Petros Kolyvas
Forum Replies Created
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Hi Thomas,
If it makes you feel any better the Matrox MXO2 on Premiere is also very flaky and doesn’t work as well as FCP; it’s too bad really as monitoring (in current generation software) seems to be a “bonus” at the moment.
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There is no intuitive interface, not even the nipple. It’s all learned. – Bruce Ediger -
[Thomas Pohl] “Fireface 800 is not supported”
Hi Thomas,
I’ve been using a Fireface 800 with CS5.5/10.6 and 10.7 without issue as the audio interface. I’ve found it to be supported adequately. Just curious what you meant?
PK
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There is no intuitive interface, not even the nipple. It’s all learned. – Bruce Ediger -
The issue you’re describing with CS5.5 and the Matrox player is not a PremierePro issue directly, it’s an MXO2 Player issue.
We have an MXO2 in our main suite here and whether it’s CS5.5 on Lion or CS5 on Snow Leopard the behaviour is the same. Eventually the player will lockup and display the behaviour you describe; no playback, no output (even to computer monitor) and sometimes a restart of the app won’t fix it.
Matrox says to trash your Premiere Pro preferences (and maybe even uninstall and re-install the driver) and you might want to try that a few times – but considering how this issue constantly crops up, that kind of ridiculous maintenance (which they suggested equally frequently with FCP to be fair) is indicative of their own driver issues.
In my own case I have to, when working with premiere pro, start a sequence that’s not using the MXO2 player, edit away, and then copy the sequence into an MXO2 player sequence to hope for playout or monitoring. When NOT using an MXO2 sequence, the freezes, stalls, and diplay issues go away and Premiere Pro works very well. The sequence, once copied or imported to an MXO2 sequence is a gamble for playback.
I’ve been incredibly displeased with Matrox over my two years with the MXO2 because of constant issues like this. It’s too bad, because the MXO2 series had (and with the as-yet-unreleased Thunderbolt adapters still has) a lot of promise – however, it has yet to really live up to that promise in a reliable, consistent way.
Good luck!
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There is no intuitive interface, not even the nipple. It’s all learned. – Bruce Ediger -
Hi Alex,
Thanks for pointing that out – I am still learning the G+ ropes. I made the photo album public (but I also added you to my Production and Post circle 😉 ).
While I learned a lot doing this DIY project, like any DIY projects there are caveats; the most important of which is how much one’s time might be worth. In this case, I did it for fun as much as utility, as well as to learn as much as possible about SAS direct attached storage and enclosures. But if you add up all the hours troubleshooting and waiting and testing the cost rises dramatically.
Additionally, anyone looking at these photos considering doing something similar should know that there are a lot of enclosure management features included in products like the one you suggested which are much harder to duplicate in DIY projects (and I did not duplicate any of them here) – things like enclosure temperatures, drive tray fit, finish and quality and font-panel feedback like disk location routines and drive failures.
The other important issue is that you’d use the same disks for the DIY model vs. commercial solutions and that means the same high prices. The RAID-5 array consists of RE4-GP drives so there’s no money to be saved since those drives would be used in something like the iStorage Pro as well.
I certainly would encourage anyone so-inclined to have a go, but conversely they should at least be aware of the what they aren’t getting in the DIY model when compared to commercial solutions – which for many end users include features that are dramatically more important in mission-critical or time sensitive workflows.
Despite the disadvantages, the two DIY advantages I can see are:
1) DIY allows for each dollar spent on the enclosure to have a high disk ratio. The Norco case I used was bottom-of-the-barrel cheap; thinner construction, and lacking really nice finishing, but for the price of an 8-disk enclosure (ProAvio S8-MS) I get 20 disks instead of 8 and it only eats up one of the SAS ports on my R680 instead of both. There are enclosures at twice the price which are far nicer builds. Few however, compare to any of the ready-to-go SAS enclosure offerings from companies like JMR, Sonnet, Promise, CalDigit, etc. I think this is simply a value proposition; the service and builds these companies offer is often excellent. The service for DIY is a lot of individual hardware vendors that couldn’t care less.
2) Noise levels. I replaced all the chassis fans and used a nearly silent power supply. About a year ago I purchased a Sonnet D500P (port multiplied eSATA enclosure.) It was billed as silent. I forget what marketing rhetoric can mangle “silent” into. But the first thing I did when I received it was replace the case fan with a true “silent” fan. The same goes for this unit. The chassis shipped with 6 ultra-high speed, ultra-high airflow, ultra-noisy fans. There were swapped out for switchable speed fans that run from silent to moderately noisy depending on the setting. The unit has been running in “quiet” mode for two weeks without issue. If you look at the pictures the 20-disk enclosure is as quiet as the 5-disk Sonnet enclosure on top (because Sonnet uses a small power supply with a tiny, high-speed, fan.)
