or not matters — the iSCSI connection is constantly working in the background independent of the dashboard software). So, whichever computer you installed the Drobo software on last is probably the only one that the DroboPro will connect to when it’s on. Completely uninstall the DroboPro software from the iMac (probably by running an uninstall program because dragging the Dashboard app to the trash won’t do it), and things should go back the way they were.
But more importantly, I’m not sure that running the DroboPro over iSCSI through a router mixed with normal internet and home network traffic is technically supported. I didn’t think it was, but I don’t know everything about it. Often, all iSCSI traffic runs on its own, dedicated ethernet port (for example, a computer will dual ethernet ports might have one dedicated to all iSCSI traffic, and another dedicated to normal network and internet traffic).
You might be better off connecting the DroboPro over FireWire 800. Even if running iSCSI through your home network is technically supported, the speed tests between iSCSI and FW800 on these things isn’t terribly different. And you might even see a speed increase because your home router is probably not optimized to pass that kind of bandwidth-hungry, video-based iSCSI traffic.
Hope that helps, and good luck!
Dave
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Hey Dustin, glad you’re thinking about some other options, and happy to help if I can.
I’m not a serious DIY SATA guy, honestly. I did a few on my own a few years ago and can give you some basics, but you’ll find a lot more people with really solid opinions and experience on which controller cards and enclosures they like for which purposes.
Here’s the SATA DIY technology breakdown as I understand it:
Building a SATA RAID with a controller card in your computer and individual cables to each hard drive generally gives you full speed access to each drive in the RAID. Best performance with a good controller card, fine for video. Cabling can be messy and only so many SATA connections fit on a card.
A SATA Multilane or Infiniband is basically just a cleaner way of cabling things but still gives you full-speed access to each drive in the RAID. One SATA Multilane or Infiniband cable usually connects four drives at full speed. Again, you’ll need a good controller card (with SATA Multilane connections), and it’s fine for video.
Finally, Port Multipliers give you roughly the convenience of a Multilane connection, but slow you down in order to pull it off. A Port Multiplier allows you to split the bandwidth of one 6/3/1.5Gb/s SATA connection, usually connecting four or five drives over a single SATA or eSATA cable. That means each drive isn’t necessarily connected at full speed, but you get the capability to connect multiple drives over a single, cheaper cable. A great controller card here won’t necessarily make a difference — the bottleneck is the connection itself. I believe they’re used most often where large amounts of storage are needed and speed isn’t necessarily the priority (not as much for video editing).
So, if I were building a serious DIY video editing RAID on my own, I’d go with either individual connections or Multilane connections with a really nice controller card that gave me a HARDWARE RAID-5 (or 6 if you want). A couple years ago, I used one that had two Multilane connections on the card, each breaking out to four individual SATA connectors (so the card could RAID up to eight drives). Just don’t believe people who offer a cheaper, software-based RAID-5 solution. It’s all about a good controller card that takes care of all the heavy-duty RAID work on its own hardware without stealing CPU cycles. Also, I have yet to see a software RAID rebuild go smoothly. Hardware RAID is key.
Also, if I were working on my own, I’d stick with 1TB SATA drives for a while. 1.5TB and 2TB drives have seen issues in the recent past, and while I’m sure people would verify they have been fixed for many models and manufacturers, I’m still a little nervous to build a high-performance DIY system with anything other than proven and reliable 1TB drives. Plus you can pick them up pretty cheap.
However, if we’re going to talk true reality, I’d still say buying a good off-the-shelf RAID from one of the top companies advertising on the COW is a smart investment. You can find some decent deals right now; and if you really want your RAID to be highly available, it’s nice to have a company to call for support.
No matter what you do, keeping those masters and footage on video tape is something you won’t be sorry for — a small investment for big-time piece of mind.
Good luck with everything, and be sure to post back if other things come up. I’ll be interested to hear how it all goes!
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There is a difference between RAID 0+1 and RAID 1+0. Wikipedia has a decent write up about RAID levels that is probably worth looking at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAID Also good info on the differences between nested RAID levels: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nested_RAID_levels
If you want to build a RAID 1+0 (also called RAID 10), Dustin, it sounds like you’ve got a pretty good handle on the how it technically works. You start with two drives and mirror them (RAID 1). Then, you get another two drives and mirror them. Then, you take those two mirrored sets and stripe them together (RAID 0). And, you’re technically correct that you could remove one drive from each of those mirrored sets and still have all your data (just can’t lose both drives from either of the mirrored sets). Performance of a RAID 10 is better than RAID 1 but still with a pretty high level of protection.
However, I’d recommend against this setup for a few reasons.
First off, RAID 10 is not the best choice for video work. You’ll find a surprising number of people willing to take on a battle of RAID 5 vs. RAID 10, but in the end, I believe RAID 10 tends to work best for small files and in write-intensive situations (specifically databases). With video, you’re dealing with large files and care more about read speed than write speed. For my money, RAID 5 is really a better choice.
