Nathaniel Cooper
Forum Replies Created
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Hi Doug,
Most of the brand name vendors have solutions to backup/archive to cloud services (S3, Google Drive, Backblaze, etc.), but the phrasing sounds more like you want to edit UHD ProRes remotely, what are your intended ‘cloud’ workflows?
Remote, or cloud based editorial is not really here yet. A few vendors have workarounds, most of which involve proxies because the high res media is just too large. As example, UHD ProRes 422 is going to be in the range of 80MBs, which is way more than most business internet connectivity can handle (at least in the states). We are starting to see Gigabit internet connectivity, which theoretically could sustain a single stream of that, however, then the latency conversation comes in and once again, you can’t play back.
Avid has some solutions, but are going to push you into the $150k+ USD range, if that’s within your budget, it’s worth checking out. Editshare, has some basic remote editing options, but they require you to use their NLE remotely, and it’s pretty limiting in what you can do externally. At ProMAX we have a transcoding engine built into our solution that offloads ProRes proxies (and other formats) to GPU and creates H.264 proxies (or you can specify other options) which can be sync’d or uploaded to the cloud. Then you work on proxies remotely and send the project file back to the local server.
Hope this helps, and if you can fill in more on what you want to do remotely, I’m sure myself/more people can fill in more details on good workflow/product options. You can also get a lot of good educational content from the blog post How to Create a Workflow Your Team Will Actually Use.
Keep us posted and good luck!
Nathaniel @ ProMAX
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I’m going full commercial on this, I apologize for being that guy…
This is exactly what the Platform Portable was designed to do. It turns local USB/Thunderbolt drives into share storage. It comes with a carrying case and has no moving parts inside. I’ve brought it on many flights as carry on.
Here is a recent user story.
“And when I first plugged my RAID unit into the Thunderbolt connection, I was in business” – Remi @ IBST Media
Good luck in your search!
Nathaniel, ProMAX
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Without proper troubleshooting, I’m guessing two paths are being created between the iMac Pro’s and the QNAP. I’m also guessing those two paths are on the same IP scheme. I’d recommend hard setting the IP of the 10GbE connections to a completely different IP scheme.
As example, if your internet/dhcp server is using 192.168.1.x, hard set the IP addresses on the QNAP to 10.10.10.1 and 10.10.11.1. Then hard set the IP addresses on your iMac Pro 10GbE NICs to 10.10.10.255 and 10.10.11.255. Leaving all of the 1GbE stuff on a completely separate IP scheme.
Then specify at the mounting point as smb://10.10.10.1 (and smb://10.10.11.1) to connect to the QNAP.
This should help if the issue is some type of priority conflict. Please note, if this does work, and you have opened/saved projects to the other ip address, you may need to re-link media when you open a project for the 1st time since this change.
Good luck!
Nathaniel Cooper
ProMAX Systems
https://www.promax.com -
Hey Chuck,
Thanks for posting, sounds like you’re looking in a lot of the right area’s. All of the options you mentioned are good ones, Bob knows his stuff and from my understanding is mostly recommending QNAP. 1303 is a reseller out of Colorado, and to Bob’s point, yes, they mostly do Quantum which is almost assuredly a direction you don’t want to go. SNS is a good option, and Small Tree is a good option; they both make their own servers (which differs from Bob/1303) and have both been doing this a long time with a lot of happy clients.
Product-wise, the common ones that you are missing are EditShare, ProMAX & Facilis.
With the set up they currently have, I’d recommend checking out ProMAX Platform, as you mentioned both Thunderbolt storage, as well as Ae/C4D rendering. The Platform allows you to connect their existing thunderbolt RAID and use that as part of the shared network, no different than if it were built in storage. The Platform also allows you to offload Ae/C4D renders to the server itself. I’m pretty sure both of these are unique to ProMAX and tend to be well liked features. That said, I do work at ProMAX so I am partial ????
Good luck in your search!
Nathaniel Cooper
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I did some testing with the bus powered, Thunderbolt 2 model that Akitio has and 260 Read/480 Write is pretty much spot on to what I found testing with ProMAX Platform Online with a 2 year old 15″ MacBook Pro. I swapped to a Sanlink 2 with the same signal chain and performance went up to about 800/800.
