Mitch Ives
Forum Replies Created
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[gary adcock] “Sorry Mitch,
I am with Shane this is not the case with the Intel laptops,
With the G4 book using the 400 & 800 FW buses at the same time only gave FW 400 speeds.”Gary, as stated in my post… the Intel MBPro is the only machine I had not yet tested this on, since the 17″ is only recently out and the 15″ had no FW800 port.
Your news is good news. Now, is the FW800 on the 17″ MBPro delivering twice the throughput of the FW400 port… or is it simply faster than the FW400 port as we had before? If anyone has tested this and has some numbers, I’m sure many of us would be interested in hearing them…
Mitch Ives
Insight Productions Corp.
mitch@insightproductions.comApple Certified Trainer: Final Cut Pro 5
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[Shane Ross] “This is the barefeats test page for FW800:
https://www.barefeats.com/fire35.html
Not double, but DEFINATELY faster.”
This was done a dual G4 (1.42), not a G5… the G5 has issues as I mentioned earlier
Mitch Ives
Insight Productions Corp.
mitch@insightproductions.comApple Certified Trainer: Final Cut Pro 5
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[JeremyG] “[Mitch Ives] “so 400 drives and 800 ports are essentially on the same bus…”
I don’t think this is a secret, Mitch. This has been known for some time. It is for this reason that you can’t have an aja io and a firewire 800 drive on the onboard fw controllers, there’s not enough bandwidth as the bus is shared and that’s no secret. FW800 does run faster (I’m not sure about double fw400, but fast enough for 8 Bit UC SD, and definitely fast enough for DVCPRO HD). You can’t have any other fw device connected to the onboard fw ports on the mac at the same time, but FW800 does run faster.”
I don’t think I implied that that part was a secret.
FWIW, you can have an 800 drive in use with an Io. You can’t use it as a media drive, but as a startup drive. We had one of the first Io’s and used an external FW800 as a startup drive and had four SATA drives internally as a RAID and did uncompressed 10 bit for 1-1/2 years.
A single drive is minimal for 8 bit, and unacceptable for 10 bit. Yes, it can work with DVCPro HD IF you’re doing simple things. We tend to do more complicated timelines. We still find that a four drive SATA array will occassionally still have trouble with complicated DVCPro HD timelines. I guess it all depends on what you’re doing?
Mitch Ives
Insight Productions Corp.
mitch@insightproductions.comApple Certified Trainer: Final Cut Pro 5
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[Shane Ross] “I’m not talking about a MBP….I am talking about my G5 Tower.”
Neither was I… the dual G5 towers are where we first discovered the issue…
[Shane Ross] “And this information preplexes me. Because I have been able to capture and edit 8-bit uncompressed, and even 10-bit uncompressed on my G-Raids…something I couldn’t even DREAM of doing on my EZQuest FW400 drives. How am I able to pull this off if the throughput is the same?”
Why? The G-raid is a dual drive enclosure. In addition, it uses a controller to read the inner platters of one drive and the outer platter of the other, to achieve a consistent throughput regardless of where on the drive it’s reading. Your EZQuest is a single drive enclosure is it not?
[Shane Ross] “What tool do you use to measure this? I wanna do some tests on my own.”
Two or three different ones… but the AJA utility (which is free) seems to be fairly useful. Rob at Barefeats has something that he likes even better. You might want to check there…
Mitch Ives
Insight Productions Corp.
mitch@insightproductions.comApple Certified Trainer: Final Cut Pro 5
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[david Saraceno] “However Mitch, a Firewire PCI card creates a second bus that uses the PCI slot.
It doesn’t have anything to due with the motherboard firewire controller in that configuration.”
Yes, I think most people know that…
Mitch Ives
Insight Productions Corp.
mitch@insightproductions.comApple Certified Trainer: Final Cut Pro 5
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[david Saraceno] “Hate to jump in here, but I’ve captured 720/24p from the Panasonic directly to the internal drive of a G4 PB without DF.”
