[Joe Wood]

Did you try tying to the scale of the shape layer itself instead of the scale of the rectangle?

// grab sourceRect based on layer time
R = sourceRectAtTime(sourceTime(time), true);

// calculate scale relative to comp
w = thisComp.layer("Shape Layer 1").transform.scale[0] / R.width * 100;
h = thisComp.layer("Shape Layer 1").transform.scale[1] / R.height * 100;

s = Math.min ( w, h );

[ s, s ]

[Joe Wood]

WOW! Thanks for your response, Bob!

I guess to clarify, the reasoning I had for keeping this so cheap was to have it more of a proof of concept for our department, to get the go-ahead for future investment in hopefully the next quarter. I tried to have this done back at the beginning of the year with a professional company who came in to look at our network and suites and gave an estimate of $30-40K starting rate for their system, which the people upstairs wouldn’t even hear, mainly cause they saw a huge price tag and didn’t understand the reasoning for why we needed it.

My original thoughts with using the 5,1 MacPro, is because it already has 2x 2.4 Xeon processors, & ECC Ram, which from what I was told in the past is similar to what you would find in a server system. And to have 4x 4TB drives with RAID 0 (striped) for the speed and the fact that this system would be temporary and does not require any redundancy, seeing how everything we have is constantly backed up externally. I have no idea about RAID cards, but the Mac Pro has a RAID assistant internally that allows setup for RAID 0.

I hadn’t even thought about the bottleneck of the gigabit network, but will definitely keep that in mind now for the future as well. I am most definitely aiming for us to have a full-fledged system to add to the rack with a proper RAID and redundancy, but as I said just need something to show the people upstairs the purpose of having a server to begin with (I don’t understand why they don’t get it, we get a big client and the boss gets a new car, but we’re still fighting to get off our crappy file management system and get something real a reliable).

(Mainly right now, which mainly still are working in 1080p, and if we are ever working with for 4K footage we are using proxies.)

Taking all of this into consideration would a NAS system like the QNAP TVS-873e you mentioned be really much faster in comparison to doing my crappy band-aid MacPro System? The cost difference would be the difference of under $1k (Which they would approve very easily) VS $2-3k which they might hold issue with.

Sorry if I’m being a pain, I’m just trying to get my team upgraded to the 21st century here.