Sean Oneil
Forum Replies Created
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Looks like a winner. Very compelling press release.
Sean
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[Peter Bobrow] ” (5 drives to a 5X1 External Port Multiplier – then 4 External Port Multipliers into a 4-port eSATA controller – see link for diagram and more info) “
Don’t assume port multipliers will work in a Mac using that card. I know for a fact that was a Windows-only feature a year ago. PM is controlled by the OS driver – it’s not plug and play like you would think. Call Addonics and confirm. If it doesn’t work in a Mac, you can still probably use a Sonnet card with the Addonics PM device. And heed David’s warning and read what Bob had to say about it.
[Peter Bobrow] “Also has anyone tried to send this type of compressed HD footage over gigabit ethernet and what was the result? “
It depends on your expectations. It can work okay, but scrubbing around in Final Cut will feel sluggish compared to FC or DAS. Bandwidth isn’t the issue – it’s latency. Many factors will determine the severity of this problem. The beauty is that you can test it before you buy anything. Share a disk on another Mac and try editing off it.
[Peter Bobrow] “eSATA runs at 300 MB/s, but bottlenecking it like this might cut down on data speed. However XDCAM EX is 35Mbit/s which leaves plenty of room to accomodate some bottleneck. “
SATA is actually 300MB/s per port. Your setup would be using four of them. So that 1200MB/s. You won’t get that of course. But not because of a SATA bus limitation.
[Peter Bobrow] “Anyone got a good cheap solution for 20-30TB of storage shared w/ 3-4 editors?”
There are tons of great, cheap options. Unfortunately not on the Mac. I wouldn’t punish anyone by recommending iSCSI on a Mac (at least not until the Small Tree driver comes out). There’s no Infiniband drivers for Mac. And while you can get very expensive 10gbe ethernet, OSX does not provide TCP Offloading, so it wouldn’t work very well – at least not on the client end. Not to mention 10gbe is probably more expensive than FC.
You should check out this product here:
https://www.areca.com.tw/products/fiber_to_sata_ll.htmYou’ll still need FC equipment and MetaSAN, so it’s not a cheap solution. And I don’t know anyone using it so it’s a shot in the dark.
If you can live with AFP filesharing, I would just get some Small Tree cards and use that until a better solution comes along. Projects like FreeNAS and Openfiler are improving every day.
Sean
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[David Roth Weiss] “Because, if you can afford them, from a technical standpoint there’s certinaly no reason not to use them in all situations. They’re simply manufactured to more rigid specifications.”
I used to think that but recently learned there’s more to it than that. Server grade enterprise drives aren’t necessarily more rigid. They’re simply designed to function differently. From what I understand, most will actually disable certain error correction features found in the desktop models. They do this so that the hardware controller can take over those tasks. This actually makes them less suitable for software RAID that doesn’t have a fail-safe or battery backup unit.
Also, sometimes the server grade disks have an unusual disk geometry that only hardware RAID controllers will work with them. The Western Digital YD series is one example. I have a dozen of them. I can go through a long laundry list of SATA controllers that won’t even recognize them (including a G5 built-in SATA, a Mac Pro’s built-in SATA, a Sonnet card, and a Firmtek card). Only our Highpoint and 3ware cards will work with them. I’m not saying that’s always the case, such as the Seagates we’re talking about. I’ve just learned that server drives shouldn’t be used outside of an actual server/hardware RAID environment. If you’re using an ATTO or CalDigit or some high-end hardware RAID card, then they are probably the best choice. But if you’re populating the internal bays on a Mac Pro or using a software RAID eSATA card, I would use the desktop models.
Sean
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[Colin McQuillan] “I also see both brands offer an “enterprise” model for a little more.. “Enterprise” drives any good for video editing/media storage so on???”
Those types of drives should only be used in a hardware RAID configuration.
Sean
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I just bought a 7200.11 and chose it over the Hitachi based on this article here:
https://www.barefeats.com/hard94.html
Sean
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Multiclip is buggy. And HDV is a major workload for Final Cut. It wouldn’t surprise me if the two can’t work together.
First trash your preferences. If that doesn’t work, try copying the contents of your sequence and pasting them onto a non-HDV sequence (like ProRes). Then try exporting (use current settings – don’t export back to HDV).
Sean
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There are products out there that will combine two monitors into one DVI port. So the computer you connect it to, and it’s OS, will think it’s just a single large monitor with high-resolution and a very wide aspect. Matrox used to make stuff like this. Their MXO product I think can do this as well.
Sean
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That’s good to know as far as backing up my system disk. But I’m actually a bit more ambitious. I’m considering it for backing up media to our NAS server. I fear that would interfere with ETT.
Time Machine’s really cool, but the problem I think is that they made it a little too simple. I wish there was a bandwidth slider to limit it to 20MB/s or something so it wouldn’t interfere with anything else.
Sean
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[Tom Wolsky] “Bottom line appears to be that Apple just doesn’t seem to think this is a significant enhancement. “
Tom’s right. They could easily make this work without causing even a hiccup in performance.
That said, I never understood what the big deal is. I missed it at first. Not for any logical reason – just because I was used to it. Right now I can’t really think of any actual benefit it would provide. When you pause playback, it jumps to the spot in the timeline where the playhead is. That’s all that really matters.
Sean
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[chris killen] “what is the best capture preset in fcp 6.0.2 for capturing hdv, dv, and dvcprohd footage in same project/sequence.”
ProRes HQ. Capture everything in it’s native resolution and framerate, but use the ProRes codec. That’s what I would do.
Sean