[Gary Taylor]

To clarify my question I have heard a number of local station don’t have significant tape playback of HD material and instead rely on satellite feeds. Just wondering if you had heard this was your experience.
Gary

[Gary Taylor]

lol, that is too funny…

In your experience have the local networks including the cable companies had playback capability for HD. If so how are they accepting the content, DVCProHD, HDCAM tapes or any other formats?
Thanks,
Gary

[Gary Taylor]

I was asking myself the same thing. Ever since I got my 50 inch plasma it is amazing how ugly the SD commercials look. Especially the local ones that look like they were shot and editing in dv25. I think it makes the project and the company look cheap. By comparison it’s almost like looking at something shot on VHS.
Gary

[Gary Taylor]

I for one am not too worried about AJA providing driver support for future Intel based Macs. Like Jeff said the cards are platform agnostic and it is only the driver that has to be updated. With external storage the only thing I am worried about are HBAs and capture cards.

One very cool thing about the move to PCIe is our ability to get the latest GPU hardware instead of waiting for an AGP version. This should give Motion users a great feeling, and if Apple finds a way to implement GPGPU funtionality in other apps then the benefits are clear.

One thing that I have heard many people talk about is the opportunity PCIe provides to card vendors. From what I understand just about every card on the today has ceiling based on PCI-X. I have been told that is one of the reasons RAID solutions peak out where they do.

It’s possible this might provide an incentive for vendor not to use bridge chips to enable PCIe compatibility and instead go to the effort of creating a native solution. Imagine an external 16 port infiniband SATA solution that can go up to 1 GigaByte per second bidirectional. Apple move to PCIe only might make this happen sooner.

Of course I say this as someone who doesn’t have in investment in legacy hardware. I think when the dust settles Apple’s
Quad machine just might be able to handle a number of 2K workflows, and that is WAY more than I need right now. Why should I worry if the new MacTels are better in some way? These machines once they are proven should be great for some time to come.

The G5 has incredible floating point performance and nothing Intel has comes even close to it. I think for the way that I plan on working the new Quad is likely to be as fast as anything released for a while to come. Just like everyone who bought one of the original dual 2.0 G5s should be able to keep working happily for some time to come. Like a bunch of other people I am just waiting to make sure there are no unexpected gotchas…
Gary

[Gary Taylor]

Hi Gary,
Thanks again for your response. I just had a very frustrating couple of hours on the phone with Lacie tech support with no luck so I was hoping you could help me out. Is there a chance you might be able to do a longer test of 1080p or 1080i? Have you limited your captures to 5 minutes because of some earlier problem?

Have you been able to test the S2S’s Safe mode for speed using the Kona test suite? In particular I am trying to find out what its write speed is?
Thanks again,
Gary

[Gary Taylor]

Hi Jordan,
Thanks for your input. Yours appears to be the sort of the cautionary tale that I was looking for.

Are your external RAID 0 being done in software or hardware. I am just wondering if you are doing RAID 0 in software and then doing the RAID 5 in software as well? One of the interesting things for me about the S2S is its ability to do RAID 0 in hardware, albeit with the loss of a drive’s capacity.

I am in full agreement about excessive numbers of cables. Moving forward I like the use of infiniband like that used in HighPoint 2240. I just need to them to release it in PCIe version.

On the issue of software RAID I am not suprised there Mac users are finding the problems with RAID that they are. I think most of our options would be considered mid-level at best on the PC. I would be interested in knowing what your CPU utilization is on your system with that monster RAID you have there.

I really wish someone would come out with a SATA RAID card with a dedicated XOR processor like the ARECA, or 3Ware units available on the PC. For video applications where real time is based on CPU doing all those caculation in software has to cost you something.
Gary

[Gary Taylor]

Hi Gary,
Have you been about to capture uncompressed 8 or 10 bit HD with the S2S? I know that Lacie implies that it could be used for HD capture? Thanks for the other warnings.
Gary

[Gary Taylor]

Hi Gary,
I don’t know if you have more than one S2S but can you think of anything that would prevent you from software striping two units together? Have you tried this? I have a crazy idea of maybe setting up a RAID5 between 3 or 4 units.
Gary

[Gary Taylor]

Hi Jan,
The news about this camera keeps getting better and better. Is there any possiblity that we will be able to switch the analog outputs can be switched to RGB output?
Thanks,
Gary

[Gary Taylor]

Thanks Guys,
I keep forgetting that the camera doesn’t have timecode out for the analog outputs since it isn’t going through a VTR.

Graeme I think that if this camera performs the way we all expect it will there will be a bunch of people interested in that update. Ideally I would prefer to reduce my bandwidth requirements while capturing but if you can help me extract uncompressed 24P footage in post production you would be my new best friend!
Thanks again,
Gary