Eric Hansen
Forum Replies Created
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Does the Xserve connect to the office switch with just a single ethernet connection? or does it have a multi-port Ethernet card?
if it’s only a single connection, then a Drobo 5D should have plenty of performance for what they’re doing.
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Eric Hansen
Production Workflow Designer / Consultant / Colorist / DIT
https://www.erichansen.tv -
Cody
Like Rainer, i recommend bare hard drives with docks. Right now, and i’m not kidding, I’m looking at 6 different external hard drives from different manufacturers, and no one knows where the power supplies are. the power supplies we do have, have generic OEM markings, so we can’t match them to the drives they go with.
remember these things with hard drives:
1. they’re not meant to sit on a shelf. they’re meant to spin. So make sure you spin them up every 6 months or so, and check their data integrity
2. all hard drives die, and at radially different times. one hard drive brand won’t consistently last longer than another. the 5 year warranty enterprise drives are designed to spin 24/7 for 5 years. but i’ve had some die in less than 3 months. always assume a hard drive will die
3. have at least 2 or 3 copies of the media in different locations.
4. store hard drives vertically, so the arms don’t rest on the spindles.
5. put the bare hard drives in a protective case
as for the argument of which hard drive brand is better, i’ve had them ALL fail. some are better than others, but just assume that all hard drives will fail and have multiple copies of your data. i’ve had the best experience buying hard drives for their intended use – Ultrastars for RAIDs, for example. for putting on a shelf, i just get the cheapest deal on Newegg or Tiger Direct that I can find. you don’t need performance, you just need a holding tank.
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Eric Hansen
Production Workflow Designer / Consultant / Colorist / DIT
https://www.erichansen.tv -
If they liked the performance of the Xserve but thought the Drobo was too slow, then yes, they’re right in the video editing NAS sweet-spot.
Are they looking to keep LTO going? if so, is it Fibre Channel, SCSI or SAS? If not, what are they replacing it with? Do they use any features of Mac OS X Server?
If no more LTO, then a Mac Mini with Thunderbolt storage and Thunderbolt to PCIe Multi-port Ethernet card could work. It definitely wouldn’t be able to handle 8 video editors. But 8 designers is probably doable. You could also look at self-contained units from Small Tree like the Titanium 5 and Titanium 8.
If they want to keep LTO, then a Mac Pro with SAS storage would probably be your best bet because it can handle more PCIe cards without needing Thunderbolt adapters.
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Eric Hansen
Production Workflow Designer / Consultant / Colorist / DIT
https://www.erichansen.tv -
I assume that you’re on OS X since you list FCP in your sig.
it only really matters how full your RAID got before you started deleting files. if it never got more than 75% full, it probably didn’t fragment too much. But if you filled it up, then defragging can help. If moving everything off, deleting the RAID, and then moving everything back is an option, do it. it will most likely be faster than running a defrag program and it achieves the same thing. i try to do this with my SAN RAIDs.
i would also suggest backing up first.
If you use Drive Genius, it will show you how fragmented your volume is, and if the files you have on there now have a lot of extents (pieces of the entire file). i let my RAID get pretty full, and i have one 100GB file with over 1400 extents. that tells me my RAID is pretty darn fragmented (100GB got shoehorned into 1400 different nooks and crannies). if your files only show a few extents, then your volume probably doesn’t need to be defragged since the files are being written whole more or less.
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Eric Hansen
Production Workflow Designer / Consultant / Colorist / DIT
https://www.erichansen.tv -
10 grand?
Haha, Bob, I think you scared him off
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Eric Hansen
Production Workflow Designer / Consultant / Colorist / DIT
https://www.erichansen.tv -
All the Mac Pros in my AFP SAN installations have an internal 2 drive RAID-0 that’s used as a scratch, to get around the 2GB export limit. export to the internal RAID, when it’s done, move the file to the SAN. it’s also nice to have to keep render files and other temp stuff from filling up the SAN volumes
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Eric Hansen
Production Workflow Designer / Consultant / Colorist / DIT
https://www.erichansen.tv -
There’s a lot of variables here, and I’m sure others will have suggestions much different that mine. I’ve mostly worked on documentaries and action sports, so the VFX stuff I’ve done is mostly titles and such. Not Transformers-style CGI. Most of my work is “natural, but punched”
first, I will take the base video and give it a white-balance or a correction, not a grade. I’ll make sure flesh tones look correct, blacks and whites are correct, etc. just so the shot looks good and stands on its own. the VFX artist will than take that video and apply their work. if certain parts of their VFX have to match colors that are in the original shot, they will do that.
I then take the final rendered output and apply the grade that makes it fit within the rest of the edit. if they matched colors in the VFX to colors in the shot I corrected initially, those colors should theoretically change as I apply a primary to the entire shot, staying uniform. If not, I will apply secondaries as needed. for me, this is about as complicated as it gets.
of course, if the effects are more involved, you will want grading in more parts of your VFX. You’ll probably want grading even earlier in your pipeline, or your VFX artist to sit in during your grade. It has been my experience that faults in the VFX show up in grading because it’s the first time everyone’s really seen everything together and everyone is staring at every pixel. Many times AE users will work at lower quality settings so they can work quickly, but miss some details because they don’t crop up until the final full res render.
I’m curious to see what other people suggest.
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Eric Hansen
Production Workflow Designer / Consultant / Colorist / DIT
https://www.erichansen.tv -
yes, but you’d be better off switching the Q4000 to GUI and getting a better nVidia card for GPU
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Eric Hansen
Production Workflow Designer / Consultant / Colorist / DIT
https://www.erichansen.tv -
curious to see how much of a hit the 2GB (per GPU) 690 would take on 4k footage vs the 680 cards with 4GB of RAM.
4 GPUs in only 2 slots is incredibly tempting though. or a 690 card in a Mac Pro with a separate GUI card. thats a lot of power without needing a Cubix
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Eric Hansen
Production Workflow Designer / Consultant / Colorist / DIT
https://www.erichansen.tv -
if you’re anticipating a lot of ingest, then i suggest a Mac Pro and not a Mini. That way you can get 600+MB/s on the RAID and transfer cards and hard drives directly on the Mac Pro (using USB3, eSATA, SAS, etc), bypassing the ethernet clients. If you use a Mini in an xMac enclosure, you’re going to saturate the Thunderbolt bus, guaranteed.
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Eric Hansen
Production Workflow Designer / Consultant / Colorist / DIT
https://www.erichansen.tv