[David Roth weiss]

If it were possible, you would be getting approximately 90MB/sec max over Ethernet from a RAID array capable of 1000MB/sec. Probably not your best use of resources.

A SAS connected 8-drive RAID such as the one John has offered you is your best bet.

David Roth Weiss
ProMax Systems
Burbank
DRW@ProMax.com

Sales | Integration | Support

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

[David Roth weiss]

Hi Mark,

I’d be happy to help you with ProMAX Platform. Feel free to call me anytime at 949/861-2709.

Meanwhile, check out our videos on Modularity and the Advantages of Platform . I think these will get you thinking.

Best,
David

David Roth Weiss
ProMax Systems
Burbank
DRW@ProMax.com

Sales | Integration | Support

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

[David Roth weiss]

[Michael Dominic] “Should I buy one 8 TB drive or smaller drives? How do you all organize your footage?”

A more important question would be, how are you going to protect your footage?

David Roth Weiss
ProMax Systems
Burbank
DRW@ProMax.com

Sales | Integration | Support

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

[David Roth weiss]

[Nat Jencks] “Can someone tell me why one of these new generation 10Gbps NAS arrays w/ 12 drives or more is not a good alternative to the traditional Post oriented SAN solutions from folks like Facilis, SNS, Promax, etc?

On the surface these seem to offer better price/performance that solutions from smaller companies which specifically target Post.”

Hi Nat,

You said it yourself when you said, “on the surface, these seem to offer better price/performance.” That’s exactly why do it yourselfers and IT departments fail all the time when attempting to cobble together servers for shared video storage.

When working with video you need more than just bandwidth, and not just any file server will do the job. Streaming raw footage from modern high resolution cameras requires very low latency, high throughput connectivity and extremely fast disk arrays that need to be specially tuned to provide the right kind of bandwidth.

Once you begin streaming that footage to multiple editors simultaneously you need yet to achieve yet another level of optimization and speed to ensure each stream arrives on demand and plays uninterrupted.

You’re looking to take a server designed to share Word docs, MP3s, and JPEG images, and wondering why it won’t deliver shared storage performance for video. If it were that easy, not one of the companies advertising shared storage here would be in business.

As an example, the ProMAX Platform Series (they are NAS systems BTW, not SANs) were designed from the ground up to deliver concurrent streaming video footage to your entire creative team, all while allowing you to monitor and control storage, permissions, and bandwidth limits in an easy to use interface. Our own extremely low-latency packet-lossless protocol makes it work, and enables us to guaranty performance. And, we don’t use just any old Ethernet cards, we’ve vetted every available card on the market to find the best performing ones, as all cards are NOT equal.

So, unless you’re prepared to write your own software protocols, and you’re up for testing loads of different Ethernet cards for performance, you’d best rely on professionals to do that for you. And remember, the most expensive hardware in the world is that which does not perform as required to accomplish the task at hand.

I hope this helps… If you need more assistance feel free to call me at ProMAX – 949/861-2709

David

David Roth Weiss
ProMax Systems
Burbank
DRW@ProMax.com

Sales | Integration | Support

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

[David Roth weiss]

Pro Res 422 1080i 30 is approx. 79gb per hour. It makes no difference whether you’re transcoding from an h.264 file, a 5k RED file, or and uncompressed file.

David Roth Weiss
ProMax Systems
Burbank
DRW@ProMax.com

Sales | Integration | Support

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

[David Roth weiss]

QT reference files are really an accident waiting to happen anyway. Change one little thing on the underlying timeline and they become worthless. I have always users NOT to get in the habit of using them, because they aren’t labeled by default as reference files, and so they can bite you later if you think you have an exported copy of a project.

David Roth Weiss
ProMax Systems
Burbank
DRW@ProMax.com

Sales | Integration | Support

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

[David Roth weiss]

[Noam Osband] “When working with it in the timelines, I dont see anything noticeably problematic when I just drop the 60fps footageinto a 24fps sequences. So, is it OK if I do that?”

Unfortunately, there’s no simple cut and dry answer.

Are you monitoring on a TV or broadcast monitor? If not, then you wouldn’t see anything “noticeably problematic,” even in the worst case scenario, as you typically can’t see fields mismatches or cadence issues on a computer monitor.

David Roth Weiss
ProMax Systems
Burbank
DRW@ProMax.com

Sales | Integration | Support

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

[David Roth weiss]

Hey Chris!

Let me ask you a couple questions, and from there I can provide an answer, or maybe two, to your question that will astonish you.

1) what’s your primary NLE?
2) what codecs are you primarily cutting, at at what frame size and frame rate?
3) how many streams/layers are typical for most of your projects?
4) do you use After Effects and/or Cinema 4D?
5) what is it about the Small Tree solution that you like?

Looking forward to seeing your responses…

David Roth Weiss
ProMax Systems
Burbank
DRW@ProMax.com

Sales | Integration | Support

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

[David Roth weiss]

Hi Tom,

Warning, I’m going into full on vendor mode here…

NetApp will absolutely fall on its face when you’re talking video performance. The Media & Entertainment deployments of NetApp are almost exclusively tier 2 (backup) or push pull solutions (copy data to your local drive, edit, copy data back); I’ve never seen any NetApp system successfully used for direct video editorial, but I’ve seen several failed attempts. The Facilis is great for the video performance and ease of use, which I’m sure is why you love it.

Vendor time – Do check out our product ProMAX Platform. It will give you the same performance and ease of use as a Facilis, but gets into other workflows (offloading renders, transcodes, etc.) the other big thing, especially for you, is that the feature sets allow it to play VERY well in traditional IT environments (AD integration, Replication, DFS, etc.)

We’ve deployed a lot of these in situations just like yours where the media department knew they needed a media specific product; but the IT department has a major say in what is deployed and supported. It plays well with both.

Hope this is helpful.

Best,
David

David Roth Weiss
ProMax Systems
Burbank
DRW@ProMax.com

Sales | Integration | Support

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

[David Roth weiss]

[John Hepworth] “Can anyone suggest the EASIEST workflow as we will likely have footage from ALL sorts of cameras…from iPhones/iPods to semi professional.”

Yes, I can answer your question with two words, “Adobe Premiere.”

David Roth Weiss
ProMax Systems
Burbank
DRW@ProMax.com

Sales | Integration | Support

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