Melvin Chong
Forum Replies Created
-
Your best bet will be playing your NLE timeline via NDI in the cloud (https://www.ndi.cloud/secure.html), but it won’t be ProRes quality as NDI is a highly compressed protocol. The bottleneck here is not costs but internet bandwidth on your clients side. Even if a “Cloud SAN” video playback exists, shoving high data-rates like ProRes 4K for prolonged period from the data-centre will cause network congestion very quickly within the facility itself. Don’t forget “cloud” essentially means someone else’s computers running on virtual machines, which are inherently shared resources within a server. That means there are many overheads involved in terms of CPU and network and ProRes eats CPU like nobody’s business and hogs bandwidth.
-
The MacPro 5,1 is almost 10 years old and the m.2 will probably not take full advantage of the older PCI-e specs. You’re better off using it as a dedicated transcoder using Apple Compressor or Adobe Media Encoder by installing a 10-Gbe adapter and 4 x SSD.
-
Th insane sustained speed of flash memory these days completely negates any need for something like XSAN anymore. Just allocate as many SSD and NVMe as the NAS allowed for cache and tiered-0 storage and you’re good to go.
-
Adobe apps have simply become too bloated for CPUs to catch up.
-
Adobe products are well known for being loaded with fancy features, not for their efficiency.
-
There is always a render tax involved. You either take the time to convert to an editable format beforehand or have a painfully long render time at the end.
-
For $3000 you should have gone the Windows route with i7 CPU and 32Gb of ram. Converting A7 compressed files to an editable format is a heavy-duty task for any CPU.
-
After Effects loads every frame as an uncompressed frame, hence the high ram usage. You can mitigate it with an NVMe drive as disk cache if your machine allows it or alternatively use a raid-0 Sata SSD.
-
From my experience as a ex-post-production support engineer, there is no such thing as too much ram for After Effects. It still retains much of its DNA from its CoSA days and hence is still not an efficient compositor. As with any other Adobe software, it has become way too bloated for its own good.
-
Upgrade your ram to 64Gb. AE is a ram-eater. The more plugins you have, the more they’re loaded into ram, leaving you with less “headroom”, so to speak.