That’s interesting. I’d like to see a capture of footage comprised of numbered frames. People are often dropping frames without knowing it. Can you play it back from there?
[david Saraceno] “And Mitch, I’ve read Rob Morgans reports at barefeats.com as to how the G5 PCI slots do not handled firewire RAIDs very well.
Actually slower than the G4 desktops.
I’ve never seen a report by Rob Morgan that FW800 runs at FW400 speeds.”
That’s one of the places I saw it, but it may have been a private discussion with Rob, since I email him to compare our individual tests off the forum…
[david Saraceno] “If anybody wants me to, I can run the AJA KONA System Test to confirm this with FW400 port and the FW800 port.”
It’s one of the utilites we used to research the issue…
Mitch Ives
Insight Productions Corp.
mitch@insightproductions.comApple Certified Trainer: Final Cut Pro 5
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[Noah Kadner] “My direct experience is the same as Shane’s- the 800 ports are way faster than the 400 ones on both G5 desktops and on Powerbooks. MacBooks just came out with FW800 on 17” so I haven’t had as much experience but so far they seem up to par with the rest of the line. “
I don’t know how to tell you guys this, but Barefeats, and several places have pointed this out. Apple has had discussions on their board about this. It’s been acknowledged by Apple. It’s a limitation of some kind in the G5’s. I’ve run tests and seen the same throughput out of both ports on our G5’s. I don’t have all the details anymore, since this isn’t “new” news… it’s common knowledge.
On my PB G4 I’ve seen a minor difference (10-15%), but nothing near the doubling that their should be.
Mitch Ives
Insight Productions Corp.
mitch@insightproductions.comApple Certified Trainer: Final Cut Pro 5
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[Shane Ross] “You mean to say that on the current MBP 17″, the FW800 port is no faster than the 400? Or are you saying that across the board they aren’t? Like my on my Dual 2GB G5? If so…show me proof of that, because I am using them and they are working great…not one dropped frame. But if I put the footage on a FW400 drive, it chokes.”
Trust me Shane, this is the worst kept secret in the Universe among those of us with the inside track. Get some testing software and test the speed of a drive hooked to the FW800 port. Then hook the SAME drive to a 400 port, and surprise… same throughput. Now, in all fairness, I haven’t yet tried this on the new MBpro, but it’s true on every other PB and the G5 towers.
If you’re seeing a difference, then there is a difference in your two drives, bridge chips in the case, etc.
[Shane Ross] “Or are you talking about if you have FW800 drives attached to a computer, then attach a FW400 drive that slows the whole bus to FW400 speeds? If so, that is solved by installed a PCI FW card ($30) and not using the built in FW400 ports…which I have done.”
Well, you won’t like this either. Even though there is a bridge, there is only one FW controller chip on the MB, so 400 drives and 800 ports are essentially on the same bus…
Mitch Ives
Insight Productions Corp.
mitch@insightproductions.comApple Certified Trainer: Final Cut Pro 5
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[Darren Kelly] “We have been recording all our material directly to the FS100 and then using that to connect to our FCP systems. We have found this to be successful, with no missing clips, or any corruption.”
It will be good to hear from you from time to time to see if this is still true after several months of use…
Mitch Ives
Insight Productions Corp.
mitch@insightproductions.comApple Certified Trainer: Final Cut Pro 5
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[Shane Ross] “The Macbook Pro will handle DVCPRO HD just fine. It is the hard drives that will be the issue, as the only firewire drives that will work with DVCPRO HD are FW800 drives (like the G-Raid), and the 15″ MBP lacks a FW800 port.”
Shane, where did you get that idea? On the current Macs, the 800 ports aren’t any faster than the 400 ports. Sad, but true. Perhaps that will change in the new Intel towers?
Mitch Ives
Insight Productions Corp.
mitch@insightproductions.comApple Certified Trainer: Final Cut Pro 5