[Marcus Lyall]

Looking at the possibility of turning my GB Labs Space into a ZFS server. Sounds counter-intuitive, but it’s 4 years old, bought and paid for, apart from the software upgrade and SLA needed to make it play with latest OSX. Which would cost about £5k. Not worth it.
So thinking…Nuke the Space and there’s a nice Supermicro chassis with matched drives, 10gb card, processors, etc. Make a nice nearline backup, file server for 3d rendering, that sort of thing.

Thoughts?

M

[Marcus Lyall]

I’ve got a Quantum Iscalar LTO5 thing.
Runs through an ATTO card, I think, into a Mac Pro.

Presstore seemed to be the best of a bad bunch.
We bought the whole lot, Backup and Archive… and never really got Archive working properly.

I used to really like it. But not so keen at the moment.

[Marcus Lyall]

Hi Todd,

I guess there’s two intentions here.

One is to alert Cow people to the fact that I am talking about this on your forum.
I certainly watch this one way more than the official Adobe one.

The other is to vent a little spleen, when I’m up at 3.30 am still trying to get this working.

I’ll post how I got it (mostly) working on the Adobe forum.
I’ll also file a feature request for improved network rendering with Adobe.

For reference (and discussion), here’s my thoughts on network rendering in less florid language.

1) AE needs a standalone Render client installer which doesn’t require online activation.
Preferably a one click install. Preferably scriptable.
This is so that you can install it simply on render clients. If you have a lot of nodes, this is a massive timesaver. Makes it far more appealing to people offering rendering services too.

Otherwise you have to do what I did last night.
Hours of ‘Whack-a-mole’ with 10 remote desktop connections, going through various dialogue boxes.

2) Lose the watch folder thing. It’s prehistoric.
3) Allow renders to be sent to a network from the render queue. A Check box in the render settings to ‘send to network render’?
4) A window to monitor the render clients. So you can see that they are connected and that they are doing something.

Look. Maxon’s NetRender was really poor too until this release. You needed a server to run it.
It was pretty buggy and it used the same watch folder mentality.
But when working, it was still more advanced than AE’s system.
Now they have lifted their game.

[Marcus Lyall]

Someone will start making a decent soft-pack for moving those Mac Pros around. Then you might be able to stick it in the hold.

But you might be surprised at how cheap you can hire an iMac for.
By the time you’ve hired a monitor….

[Marcus Lyall]

You can ship a workstation. But then you don’t have your computer just when you need it… Just before you go.

Rent a fast computer where you’re going. iMacs are perfect for this.
Easy to move around on site.
Better still, get 2 or 3.

1 to work, the rest to render.

Take a gig ethernet hub.
Put your project on a TB drive.
Share between machines.

I do this sort of thing a lot too.
Find a good rental company in advance. Get them to deliver the day before you arrive.

This is pretty much the one thing that CC licensing is good for.

Another thing when flying. Three copies of your work. Always.
One in the hold on a drive.
One in your hand luggage.
One in your studio at home.

[Marcus Lyall]

It’s irrelevant if the core code and data structures haven’t been altered to be the same between the two applications… and since they DON’T play nicely together in a lot of fundamental ways, I think it’s a safe bet that they indeed have not been touched for a very long time.

So here’s the thing. Most programmers will tell you that software is about 10% coding and 90% UI dev. Maybe slightly different for video.
The UI of AE is amazingly baroque, but we like it in a comfy old sofa kinda way, right?

The strange diagonal arrangement of clips.
The seemingly pointless node interface designed to ward off the Discreet Logic Flint threat of the late 90’s.
The illogical 3d camera interface with the mickey mouse ears and the Film size in the wrong dimension that has been with us since AE5.

I can live with all of this.

But the changes that have happened since the time AE was written are so immense, that it beggars belief that the code base hasn’t changed dramatically.
I know AE is frame-based, essentially Photoshop controlled by a timeline.
I know it’s barely taken seriously by post companies, because of it’s relative inefficiency.
I know it’s almost totally unable to use the magic of Open GL for realtime effects.
But I quite like it after 20 years. It’s still quite fun.
Although I have to say that C4d is a LOT more fun. Because you can, like, push the play button and watch a whole 3d world go by in realtime.
Which is what modern code allows you to do.

