Sean Oneil
Forum Replies Created
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Whatever you choose will work. I’m personally a fan of the HD-SDI to HDMI converters. We have one in every bay. That way all audio and video comes down one BNC cable and nothing else. The HDLink Pro even allows 5.1 monitoring.
Sean
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[Chris Babbitt] “Once again, why so expensive? The 8x Pioneer can be had for around $250.”
Same reason. They’re taking advantage of Mac users who don’t know any better.
Find me one example of any Blu-ray drive ever made not working in a Mac. You won’t. They all work. Just like all SATA hard drives work. Just like all USB keyboards work and all LCD monitors work.
Sean
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[Khu Suh] “5. I convert the quicktime to AVI through After Effects CS4”
Don’t do that. Very bad. You’re re-encoding with a very lossy codec.
[Khu Suh] “Collegue import it in FCP and export to Tape”
And then you’re doing it again. Very, very bad.
[Khu Suh] “There are quite a few areas where things can be improved. The biggest being if I can somehow export my premiere pro cs4 project and just send him that which he can open in FCP. (If not possible, does a PPRO CS4 on mac and PC share the same project files)”
Projects or media? Premiere Pro CS4 on the Mac will handle Quicktime media natively. I thought it did on the PC as well. Have you even tried importing the .mov without converting?
For sharing project data, I read that Premiere CS4 can export and import Final Cut XML project files. I don’t know if that is Mac only or on both platforms.
Sean
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Who made the DV tape? Is it the same place you’re doing the telecine at?
Sean
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I have some questions. How far away is the room? Do you need to send audio as well? Besides the Kona, do you have other equipment you’d like to be able to monitor (like decks)? Do you have an SDI patchbay, a component patchbay, both, or neither?
Sean
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Shane,
That’s correct, we were not talking about a SAN. If I were going to do a SAN system today I personally would choose fibre channel rather than 10gbe with iSCSI or AoE. I agree with you there. But we were discussing AFP file-sharing, which is not possible over Fibre Channel. There is a protocol for “IP over FC” as you mentioned but it doesn’t exist in the Mac OSX kernel and surely never will. If it did exist, I’d be using it right now.
Yes AFP is less efficient than block-level SAN. But it’s also a lot less complicated, less expensive, and makes it much easier to use your own storage devices that can easily be upgraded down the road. It might make more sense for smaller places.
The reason Bob was only getting 180MB/s is surely the limitations of AFP on OSX Leopard. If one were to use NFS sharing over 10gbe on Linux or Solaris, it would no doubt be 3 times faster at the very least. Based on what I’ve read, AFP is inefficient and the TCP stack in Leopard sucks. But I’ve also heard that Snow Leopard is going to drastically improve this. We shall see. I think people at large facilities will still be using SANs for years to come. But when 10gbe becomes more common I think it’ll be more than enough to satisfy the needs of small shops.
As far as copper vs. fiber interconnects, it’s just a matter of distance. All the Macs at my place are next to each other in a machine room, so if I were to get 10gbe adapters I’d only need the copper CX4 ones.
Sean
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[Shane Sokolosky] “you can setup TCP/IP over fiber”
I would do this in a heartbeat if I could. But my understanding is that Solaris is the only OS that supports this.
Sean
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[Chris Babbitt] “Will any drive work.”
Yes.
[Chris Babbitt] “Does the Fastmac have some kind of magic that justifies a $580 price tag for a 4x drive?”
No, but it probably comes with a $10 IDE/SATA adapter.
Fastmac makes slim Blu-ray drives that are specially made to fit in Macbook Pros. For desktop it’s just a generic drive like any other. What they’re doing is practically a con job. I can understand a 10-20% markup for the “We promise this works on Macs” niche. But they’re charging more than double. Ridiculous.
Sean
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Bob, to quote someone just highlight the portion of their message and then hit “q” on your keyboard :).
Sean
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All 3 articles are correct.
[Chris Babbitt] “One article says that the MacPro optical bays are IDE, not SATA”
There is an IDE plug back there if you want to use an IDE Blu-ray drive.
[Chris Babbitt] “and you have to buy a special SATA adaptor to plug into the back of your drive”
You can do that if you want. Some vendors include it. Still a lot cheaper than buying external.
[Chris Babbitt] “Still yet another article says that you have to buy a SATA cable and pull a bunch of stuff out of the machine in order to access the SATA ports on the mother board.”
The cable should come with it (if not it costs less than $5). Remember with external you have to buy a firewire cable which costs more.
If you have small hands (I don’t) you don’t even need to pull anything out. I wouldn’t recommend my grandmother do it, but we’re all intelligent professionals here, right?
There is one drawback. SATA ports 5 & 6 don’t show up in Boot Camp, so you can’t use it in Windows (if that matters to anyone – it might if you want to actually view retail Blu-ray movies).
Regardless, it’s just silly to me to go external when you’ve got that empty optical bay meant for this. It’s also worse for the environment and your power bill.
Sean