[David Roth weiss]

Can you use the phrase in context?

If it’s something a client requested it doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s terminology typically used by anyone else in our biz, but in context we might be able to feret it out for you.

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor/Colorist
David Weiss Productions

David is a Creative COW contributing editor and a forum host of the Apple Final Cut Pro forum.

[David Roth weiss]

Buy a used 12-core Mac Pro, upgrading procs on an older Mac Pro is not a good investment.

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor/Colorist
David Weiss Productions

David is a Creative COW contributing editor and a forum host of the Apple Final Cut Pro forum.

[David Roth weiss]

[Mike Jackson] “Our movie was shot on the RED Dragon, and although Adobe encourages people to use the RAW files, performance is just not good enough for heavy editing”

Adobe encourages people to use the RAW files because, if you have the right hardware, you can edit just about anything seamlessly on the timeline without transcoding, and that’s what separates Premiere from all the other NLEs. Premiere is plenty good enough for heavy editing of 4K R3D files, but most Macs unfortunately are not.

It’s no wonder you can’t playback 4K R3D files as you’d like, as your hardware is not really up to the task. The most important issues you have are:

#1) You’re editing off of a single eSATA hard drive (you need a six or 8-drive RAID for seamless playback of 4K R3D and beyond).

#2) Your old ATI graphics card (get yourself a GTX 680 Mac Edition or 780 Mac Edition)

#3) Not enough RAM (double-up to 32Gb)

Your old and slow processors aren’t helping things, but if you upgrade at least #1 and #2 above, you will increase your realtime performance dramatically.

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor/Colorist
David Weiss Productions

David is a Creative COW contributing editor and a forum host of the Apple Final Cut Pro forum.

[David Roth weiss]

[Ray Sherman] “RAID 5 requires a minimum of three drives”

True, but it makes little sense in a config under 4 drives, especially if you backup everything.

[Ray Sherman] “With the Pegasus R6 12TB (6x2TB) it would be double the minimum needed for RAID 5 therefore, I think this may be all I need.”

If seamless playback of 4K and larger files is important to you, you should not be as concerned with overall capacity as you should about the overall throughput of the hard drive subsystem – if you are going to skimp anywhere, do so on drive size, not the number of drives. Trust me, buying an 8-drive array now will be a much better investment for you – a four or six drive enclosure will not have the overhead you’ll need longterm for 4K and beyond, and you’ll have to buy a new enclosure all too soon. Never buy what’s just good enough for today, if spending a little bit more gets you three to five more years of useful life, and bit chin performance now, you will be much happier both short and long term.

[Ray Sherman] ” do realize that it would be smart to backup my media on another external drive that is separate from my workstation for safe storage.”

Not just smart, but imperative.

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor/Colorist
David Weiss Productions

David is a Creative COW contributing editor and a forum host of the Apple Final Cut Pro forum.

[David Roth weiss]

[Ray Sherman] “I do feel that it’s important not to place un-edited and/or rendered media on the OS drive. Would you partition off the drives as I did with my former PC workstation as follows?
OS 1TB: software, etc.
Hard Drive 1 (2x750GB Raid 0): Un-edited pre-rendered video, pictures and music
Hard Drive 2 (2x750GB Raid 0): Rendered events for final output to DVD, etc. “

You are overthinking Ray. As I previously mentioned, the Pegasus hard drive arrays come preconfigured as RAID 5, so just plug it in and edit, and DO NOT PARTITION as you did your previous setup, that would defeat much the purpose of purchasing a large multi-drive array. Remember, every time you double the number of disks in a RAID array you virtually double the throughput of that array – and, that’s the primary advantage of what you’re paying for. Accordingly, if you want to play 4K seamlessly, you should be purchasing an 8-drive Pegasus, not a 4 or 6-drive model.

Also, in the overthinking category, just consider your RAID to be your “media drive,” – stop all thoughts about this file type her and that file type there, the RAID is fast enough to deal with everything, video, renders, audio, etc. You can use an SSD cache drive for increased performance, but my understanding is that cache drives really only improve performance of AE, not so much in Premiere.

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor/Colorist
David Weiss Productions

David is a Creative COW contributing editor and a forum host of the Apple Final Cut Pro forum.

[David Roth weiss]

That’s great, it pretty much rules out storage as the source of any issues. You’d be surprised how many users are editing off of single drives, and totally unaware of the importance of drive throughput.

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor/Colorist
David Weiss Productions

David is a Creative COW contributing editor and a forum host of the Apple Final Cut Pro forum.

[David Roth weiss]

What type of storage are you using hit your media?

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor/Colorist
David Weiss Productions

David is a Creative COW contributing editor and a forum host of the Apple Final Cut Pro forum.

[David Roth weiss]

So long as you backup everything RAID 5 will be just fine – while RAID 6 is more secure, it comes at the cost, i.e. two drives worth of storage space lost to the protection scheme – that would be half your 4-drive array and 1/3 if a 6-drive array.

FYI, neither RAID 5 nor 6 has a performance hit on reads, both do writes, with RAID 6 substantially slower on writes.

Also, though RAID 6 is substantially more secure, since no form of RAID protection provides enough security to avoid backups, RAID 5 is the industry standard for most until you get into 16-drive arrays and beyond.

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor/Colorist
David Weiss Productions

David is a Creative COW contributing editor and a forum host of the Apple Final Cut Pro forum.

[David Roth weiss]

Hi Laurie! You’re not be happy with this, but your issue is unfortunately due to the fact that you’re editing h.264 in FCP 7, which unfortunately is not capable of dealing with it properly.

For the record, h.264 and all of the other MPEG variants such as MP4, MPEG 2, etc. are not really supported. There are a zillion posts here on the subject, and it’s why I asked that first. Yes, you can seemingly work with those codecs, but then all kinds of issues quickly rise to the surface, just as you’ve noticed.

The only good way of editing those codecs is to transcode the material to a codec designed for editing such as Pro Res, etc. before editing.

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor/Colorist
David Weiss Productions

David is a Creative COW contributing editor and a forum host of the Apple Final Cut Pro forum.

[David Roth weiss]

Are you editing h.264 or MP4 files in your timeline?

If no to the question above, have you tried trashing preferences?

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor/Colorist
David Weiss Productions

David is a Creative COW contributing editor and a forum host of the Apple Final Cut Pro forum.