Interestingly the same Akitio unit on the same workstation booted to Windows 8 got about 600MB/s each. So, I very much suspect the OS X drivers for that NIC are just not the best.
That said, I’ve still recommended it a few times just because it’s inexpensive, small, bus powered and still 3 times faster than a 1GbE connection. In the right situation it can be great.
Best,
Nathaniel Cooper
ProMAX Systems -
Hey Juan,
There are a few ways you can do this. If you want to go a little DIY, you can use Thunderbolt to Fibre Channel adapters, connect the FC RAIDs up to a MacMini and reshare them as AFP shares. Then go Thunderbolt to 10GbE to a Netgear ProSafe, which can go 10GbE out to the workstations. It’s not particularly fancy or elegant, but for basic sharing it will get the job done.
If you want to step up to a managed solution, this is what the Platform Portable is designed to do, turn existing storage into shared storage. Most users use it with Thunderbolt storage, as that’s more common; but you can certainly put a FC HBA into it. This option would be a bit more expensive, but offer more media management features, rendering, transcoding, etc. https://promax.com/products/platform-portable/
Hit me up if you have any questions and good luck!
Best,
Nathaniel Cooper
ProMAX Systems
nathaniel@promax.com -
All good Justin, thanks for the complements!
Wait till you see our cloud integration ???? Side note, we are about to launch a line of servers that will be at a much lower price point, that can grow into the full workflow server when you guys get to that point. It’s just above QNAP pricing, but it will give a better way to scale your workflow down the line. If you want some details let me know, otherwise good luck with the QNAP, it’s a good product!
Best,
Nathaniel
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Hi Justin,
I don’t know if I’d say there is a catch per-say, but as you stated earlier; you got pretty sketchy help/answers on the front end, when that happens you can usually expect that on the back end, if not worse. QNAP is a good company with a good product, but they don’t have much to provide as far as expertise in pro video, which you may or may not need.
Their technology is fast enough for editing video, because the baseline tech available today is crazy fast (cheap 10GbE NICs, cheap 10GbE switches, 12G controllers, 12G drives, all super fast). So if your only goal is to have a networked RAID that is fast enough to edit from, either will work.
LumaForge will provide a more industry-specific type of support, as they focus on this market.
All of that said, without the specifics, I tend to agree with the statement that loading up RAM is not going to give you any benefit. Processors have minimal impact on video performance, not none, but any mid-range processor (i5-7400 as a good example) will have zero issue providing the processing needed for Shared Storage. In the systems my company has we do load up RAM (sometimes) but only when customers get into offloaded Rendering/Transcoding, outside of that I’m not sure what benefit having 128GB of RAM would give. I’d skip it unless they can give you a specific technical reason that it’s going to help.
As far as other systems, I may be a bit partial, but I’m allowed… check out ProMAX Platform, it goes to the next level of shared storage by adding Asset Management, Archive, Transcoding, Rendering, etc. all built into a single system/single piece of software.
Good luck in your search!
Nathaniel Cooper
ProMAX Systems
nathaniel@promax.com -
I recorded a short video on this for you. It’s not super clean, but I hope this helps!
Nathaniel Cooper – ProMAX Systems
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Hi Joao,
This all makes sense and it seems like you’re looking at the right things and asking the right questions in order to better protect your data. What connectivity is on the storage you listed? Is it all Thunderbolt?
As far as trying this without shared storage, you can do the archive side fine without shared storage; but backing up to LTO without shared storage is pretty hard especially if you want to send copies offsite. You really just need centralized LTO access to handle that without making it an onerous task.
I like the M-Tape a lot, a ton of our customers have used those and it’s just a solid piece of hardware.
For trying to be budget conscious you could start with an M-Tape and some software to create LTFS archives. Then use a disk to disk backup utility (Like carbon copy cloner). Stick with LTFS so when you keep growing and want to move to a centralized backup option your existing archives will still work.
If you can push a little higher on budget, check out the ProMAX Platform Portable. It will turn Thunderbolt/USB/other Storage into shared storage, while adding a Asset Management, Backup and Archive layer. It also works with the M-Tape, but if you got both that would push you slightly over the budget you mentioned.
If you have any questions, feel free to hit me up on here or privately.
Good Luck!
Nathaniel Cooper – ProMAX Systems
nathaniel@promax.com