Marcus Lyall
Forum Replies Created
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iScsi sounds interesting.
Wasn’t thinking of using this for editing just yet.
But it’s tempting…So far we’ve got an old 8 drive Proavio linked up to a Supermicro box running FreeNAS on a little USB stick.
Going to get a second Proavio hooked up this week and then look into getting a proper enclosure if it’s all working OK.Got good speeds over gigE, but haven’t tried FCP / Premiere yet.
Dunno if SanMP would work on FreeBSD…
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We use Presstore and an LTO5 jukebox.
You need to be thinking about having both a nightly ‘backup’ for work in progress.
And an ‘archive’ for finished projects.If your edits are deadline sensitive, I would recommend that you have a primary SAN for your editors to work from, plus a mirror of this SAN, in case the first one goes down.
So every night, the data on your primary SAN is backed up onto tape and to a second SAN, so you only lose 1 days work if everything goes wrong.
Plus your editors can keep working that day from secondary SAN.Even better, keep project files backed up on your desktop machines, as you’ll be updating these more often than footage.
The rule of thumb is that your data should be in 3 places at the same time while you are working. One of these should preferably be offsite.
Sounds drastic but believe me you do not want the pain when it goes wrong and the backup plan isn’t working. I have been there and it is not good at all.
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Adobe seem to have spent a huge amount of time convincing the post industry that it’s a viable proposition for larger projects and professional workflows…. Only to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.
It would be really nice to have a little product stability in Premiere and AFX in order for us to make some decisions about whether it’s worth rolling out to our whole business.
We’ve just got to the point where we’ve settled on Premiere as our primary editing package, despite it’s stability issues. It’s just not as stable as FCP classic was.
Premiere still a bit unstable. Would be nice if it didn’t crash so hard.
Would be better if I didn’t have to pay a monthly subscription on top of my 3 CS6 licenses to have this ‘feature.Also, Multiple CC licenses need to be able to be administered from one account.
So I don;t have to set up dummy accounts for freelancers.
Dunno if you can do this at the moment.Great innovations coming from Adobe. Premiere and AFX looking better than ever….
Maybe just leave the license innovations a while until the market is truly captured? -
Hi Jason,
Have a look at some of my previous posts from a few years back on this forum.
I did the same kinda DIY thing as you are talking about.
I did get it working. It didn’t cost £15k to set up.
It still works now. Does exactly what you need.
Built with off-the-shelf gear.I also had a FreeNas 20gb system built for me by an IT buddy.
8 ethernet ports. 80mb per second to each port. Works like a charm. That was also cheaper than the turnkey system. But it’s now our backup system.We still ended up buying a turnkey solution for £27k.
Why? Because I like being able to point the finger at someone else when the storage goes down in the middle of a project.Turnkey thing was overpriced, is now out-of-date and has had problems. But I still don’t regret buying it.
Wait till your primary storage goes down in the middle of a big project, when you built it yourself. I have been there. It’s not nice.
Seriously. If your storage stops working, then your business is screwed.Buy an overpriced turnkey system from a nearby reseller.
Get a rock-solid backup strategy. Tape storage for safety. Cheap disk backup so you can keep working. -
10gb switches starting to turn up on eBay.
Myricom cards also pretty cheap these days.
For the intrepid, the 2nd hand enterprise market is your friend… at least until you can afford the new stuff.
BTW.. Just watched 13 streams of Prores HD playing over 10gb in Premiere, all with 160 px gaussian blurs on them. In realtime.
Bowled over… -
OK, I think I get it….
My thought was that if I’m doing 10 bit work in Premiere and I’m using a Geforce card, then when it renders using a GPU-accelerated effect, it’ll be doing this in 8 bit not 10 bit.But I guess what might be happening is that I’ll be watching an 8 bit preview when I play something in realtime.
And when it renders, it’s using a different pipeline which works in 10 bit.Assuming this would be the case as otherwise any non-Quadro machine would be working solely in 8 bit, which can’t be right.
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Hi Gavin,
Your setup sounds a lot like ours.
We have about the same number of workstations and a few more render nodes. Plus, like you, we need fast compositing.Here’s my 2 pence. You need…
A self-contained RAID that is 30% bigger than the largest amount of storage you anticipate needing at one time. You’ll probably need something with 24 drives for speed. This should be your primary storage. You want a 10gb ethernet port out of the back.
Something like the systems being suggested above.A back-up raid that can be lower performance but same size.
This is a mirror of your primary storage. Also on 10gb ethernet. It needs to be backing up your primary server on an hourly or nightly basis.A 10gb ethernet switch. Go for fibre, not copper connections.
An Edgecore ethernet switch with a 10gb port in the back, so you can serve out 1gb ethernet to all your animation workstations.
Another ethernet switch to go out to your render nodes.
These connections will give you about 90mb/s I/O. Easily enough for animation.For your faster finishing machines, install 10gb cards and connect them directly to the 10gb switch.
Buy a multi-changer tape backup system and backup software such as Presstore.
Get the whole lot, Sync, Archive and Backup.
Back-up everything from your mirror drive nightly.
Archive at the end of each job.You will need someone to put all this together for you.
Preferably a reseller who can be at your premises within 4 hours if there is a problem.
Allow some time to get it working properly. It’s a big job.
You will also need someone to do about a day a week (at least) of IT support to keep it all working healthily.We have been down this road for some time now.
It’s all about redundancy. You need something where if your primary server goes down, you can get working again as soon as possible. 10gb is good cos it just works.Good luck….
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LTO5 and Presstore.
If you can afford the multichanger LTO5, then get this. Huge timesaver. But expensive.
The big problem with archiving is having to change the media.
Nothing better than going home for the weekend and finding that the whole 10tb has archived itself.
Nothing more boring than forgetting to put the next tape/disk in morning, noon and night.We tried Retrospect, Bru and Presstore.
Presstore is expensive but by the far the best.
Bru is great if you like Terminal. (or was when we were using it).The thing about backup software is to buy the right one first time.
Otherwise you back everything you have up, then realise the software is crap, and have to do it all again with the next one.Other good thing about the multichanger is that you can schedule a nightly backup and stick 10 tapes in. Then you don’t get the situation where you thought the backup was running but the tape was full.
That can get expensive too.
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So hypothetically, there is a UPS, but someone has decided to hit the reset button on the front.
And when the storage device comes back up, the last 48 hours worth of work is corrupted. Because, as it is explained, all of the allocation information for this data (or indeed the data itself) was stored on the RAM cache, and hasn’t been written to disk for the last 48 hours.
So with these systems it’s all about whether it doing write thru or write back? Imagining that one of these settings is more optimised for video playback. ie the one doing less write-backs.
But it seems like having a RAM cache that doesn’t write itself to disk more than, say once a day, would be a fairly fragile scheme?
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We have a Quantum here.
Get the big rackmount one you can put 40 tapes in. Not the standalone thing.
Use Presstore for backing up.