Second, hard drives on shelves make poor long-term storage devices. They fail unpredictably when sitting on the shelf. You need to spin them up from time to time just to make sure they’re happy and keep all the parts moving, which is easy to forget to do. All hard drives eventually die, and sitting on a shelf, you’ll have no warning as to when it’s about to happen.
Third, archiving to a RAID 0 is a doubly-bad long-term storage choice. If one hard drive is prone to fail, archiving to a two-disk RAID 0 is twice as prone to failure (because if you lose either drive out of the set, all your data is lost). If I’m following your plan right, you’ll be removing two disks (one from each mirrored set) to save long term, which essentially gives you a RAID 0 where you need both those disks to stick around and work forever.
Fourth, constantly matching drives and reformatting a new RAID set will be a challenge over time. Ideally, all the drives in your RAID 10 set should match — so what happens in a couple years when you can’t find the same drives easily anymore or want to move up to bigger drives? Not only will keeping track be a headache, but you’ll probably run into a few times where you just need to start over with a new RAID 10 to match up drives.
I know a few people who have chased this dream — editing a project on a hard drive, sticking it on the shelf and restoring the project instantly when changes come down in the future. In fact, I know at least one person who swears by it and I believe uses a series of LaCie external drives (rather than bare drives in a RAID 10 like you’re suggesting). But, I’m not convinced it’s a good long-term model.
Instead, I’d recommend you develop two systems — one to serve your editing needs, and one to serve your archiving needs. Editing and archiving are such different tasks with competing priorities. It sounds like you’re trying to get everything at once — both the safety and flexibility of a long-term archive right along with the speed and performance of an edit system — in the same hard drives. It’s a nice dream, but I think you’ll be happier (and actually spend less money long term) by maintaining two separate systems.
For your editing system, I’d recommend a good, hardware-based RAID 5. Lots of vendors on the COW sell them and even offer discounts. My current favorite is the G-Speed ES series from G-Technology. https://www.g-technology.com/products/g-speed-es.cfm
For an archive system, I’m currently a big fan of the DroboPro. https://www.drobo.com/products/drobopro/ Basically, if you put some green (slow) 2TB hard drives in that, you can grow it over time, and keep it on with e-mail notifications so you can find out if a drive is failing. It’s slow, but safe, reliable and flexible.
I’d recommend editing on your fast RAID 5 device, and when you’re done with a project, take the time to move the files you’d need to work on the project again off to your archive device and delete those files from the RAID 5. With some software (like AE) you can pack up and archive only the finalized compositions you actually used. With others, you’ll need to manually move files and folders. This takes time, but I’ve found gives me a much more usable archive.
In the future, you can do some things (like burn another DVD of a project) just by connecting to your archive device — no need to recopy the files. However, if you need to re-edit a project, you can copy all its files back to your RAID 5 with less time than recapturing from tape. (Sad as it is to say, though, tape is still an extremely cost-effective and fairly long-term storage medium. I would trust many tapes longer than almost any hard drive. Depending on what you’ve got and how much money you have to spend, tape archiving shouldn’t be overlooked.)
I doubt this was the good explanation of RAID 1+0 you were looking for, but hopefully it’ll get you thinking about some different options. Good luck and please post back if questions come up!
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Hey Matt, I know it’s been a while since you posted this, but I’ve tried a few and been pretty happy with the RiData Dual-Layer discs (they’re ink jet hub printable, 8X rated), and I buy almost all my media from Meritline.com
However, in general I’ve found dual-layer burning to often be more trouble than it’s worth. I get a lot more errors from encoding and building dual-layer projects than single layer, and I’ve had a higher rate of compatibility issues with set-top players for dual-layer burned discs. There are times when its necessary, but sadly, I’ve found that accepting a higher level of compression to fit things on a single-layer DVD has been the path of least resistance with the fewest headaches. Perhaps other people out there have had better luck than me.
For single-layer DVDs and CDs, I don’t think you can beat the quality of Taiyo Yuden (now JVC). Again, Meritline has been very trust-worthy retailer for me:
https://www.meritline.com/taiyo-yuden—m-13.aspx
Good luck!
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Following Bob\’s advice is usually pretty smart. Ideally, you want to keep your server updated ahead of (or the same as) your clients – not the other way around. No harm in an older server as long as it can take the new OS. Unfortunately, as you know, that G5 won\’t go beyond 10.5.8.
Hope everything gets sorted out for you!
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Hey Bob, for a small bit of relatively useless Apple trivia, their very last round of G5 computers known as “Late 2005” (including the 2.5GHz Quad) included PCI Express slots.
https://support.apple.com/kb/sp37