Lance Bachelder
Forum Replies Created
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The new Mojo gives you one SDI port which can output both HD and SD and one HDMI port for HD preview. Also has various audio i/o.
I think the next step up is the Nitris DX at 16k which gives you complete i/o like add’l SDI and component i/o all active like a Kona 3.
Top of the line is the Nitris Symphony around $36 which gives you the same Nitris DX hardware but the upgraded software.
Not sure if any of this is going to get people excited about Avid. There were probably 300 to 400 people in the theater (very full) last night but I saw only 2 or 3 that were under 30 years old.
Lance Bachelder
Southern California -
Avid announced the new HD Mojo etc. in LA tonight – the 10 grand Mojo has HD-SDI and HDMI for monitoring.
All the new bob’s have HDMI and no longer use firewire but a PCI-e interface for better throughput.
Lance Bachelder
Southern California -
Are you on a Windows machine? No PC solution for Pro RES. I usually convert them to a different codec on the Mac and then re-batch them via After Effects into the codec of your PPro project.
Lance Bachelder
Southern California -
I’m real happy with MetaLan – we looked at iStor before we ordered our current raid – I was really impressed by the iStor system though we never got to put it through it’s paces in a production environment. I really think iSCSI is a cool way to set up a SAN that’s all.
Lance Bachelder
Southern California -
Another very cool system we looked at that’s even faster is the iStor. It uses iSCSI protocol with no per seat charge and you can direct connect 8 users with no switch! The only extra cost is the iSCSI initiator software for OSX and a good Alacritech iSCSI card (you can use built-in ethernet ports).
I really wanted to install this system and test it out and iStor was willing to give us a test system but it was vetoed by our producer for debatable reasons.
If it was my studio I would have given it a good shakedown.
Lance Bachelder
Southern California -
One more thing –
The reason we like MetaLAN so much is that it is really simple to set up and use. The cool thing is every workstation, Mac or PC, sees the raid as a local drive instantly – no volume locking/unlocking! True file based file sharing. And no MacDrive software required on the Windows machines like other SAN’s! Reverse is true – you can set-up a WinXP Pro server with NTFS RAID and Macs can read/write to it no problems or add’l software. And MetaLAN uses standard OS – no server version required for metadata server!
Another cool thing is I can go in tomorrow and atach a firewire 800 drive and everyone would instantly see that as a local drive. Any drive/type – even internal raid on Mac Pro can be seen by everyone as if it was directly attached. You can also choose who can see which drive if you like.
I have a 3TB RAID 0 inside the server using the 3 add’l bays on the new Mac Pro’s which can only be seen on the server and I use Retrospect to back up the SAS RAID to this internal raid for emrgency use only.
Hope that helps!
Lance Bachelder
Southern California -
The Mac Pro metadata server is attached to the raid via ATTO SAS card (which is free with the Aberdeen raid!).
In another slot is a Small Tree 4-port ethernet card (could be a 6 port card for even more bandwidwith!) with all ports trunked into one 4 gig pipe (poorman’s 4GB fiber!).
This minimizes the bottleneck between the server and the switch. All Macs (and a couple of PC’s) are attached via a single Cat 6 ethernet cable.
Another tip:
All newer G5’s and MacPro’s have 2 ethernet ports which could also be trunked for a 2 gig pipe to the switch! We are not doing this because we are using the other port to see the studio’s Isilon system where we pull all files for editing etc. (we are doing a CG series) So you can get pretty fast access to data using ethernet wisely with MetaLAN at $299 seat.
I looked at and/or tested just about every SAN out there and this made the most sense to me based on our budget. If money was no object I’d probably upgrade everyone to fiber but we are having no problems cutting Pro RES with this configuration.
Another option would be to put 2 port Small Tree cards in Macs that need more bandwidth – dedicated cards are supposed to outperform built-in ports but I haven’t tested that yet.
Lance Bachelder
Southern California -
Sorry for the confusion Bob – the speed (550 MB sec.) is for the RAID 5 at the server – not the speed to the network. I just mentioned it because most of the fiber raids we looked at could only sustain around 350 MB sec in RAID 5 config.
We are currently using MetaLAN (the ethernet version of MetaSAN) via gig-e to all Mac workstations and getting close to 80MB sec. per seat (7 seats). This is plenty fast for our Pro RES HD workflow. We are using a Small Tree 4-port gig-e card in the Intel MacPro metadata server trunked off our Asante switch for a 4 gig (theoretical) pipe – minimal bottleneck is the key..
The cool thing about MetaSAN is that you can pick and choose who needs speed and configure each seat accordingly (we set everyone at 50 MB sec. max). If someone needs faster access just upgrade that seat to fiber and pay the difference between MetaLAN and MetaSAN – around $700. Of course you’ll need a fiber switch but those are coming down in price these days.
The benefit of the SAS raid vs. fiber, for us, is much simpler/faster pipe between the server and raid.
The Aberdeen raid can be ordered with 100% 15,000 rpm SAS drives (vs. SATA) and dual ATTO controllers for something crazy like 1,700 MB sec. in RAID 0. A fiber MetaSAN set-up with this raid could easily support uncompressed HD to 2 or 3 workstations.
Lance Bachelder
Southern California -
We just installed an Aberdeen 16 drive SAS RAID 5 with ATTO SAS controller on an Intel Mac – gets 550MB reads and 350MB sec. writes sustained!
(even faster in RAID 0 config)We put it on our MetaSAN and it works fantastic with FCP – much faster than fiber and a lot less $$$.
Lance Bachelder
Southern California -
This how we deliver our show every week – we have a 720p 23.976 project and use the Kona 3 secondary SDI output downconverted to center cut 29.97 SD – Digibeta looks awesome.
All output conversion is done in AJA hardware/control panel and not FCP. Trick for frame accurate insert from a 24p project is pre-striping tape at 29.97 df.
Lance Bachelder
Southern California