[Petros Kolyvas]

A good question. The latest update for the Matrox MXO2 drivers (released this week) indicated compatibility with CS5.5.1 on the Mac but no update was available when I checked.

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There is no intuitive interface, not even the nipple. It’s all learned. – Bruce Ediger

[Petros Kolyvas]

Hi Chris,

Thanks for the props. It was a lot of fun, and a month in the unit is working really well; fast, reliable and quiet like I’d hoped for.

Regarding the physical connections on the back of units (it was the rack-mounted 8-bay 6G but I believe they’re the same except for form factor), the fact that 8 drives are connected via a single physical link was what made it one of the ready-made solutions that interested me most.

Now, before I go any further, I should say that as with anything on these-here-internets, what I’m about to say is based on what I’ve studied and learned throughout the project (coupled with some previous knowledge of SCSI from the days of Ultra SCSI), but is by no means definitive, so I would anyone that knows more and/or better should chime in as needed.

SAS ports are not physical. So, for example, the ATTO R680 I’m using has two external physical connections, but is actually an 8-port card. Each SAS port (a link from initiator to target) runs at 6Gb/sec. So one physical cable carries 6Gb/s x 4 ports of bandwidth.

From what I understand, these “ports” are more or less managed by the SAS host bus adapter. On the command line, for example, I can see that the four ports at connector A are “up” and connected to the Intel SAS expander at 6Gb/s so that one physical connection can carry a maximum theoretical 24Gb/s when we’re talking data streaming across a possible 4 ports.

How this works in practice is still fuzzy in my mind, but (back to your original question) for me having to use up two physical connectors for a single 8-disk enclosure seemed wasteful to me and probably a choice of lower-cost design.

I believe the iStorage Pro 6G units (for example) use the well-regarded Areca 6G SAS expander. (https://www.areca.com.tw/products/sascableexpander.htm). The same Areca unit is used in the 24-disk Norco (https://www.norcotek.com/item_detail.php?categoryid=8&modelno=ds-24e) and many many others – so you can see the vast possibilities for just a single physical SAS connection.

In regards to your Stardom question; I don’t really have enough experience with Stardom to really know – we have a single Stardom product here (a ProDrive Mac Pro RAID-0 “Tray” in an older Mac Pro) and while it works fine, the build quality isn’t spectacular. Having said that it was incredibly cheap for such a niche product and Stardom did respond to support requests.

So far, every manufacturer we’ve dealt with was reasonably responsive, including Stardom, Sonnet (though lately they haven’t answered a single message), iStoragePro, and ATTO. Each step up though, has resulted in more personalized service and much more clear willingness to help without cookie cutter solutions.

Here’s to hoping you find exactly what you need!

—
There is no intuitive interface, not even the nipple. It’s all learned. – Bruce Ediger

[Petros Kolyvas]

In my case “Green” in the bins labels clips red amongst other equally puzzling combinations. At first I had no idea what was going on… but then I remembered thinking the pastel colours Premiere Pro ships with were too muted to quickly tell the difference on occasion.

Messy labels it is. 😉

—
There is no intuitive interface, not even the nipple. It’s all learned. – Bruce Ediger

[Petros Kolyvas]

I filed a bug report with Adobe regarding this issue. I don’t think you’re doing anything wrong.

—
There is no intuitive interface, not even the nipple. It’s all learned. – Bruce Ediger

[Petros Kolyvas]

The innability to flip between “players” is a serious issue. (we have some matrox hardware as well.)

One temporary work around would be to edit in a non-mxo sequence, but nest that sequence in an MXO2 sequence so you can edit without issue and then monitor your edit on the mxo2 hardware when needed.

Short of that, you’d have to copy/paste the edits between sequences. With all the mxo2 player issues, I find myself doing that even though the mxo2 is hooked up 24/7.

—
There is no intuitive interface, not even the nipple. It’s all learned. – Bruce Ediger

[Petros Kolyvas]

At the moment, I think the answer is no.

Premiere Pro’s handling of tapeless media (logging/binning/etc.) is still lacking. It seems that all the media management for what we might consider “ingest” really has to happen outside of the NLE since it has to already be “on the machine.” What we need is a Log & Tranfer like FCP, but without the transcoding. I’d even accept that it would simply be a utility for importing whole clips.

Conversely (as we’re all quite aware) Premiere’s ability to use those files in an edit is stellar.

I tried to use OnLocation for “ingest” from disk images but it’s behaviour is the same as PremierePro’s. It won’t move or work with MTS files unless they’re already on the hard disk in read/write-enabled directories; this means you can’t create disk images of cards while you’re on location and then use those later on to “import” footage – since there is no true “import” with Premiere – just linking.

In my case the AVCHD footage is Panasonic AVCCAM. So when I had multiple “shoots” on a card (or even multiple scenes on a card) I would copy the selected clips onto a new blank card in slot 2 on the camera and then use that card image to maintain timecode etc while not having my clips all confused together.

That’s the best workaround I could think of at the time.

—
There is no intuitive interface, not even the nipple. It’s all learned. – Bruce Ediger

[Petros Kolyvas]

[Vince Becquiot] “I misread, I thought we were talking about Dynamic linking”

I thought we were talking about it too…

As far as I know (and I might very well be wrong) dynamically linked compositions will still use AE’s render settings (I’m actually opening up the discussion here.) 😉

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There is no intuitive interface, not even the nipple. It’s all learned. – Bruce Ediger

[Petros Kolyvas]

I found lots of AE CS5 (haven’t had the same issues with CS5.5) render issues were fixed by disabling the “Render multiple-frames simultaneously” option under multi-processing in AE or the AE render engine.

When I got really stuck and was trying to export my final edit, in one case I simply used AE to render out all the scenes/shots and then just created a copy of the Premiere Sequence and manually replaced each one; it wasn’t fast, and wasn’t pretty – but it worked.

I wish you the best of luck finding a solution that works – it can get very frustrating!

—
There is no intuitive interface, not even the nipple. It’s all learned. – Bruce Ediger

[Petros Kolyvas]

Hi Bret,

Looks like we’re in exactly the same boat.

Here’s to hoping we get a fix!

—
There is no intuitive interface, not even the nipple. It’s all learned. – Bruce Ediger

[Petros Kolyvas]

HI Paul,

https://www.istoragepro.com/prod.php?id=it4ufer
(You may be surprised.)

I’m pretty sure it’s available diskless if that’s what you’re looking for. (I don’t sell storage solutions – just trying to help.) The iStoragePro site has a long list of places you can purchase such a thing.

Good luck!

—
There is no intuitive interface, not even the nipple. It’s all learned. – Bruce Ediger