[Jeff Meyer]

USB won’t cut it for editing. USB2 might be okay for SD DV video, but USB1 won’t cut it for anything other than a backup. If your external is USB1 you’ll want to use the internal drive instead – which is not recommended.

Look into a firewire drive. G-Technology supports Creative Cow and makes firewire drives that don’t require external power – great for portability.

Lightpeak (Thunderbolt in Apple speak) is faster than firewire, but it is in its infancy and rather costly at this point.

[Jeff Meyer]

A drive separate from the system drive is a must. Start with a firewire connected external drive.

For Final Cut X the RAM will probably be more significant than the SSD. You’ll get better Final Cut X feedback in the FCX forum:
https://forums.creativecow.net/fcpxtechnique

[Jeff Meyer]

If transitions are involved it sounds like a re-render.

Final Cut’s render files include transitions. If you have clip A and clip B with a transition between them and clip B requires a render the render file will start at 100% clip A, then the transition, then clip B. If you make the render file a master clip when effects added to the render file come on you’ll see an abrupt change to clip A as the transition begins. If you dig into your Final Cut Scratch folder and look at the Render Files folder you can search around for the render file you need, but they aren’t human readable and the way Final Cut’s transitions with effects on clips and render files work won’t do you a favour.

Perhaps you need to simplify your effects stack – sometimes you can do more with less and improve your render time.

[Jeff Meyer]

I think you’re too worried about equipment. If you’re cutting HDV and DV25 a Firewire400 connected solution should be sufficient. You seem attached to the idea of needing RAID also – which may or may not be a good solution.

If the budget is there look at the G-Speed Q products. Another option would be the Drobo products, which can grow with you by simply adding drives. I would like to add a word of caution against using proprietary technologies such as Drobo. If they go out of business tomorrow all the BeyondRAID technology in the world won’t matter if you can’t get tech support when you need it – which brings me to my next point. RAID-5 and RAID-1 are band-aid solutions. They don’t replace a tape on the shelf. They’re still dependent on something spinning thousands of times a minute, with extreme manufacturing tolerances that will fail. The real question is how things will work when a hard drive fails. If you want to cross your fingers (and risk your client’s money) with only RAID-5 feel free.

My advice at this stage is to get a 3TB FW800 drive for your media to live on. Get a second 3TB drive (FW or USB) and manually keep them synced. You’ll know what projects you’ve worked on day-to-day, so it shouldn’t be difficult. Right-click on a Finder window, pick Show View Options and check the “Calculate all sizes” box. This feature and a side-by-side comparison can help you make sure you aren’t missing an entire reel or something crazy like that. Once every three to six months wipe the backup drive and copy/paste everything back over just to be certain everything is current. It sounds like a lot of oversight, but the Calculate all sizes and the fact that media doesn’t change makes it relatively trivial for the peace of mind it offers. When I was in undergrad this very method save my tail after a drive failure.
Keep your projects on your system drive with a Time Machine backup so that it is always up to date – or a Skydrive, Dropbox, Sugarsync style service to keep things current in the cloud. This will be much easier than having to sync the drives daily. Source media (the video clips) don’t change too often, but project files change hourly.
You can sell this solution internally by saying the startup cost is lower, but also inform them that you will need additional funding to purchase another couple of drive in a year or however long you believe filling 2.5TB may take. Leave some extra space on your drives. You’ll eventually use it, and it keeps them performing faster.

The advantage of this method is there are two discreet copies which can (should) be in two different places. With RAID they have to travel together, which makes power surges or natural disasters more of a factor. You said MacBook somewhere in this thread, which generally means drives are moving, which dramatically increases the failure rate – a very good reason to avoid RAID-5.

Now, to get to the last question you asked, eSATA, Firewire800, and USB are all 100% discreet. You can not start at eSATA and jump out to a Firewire or USB drive. You can daisy-chain through Firewire, and you can get hubs for both USB and Firewire, but remember, for a hub you’ll be limited by the throughput of the single connection from the hub to the computer.

I wouldn’t be too worried about specs like areal density. For HDV (ProRes, ProResLT) or DV25 a single drive connected over Firewire will get it done. What you need to do is figure out how to get cutting, and how to get assets and projects backed up.

[Jeff Meyer]

I’m sending half hour TV shows in XDCAM hd422 1080i (in MXF not MOV) that are coming in between 10 and 13gb depending on how much black the network requests for commercial breaks. If your one minute test is 37gb there’s a problem.

Is XDCAM HD422 50mbps 1080i in a Quicktime your deliverable?
• If so change your Final Cut sequence settings to match. Field dominance should be upper. If you have to change the frame size or pixel aspect ratio be sure to check ALL of your clips to ensure they’re properly conformed to the new sequence settings, then export at current settings.
• If not please tell us what your deliverable is so we can advise what changes you need to make.

[Jeff Meyer]

Did you change the Motion Filtering Quality in the Video Processing tab of the Sequence Settings to Best?

[Jeff Meyer]

If you’re planning to to with the FedEx route and reusing media I would suggest getting some CF or SD cards instead of rewritable BluRay discs. Discs scratch too easily for me to consider reusing them. If you’re going to keep putting BluRays on the shelf as masters they could be a good approach.

If you go with the FTP route Disk Images could be a good strategy due to the MD5 checksum error check. Just don’t skip the verifying step when opening it up and it’ll make sure everything moved successfully.

[Jeff Meyer]

It’s the controller that G-Tech bundles with a G-Speed ES. It has a RAID engine on it, but the G-RAID will always rely on its own internal RAID controller.

[Jeff Meyer]

Just ran AJA System Test (1080, 10bit, 2gb) on my 2TB 4th gen G-RAID. Here are the results. I included the G-Speed ES drives to establish that drive capacity doesn’t have a substantial difference on speed.

G-RAID FW800 scores:
write 64.7 MB/s
read 57.1 MB/s

G-RAID eSATA scores: (using controller bundled with G-Speed ES series)
write 169.2 MB/s
read 168.3 MB/s

G-Speed ES 12tb RAID-5 scores:
write 158.0 MB/s
read 177.3 MB/s

G-Speed ES 8th RAID-5 scores:
write 158.3 MB/s
read 176.1 MB/s

220Mb/s nanoflash is about 28MB/s. (Megabits versus MegaBytes) You should be able to get two streams of it (56MB/s) over FW800, but for more than two streams look into eSATA or the Promise RAID. They’re saying the 4 drive enclosure gets over 500MB/s – nearly triple your G-RAID over eSATA, and nearing 10x the G-RAID over firewire. Hope this is helpful.

[Jeff Meyer]

With WMV every second or two it will draw a key frame, then for subsequent frames it notes what changes instead of drawing it from scratch. This saves space, allowing your file to be 1.5gb, but it also makes it very difficult for an editor to work the the file. For Final Cut to show a particular frame it may have to draw 30 other frames before it can start looking at the frame you want to see. Also this is a specialised Windows format – it isn’t going to do well on a Mac. You’ll have much better performance with Windows Movie Maker, not that you’ll have a quarter of the capability of Final Cut.

With ProRes every frame is stored as its own image. This takes more space, but is much easier for the computer to work with. If you convert up front to a standard frame size (720×480, 1280x720x 1920×1080) and work with a codec in the ProRes family (ProRes LT sounds appropriate for this project) Final Cut will be much more friendly.