Anyway, I can’t believe I wrote all that up. It was fun, and I’d do it again but I have no illusions that any number of off-the-shelf solutions would be as good, if not better (putting aside upfront costs) for many/most professionals.
Here are the links that made it happen for me:
https://www.servethehome.com/sas-expanders-build-jbod-das-enclosure-save-iteration-2/
https://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1548839
https://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1484614
https://forums.servethehome.com/showthread.php?148-Intel-RES2SV240-24-port-SAS2-Expander-Wiki
https://forums.creativecow.net 😉—
There is no intuitive interface, not even the nipple. It’s all learned. – Bruce Ediger -
Hi Alex,
In the end, I decided to build my own 20-disk 6Gb SAS enclosure (https://plus.google.com/photos/104019828057277999380/albums/5643923770500610449).
I do think that if I had to buy an diskless enclosure, ready-made, the iStoragePro 6G enclosure was the best option, so thanks for taking the time to respond.
Take care,
PK—
There is no intuitive interface, not even the nipple. It’s all learned. – Bruce Ediger -
Thanks Tom.
Luckily, I have a working partition of 10.6.8 so it’s not a big deal (rarely without a parachute) – just that everything else seems to work fine with CS5.5 (quite well actually) so there was no indication something else was amiss.
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There is no intuitive interface, not even the nipple. It’s all learned. – Bruce Ediger -
(The new lacie Thunderbolt drive actually has dual TB ports, whether that would allow 2 laptops connected I’m not so sure – https://www.lacie.com/products/product.htm?id=10549).
I believe that’s so units can be daisy-chained.
Still it’s all worth exploring. Let us know what you end up doing – I’m sure more and more people will be interested in this type of compact setup. 😉
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There is no intuitive interface, not even the nipple. It’s all learned. – Bruce Ediger -
If something like you’re asking for (a dual connection Thunderbolt enclosure) exists, it would most likely be quite expensive. At the moment, the Thunderbolt ecosystem is sparse; many of the “annouced” product lines have yet to come to market.
You could do what you want with a single Thunderbolt/FW800/eSATA disk array and a small gigabit ethernet switch. You could even save costs and use a cross-over gigabit ethernet cable to connect the two machines directly – you’d simply have to assign them IP addresses manually as if they were on the same network.
The machine doing the ingest and logging doesn’t need the kind of speedy access to the disks that the editing station needs so GbE should be more than adequate.
As for directory/folder permissions, I’d use Sandbox 2 – it’s free.
https://mikey-san.net/sandbox/You could also just opt for installing OSX server on the editing machine and use XSAN, but in the past we’ve used Sandbox 2 to great success for a setup similar to what you’re describing without any of the server/processor overhead.
The only caveat is finding a way to live-update the list of available clips in the editing app – I’m not saying it can’t be done, I just don’t know enough about Premiere’s innards to know how that might work.
Sounds like a fun challenge though. I wish you the best of luck – and suggest you wait an see what other ideas are presented here. Lots of ways to skin a cat!
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There is no intuitive interface, not even the nipple. It’s all learned. – Bruce Ediger -
Hi there,
So sorry to hear about the issues. Can you give us a little more information on the sequence you’re trying to export?
Sequence settings, video source formats, and destination (delivery) format would help.
Do you have linked AE compositions on the sequence timeline?
Are you getting any specifc error?
Are you exporting directly or queuing up in Media Encoder?
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There is no intuitive interface, not even the nipple. It’s all learned. – Bruce Ediger -
You can install Lion without upgrading from Snow Leopard in a few easy steps.
-Download/Purchase the Lion installer from the App Store
-Right click on the installer and “Show package contents”
-Browse to “Shared Support” and in there is InstallESD.dmg (this is the Lion boot disk image!)
-Use disk utility to burn a DVD of the Lion disk or use target disk mode to copy it to a USB flash drive or a partition on a USB hard disk.Then: Install lion without snow leopard!
A guide is available here:
https://www.eggfreckles.net/tech/burning-a-lion-boot-disc/I partitioned an SSD on one of our Mac Pros and installed Lion as described. It worked very well.
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There is no intuitive interface, not even the nipple. It’s all learned. – Bruce Ediger