Aw, c’mon, quit talking about low-hanging fruit like that and start asking about the necessity for a nested comp to accommodate scaled video… and all of a sudden, the fundamental differences between the two applications becomes very clear.

Besides, what name do you give the feature during your UI tweak? It’s AE name or its PP name? Either way, someone doesn’t like it.

You don’t even have to nest the video unless you use that one stupid scale command. I didn’t even know it was nested in Pr.

We have to use AE feature names because we are on the AE forum, right?

[Marcus Lyall]

“But you have to remember that both AE and PP were bought from other software developers…”

CoSA? Er. That was some time back in the last century, wasn’t it?

“I guess it all depends on whether you consider re-writing software from scratch to be easy or not…”

We’re not talking major stuff here.

Things like trying to use the Mercury Engine for playback in AE with GL-compatible effects for instance. That’s hard stuff. Just calling the same effect the same thing and putting it in the same place?
That’s a UI tweak.

It just feels like there are two dev teams on different floors, who don’t sit down for lunch together that often.

[Marcus Lyall]

I just saw this from Todd.

My guess is that you’ve done something to the clips in Premiere Pro that is causing this change in behavior. An unaltered clip in Premiere Pro will come across as a clip/layer in After Effects, but—for example—a clip that uses certain effects or the Scale To Frame Size option will come across as a precomposition to encapsulate those changes.

So I used Scale to Frame Size.
Thus the precomping…. Er….. Why would this put it into a precomp?

How about calling it ‘fit to comp’, like AE, and have them do the same thing, without the precomp feature?

The idea of having software tools in a product line is that they kinda work the same way. Like a common metaphor…
So why don’t they work the same?

I’m going back to using these tools after a while away from front-line VFX.
There’s a lot of stuff that between these two apps that seems really kinky.
Like there’s now a great colour corrector in PR, but you can only add it in PR, even though it would be kinda super-handy in AFX.
But you can kinda add it when you convert the project, but you kinda don’t get the interface.
And then all the effects are grouped differently. Like PR is a few versions behind… and ahead at the same time….

This doesn’t feel like complicated stuff, surely?
If it’s legacy support, isn’t it time to standardise under the shiny new CC banner?

[Marcus Lyall]

Quite a thread.

The frustration of this SAN forum is that you’ve got people with very little technical knowledge and those with expert knowledge. And a lot of vendors. It doesn’t feel very ‘hobbyist’ which is the charm of the Cow. In the other forums, someone who has figured out something on a short film can help someone who is working on a Hollywood film.
There isn’t quite the critical mass here to make it work like the others.
SAN forum doesn’t feel very peer-to-peer.

Bob at least showed people how to build their own SAN. Which was really useful for me.
Because I couldn’t afford a turnkey system. I get why he’s cranky. SAN stuff is the backbone of your business if you do post. Bad things happen when it goes wrong.

But there’s surely room on this forum for those people geeky enough to want to try out unorthodox networking shizzle and report back to other people on how it worked.
Isn’t that the point of this forum?
It’s great that we get warned by people that it won’t work or that we’ll lose all our data.
But sometimes, in between jobs, it’s fun to just give things a go and see what happens.

I am not a network engineer but I manged to build a SAN from scratch, which is still working 4 years later.

Just to restate that for those people who are on a budget, Ebay is a very viable option for 10gb equipment. We’ve bought all our 10gb from ebay. All of it has worked.

There are very few moving parts in networking equipment.
It is sold at knock-down prices by people stripping out data centres.
My 20 port switch cost less than the EdgeCore switch that does the 1gb ethernet.

You can probably get 4 or 5 machines linked to a 10gb switch for under $4k total if you search hard enough.

[Marcus Lyall]

So, one question.
Any recommendations on a sata drive enclosure.
Looking for something with…

either 24 or 36 bays.
sata multilane connectors.
redundant power supplies.
economical.
rack mount

We have a supermicro rack server. Apparently you can pull the motherboard out and put it in a raid-style chassis. But would prefer not to. Unless it’s relatively painless.