Ericbowen
Forum Replies Created
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Running a centralized SAN server with a 10GBE network connection would be the cheapest solution long term. You would also only require the single or dual port 10GBE connection to a switch versus running network based units that will eat ports as you as you add. Just look for a SAS storage unit that allows you to SAS expand ie chain off 1 raid controller.
Eric-ADK
Tech Manager -
Number 1 factor with AE and render performance is available ram space and CPU/Threads usable. Those are intertwined as Adobe assigns ram blocks per thread for the frame by frame rendering. This means the caching model used by the player is going reference the codec used and the available ram space. That will be the initialization resources used. The more ram you have the greater amount of Frames AE will grab immediately to start processing frame data. If you increase your ram significantly then that would significantly effect that and the overall render performance. Then comes the data rate the drives can handle starting out and as the render process continues. This will fluctuate but will fluctuate far more with drives close to 100% capacity. That is because the latency on drive requests ie read and write requests significantly increases as the locations for data are spread out over the platter. This tells the application writer which is writing the format files to let the processing application know the data rate it can handle is slowing down. The Processing application will slow down to compensate since ram is limited. This will change the amount of frames cached at one time. If you take a clean HDD or an SSD drive which has latency in microseconds then the file writer will write the data as fast as the application can get it processed. So ideally a SSD drive is perfect for renders but if you cant do that a clean mechanical drive will do provided the codec data rate and data processing doesn’t exceed what the drive can handle. A 2 drive raid 0 is another way to achieve the same performance for render. However anymore an SSD would be ideal since they are so cheap and renders rarely if ever exceed their size.
Summary
Get 24 to 32GB of ram with 32GB the real number you want with 8 Cores.Clean out Render drive completely or get an SSD render drive. Another option is raid 0 but difficult with mac Pro config space.
Eric-ADK
Tech Manager -
Actually yes it does. Adobe changes their caching models for codecs especially with new versions. That is very common now days as new codecs are releasing along with new flavors of codecs. You need to take the drive latency out of the equation. There is also the expected rate of data by the file writer which also changes and can cause the process to slow down considerably especially since the frame caching will be effected by the expected data rate the drive can handle. I would really suggest you get that sorted out.
Change the ram per thread to .75GB. 14GB is really low for a Dual Xeon 8 Core system with AE. Any reason your not running 4GB modules?
Eric-ADK
Tech Manager -
Mechanical HDD’s start slowing down once you exceed 60% volume capacity. Once you are beyond 80 to 90% the performance has dropped to 60% or less of what the drive is capable off. I suggest you get that drive cleaned out or media moved off. If this is an archive drive then move to a clean drive for renders. SSD drives do not have this limitation and the latency is allot lower. you can have multiple file reads and writes to SSD’s without losing performance. If the Cache drive is greater than 50% utilized capacity, then get that cleaned out as well. What do you have your Multiprocessor settings to in AE CC including ram allocation?
Eric-ADK
Tech Manager -
Have you tried loading one of the Autosave project files yet?
Eric-ADK
Tech Manager -
You need enough ram to feed the threading in AE as well as encoding/effects processing in other applications. AE will use more ram than any other application listed especially with 6 cores/12 threads. 32GB is really where you want to be on that. I would sacrifice a system for now and use the current laptop at work since less editing. The desktop will always outperform the laptop especially when considering the same Gen CPU’s. The Current Desktop and mobile platform is Haswell 1150 socket. That is what you want to look at now if you cant get the X79 setup.
Eric-ADK
Tech Manager -
Major Kudus on this. A very comprehensive but easy to understand layout of storage and technology. The only change I would suggest is the Enterprise drive versus Desktop/NAS class drives although WD Red drives do have the feature. The Enterprise drives have the Error Recovery Control which in WD lingo is TLER. This feature is something all the drive manufacturers restrict normally to their Enterprise drives firmware simply because they want Large raid clients buying mass amount of enterprise drives for their storage needs. What this equates to in the raid configurations are controllers marking drives bad and out of the raid volumes prematurely simply because the drive is not responding during a repair operation. If that operation takes to long or there are to many bad blocks in that location to repair in time, the Controller thinks the drive is bad since it’s unresponsive and marks it out of the raid. This puts the raid into degraded state prematurely since it really was just a drive repairing block data in bad block areas. Enterprise drives will timeout that function before the time period expires based on the controllers or controller settings. Some controllers have management settings that allow you to change that timeout period. Either way this issue has become exasperating over the last couple years since drive manufacturers are shipping drives with so many bad blocks and it doesn’t seem they are marking them out at the factory anymore. I know the cost of Enterprise drives is significantly higher than desktop drives when buying bulk but this issue can cause a raid and client no end of headaches. Parity raids are far more likely to run into this than mirror block based raids. So as a general rule if Parity always get Enterprise and if Mirror then you can look at Desktop but I still don’t recommend it. Those with questions on this can reference some info here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Error_recovery_control
Eric-ADK
Tech Manager -
Let me test that and get back with you.
Eric-ADK
Tech Manager -
Based on the workflow info so far the CPU processing will have far greater effect than GPU. I would really suggest a 6 core X79 platform for this but the budget is going to make it difficult. The 760GTX card would be the video card to get with your budget. Beyond that you want the 3930K and 32GB of ram. Those are a must with that work for good performance. Do you have an expansion chassis for the MBP to even add a video card to? Without that you would not get even a Used Mac Pro and that video card with that budget that I have seen.
Eric-ADK
Tech Manager -
I assume you have the sequence selected you want to link from?
Eric-ADK
Tech Manager