Francois Stark
Forum Replies Created
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One thing I don’t miss for one second about edit* is the six second preroll on capturing that out matrox digisuite LE had…
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Can you use Apple’s standard disk utility repair tools on a fibrejet volume?
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Fibrejet and SanMP are examples of volume based sharing. They only allow one user to write to one volume at one time, but all users can read from that volume at the same time.
EG you can digitise all media for a project to one volume and then four FCP suites can each run their own project using the same media from this one volume, OR you can digitise on three FCP suites to their three volumes concurrently, and edit the material on the fourth suite once the digitising is done.
SanMP’s project managment is a bit more complicated that on file-based sharing systems like XSAN where all users can write to all volumes, so in most cases you will just set up one very large volume where all users work.
Regards
Francois -
I don’t understand – which meter shows 170 and which ceiling 60-70?
When you stire the LU’s together, be sure to disable journalling. You can then test the disk speed on the stripe set before even converting it to a sanmp volume.
I found it difficult to figure out which LU’s to stripe together, so next time I will make all volume slightly different, but with mathing sizes for the LU’s I want to stripe. I have bought two new 400GB drives for the aDTX array, so I will need to re-set up the array from scratch.
Another tool I found useful was the QLogic 5200 switch’s performance monitor – it shows read and write traffic on each fibre port.
Regards
Francois -
I found one problem with a Terrablock SAN when I saw it at NAB: On the Mac clients they had to reboot the client for every time they need to change client permissions, unmount or mount new drives.
On PC’s the system seems to be pretty faultless – saw it running several AVID systems with the OMFI directory and database rebuilding problems sorted out.
Regards
Francois -
Well, we’ve installed a SANMP system about two months ago. Had some teething problems but here’s the summary:
What differentiates the systems:
-SanMP needs no Metadata server like XSAN.
-XSan can not be used as audio drive for Pro Tools.
-Fibrejet can not work with PC’s – only os 9 and X.So we decided on SanMP because we wanted to use our five seats like this: Four FCP systems and one PC, acting as a server for our graphics systems. After installing sanMP on the PC we found that the PC side had some disadvantages: It could not access our sanMP drives that we striped on the mac using apple disk utils. We wanted to use stripe sets to improve performance so that cancelled out most of the mac -> PC sharing we wanted. The Macopener that comes with sanMP is also limited to mounting 250GB GB NTFS volumes on the PC.
So we decided to move one of our 1.2TB Huge SCSI arrays from the FCP systems to the PC server and move the PC server’s SanMP seat to Pro Tools. Well, both these systems work pretty well right now. The graphics server serves very efficiently, while we have run Pro Tools sessions with uncompressed video streams from different sanMP volumes. It’s no use to have only one pro tools on a SAN, so we should be getting another seat for our second Pro Tools room soon.
The four FCP systems work fine. Each FCP system has a large sanMP volume it can write to, and it can read all the other systems’ volumes. We also have a permanent volume for re-used graphics etc and a spare volume.
In terms of hardware we settled on the ADTX array because of the redundancy of the controllers: each controller can take over full control of all drives and raid arrays in the box. We also bought it for a little less that a similarly configured apple XRaid array. We also bought a QLogic 5200 fibre switch and five apple fibre cards.
If you can, get a reseller that has experience in setting up SAN for FCP systems (chrispy seems to be a good candidate) but if you have a hard head like me and want to do it yourself, here are a few hints:
– Once you figured out how LU mapping and masking works, make sure every port on the drive array maps a LU 0 to the clients. I started with LU 1 and none of my clients wanted to see any LU’s.
– Our G4 systems did not want to see the LU’s properly on os X.3.9. We went back to os X.3.4 on the G4’s and then they worked fine.
– Don’t jump in to new OS updates without proper testing. Rather install the os you want to test in a firewire drive partition and then install client apps like FCP and SanMP. Test from the firewire drive, while leaving your production boot partition for real work. We should continue testing tiger this way soon – our preliminary tests on the G4’s indicate that tiger also does not allow the G4’s to see the LU’s properly. If you don’t see the LU’s, SanMP can not run because it needs to convert normal NTFS drives to sanMP drives.In the end we could have used Fibrejet because we don’t have a PC on our SAN.
Regards
Francois -
Yes, you are missing something. On the PC Ctrl-J (movie properties). Go to the video track and select high quality – tick “high quality enabled”. See the difference?
For some STUPID reason, Apple has set the PC QT played to default to low quality on all DV quicktime files.
QT 7 has a new setting that forces high quality on all files.
Regards
Francois -
Hi
I found that I had only about 15 fonts, excluding aerial and aerial black. I have another partition with os x.3.9 on the same machine and copied all the fonts from that partition over to my fontless x.3.4 folder and title3d started working. I have no idea which font’s absence caused the crash, but that’s what worked for me.
You can also go to apple and download the titles3d installation and re-install it.
Regards
Francois -
Hi Gunner
Thanks – you solved it. I checked the problem partition’s fonts folder, and found only about 15 fonts! Something must have gone wrong with the OS install.
Well, I just copied all the fonts from my X.3.9 partition and now FCP and the 3D title tools works fine.
You would think that if boris’ title3D cannot find a font it should bring up a messagebox stating the fact, in stead of just crashing…
Thanks again
Francois -
Hi Matte
Thanks for your suggestion but I’m way past that level…
This is a “new” FCP 4.5 installation on this os X.3.4 partition. I have installed, uninstalled and re-installed the Kona LS card into this partition, and trashed the prefs in the process. I have also downloaded and over-installed the Boris 3D title 1.1 update from Apple. Nothing helped for the title tool crashing problem. The previous FCP 4.5 installation, on the same machine, with the same Kona LS hardware, running on the os x.3.9 partition runs perfectly.
I guess my next step would be to re-install FCP from scratch.
Thanks
Francois