Steve Chandler
Forum Replies Created
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The very same Bob :). Long time no talk! Enjoyed your new article on LTO btw.
Nat – the (semi)short answer is that Premiere historically has not liked working off of network drives, and while those problems are supposedly fixed these days… we had a bad time with it. It needs to be said that we had a bunch of other variables at the time (new version of Premiere, new footage format on a project), and there are many companies out there who claim to do this without issues.
It all SHOULD have worked, we kept having people tell us… but it just didn’t. Playback sucked. It was probably a combination of factors, but the fact remains that as soon as we switched to a true SAN with block-level access, those playback problems all but went away, and any additional issues were certainly easier to diagnose and fix.
Lots of theories came up: Premiere cache sucking up bandwidth while conforming footage; MTS footage not performing well on a NAS; block size on our RAID being too large; Premiere not understanding the larger bandwidth pipe it had from 10GbE… None of these were ever really proven or disproven.
That’s abut all I’ve got for you, sorry it’s not more concrete, but this was our experience. Like I mentioned, almost ANY 10GbE NAS should work file with Resolve, and I’m sure you’ll be able to figure out any Premiere problems you have, if any. All-in-all, 10GbE NAS systems are pretty darn cool (though a 10GbE XSAN is even cooler 8) )
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Hey all – how is NFS performance these days? From very limited experience and some research, I’ve been under the impression that NFS performance was pretty crappy on OS X by default. Obviously the vendors are doing proprietary stuff to speed this up. Does anyone know what sort of techniques can be used to get better speeds natively on OS X?
I’d like to experiment with that on our shared storage system, but mostly as a fun curiosity – don’t want to go down that road if it’s not worth it.
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Wait, SNS was supplying you with a custom build of globalSAN? Jeez. SNS is pretty rad.
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“Never a good idea” until you actually need to change them!
Thanks a lot for sharing this, Chris. We are experiencing similar issues with a 10GbE XSAN, albeit much less pronounced that yours. We’re averaging around 600 MB read, which sounds great – until you realize there is a 2-3 second “ramp-up” in speeds. Looking at a graph, our actual sustained read is closer to 900, but the ramp-up screws with our numbers. Something is obviously not right, and I want to fix it before it actually becoms a problem for us. I tried coming up with my own sysctl numbers that failed spectacularly – but included the kern.ipc.maxsockbuf parameter. My hope is that that was the issue, and combined with your updated numbers we will see a change. I’ll report back here.
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Yikes! The vendors are really circling the boat on this one. I guess it shouldn’t be a surprise when you’re dropping 10GbE SAN and Resolve 12 questions into the water like hot buckets of chum… 😉
We are running a 10GbE XSAN solution here at our small post production company which we mostly designed ourselves. We had some hiccups during the initial spinup of the whole thing. We originally had it set up as a NAS, but Premiere didn’t like it. We transitioned to a XSAN and had some initial configuration problems there as well.
I mention all of this because during that time, Resolve performed like a champ – both on a NAS and on a SAN. I don’t reall having any playback issues at all, even while our other NLEs were having lots of problems. Judging from the comments above as well, Resolve seems quite good at handling itself on lots of platforms (Premiere is the one to worry about… but thats another story!)
Obviously you should still keep all of the usual considerations in mind when dealing with video shared storage. I’m just offering my anecdotal evidence here, which is by no case authoritative since we are still fine-tuning our network.
All in all, it performs just fine. I wouldn’t worry too much about Resolve compatibility, and instead focus more on any other requirements you have for your SAN.
Oh, and I jest with you, vendors… you have some great products on here with even greater support, but sometimes people are just looking for general information and it comes off as a bit much in situations like these.
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Nope! 😀
But thank you for the info Bob, I wasn’t aware of that. In with the helpful info as always.
I mean it looks very cool, but we’ve made a conscious decision to look at the cool toys from a distance right when they come out. We’re tired of changing our workflow just to accomodate new tech that is (usually) limited and proprietary as a result.
That said, I am slowly falling in love with this enclosure. I wish I had a chance to try out an Accusys system just for kicks, as they seem to do innovative stuff that works well. The XSan functionalitty says a lot about the flexibility of the device too – and it fits nicely with the simplicity of the new XSan 4 software. Building a custom solution for the new XSan 4 version is a HUGE chore, so it’s cool that this is inadvertently a plug and play solution for that.
Since we’re kind of talking about Thunderbolt shared storage now, I’d just like to play devil’s advocate and point out some flaws I do still see with the idea:
1. Cable length. Those super long optical Thunderbolt cables were super expensive last I checked! And I bleive there’s still a limit? I might be wrong. Fact is, the 10k price tag is preeetty good, so I guess you make up for the cost a little bit there.
2. Compatibility. This is the big one for me. You basically have to use a new Mac Pro. End of story. Or I guess some weird Intel Hackintosh could work too? But who wants to do that, come on now (deep down, I want to do that).
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Yeah this definitely seems like a first of it’s kind thing. When it was announced I was really skeptical (having researched Thunderbolt ethernet and been horrified at the results) but they do seem to have this figured out. The info that has been leaking out about it is all very open and transparent, no sales double speak going on. Obviously they are still hiding their technique, but the company has a long history with making shared storage PCIe solutions, which Thunderbolt is a natural expansion of.
They REALLY need to just release a price already so we can all move on with our lives.