[Steve Modica]

Is the blackmagic device a PCIE card? You could put it in a magma chassis and run out to the display.
They also have a PCIE switch in the box so you’ll have 2 other slots. They can better multiplex the traffic that way so it out performs 3 daisy chained units.
Steve

Steve Modica
CTO, Small Tree Communications

[Steve Modica]

[Chris Simpson] “I did feel the higher the number the more likely it would be indicative of it’s capability”

This is usually not the case. In fact, I’ve found that some of the fastest drag race cards are the worst multistream performers. Engineers optimize for the big marketing number at the expense of a more random looking load. When we first got into the storage space, we were testing one vendors card (the fastest we were aware of) and it could not push one Pro Res stream reliably. It glitched to often.

I would call areca on this. I know they have tuning things for their cards. I know they’ve been working on that sort of performance. They should be able to help.

Steve

Steve Modica
CTO, Small Tree Communications

[Steve Modica]

[Chris Simpson] “Now here’s my simple maths, forgive me if I’m too simple, 12 streams of Pro Res LT (@85Mb/s or 10.7MB/s). Or 1027.2 Mb/s or 128MB/s, the AJA system test I’m getting average write speeds around 700MB/s and read speeds around 420MB/s, the pipe, if my simple math/understanding is right, ought to be wide enough. Which leaves me puzzling over the inconsistent speed over the course of the AJA test.”

Hi Chris

This sort of math doesn’t hold up with raid controllers. Their performance on a drag race test like AJA doesn’t equate to their performance when running 10 streams of something low bandwidth. It’s also true that you need to have fairly reliable, stable, low latency response through the entire run, not just an overall number that gives you good bandwidth. For example, your raid could glitch for half a second during the test and still pump out 750MB/sec, but you would certainly drop frames during that glitch. (We’ve profiled older variants of Areca and seen this behavior. I’ve not looked at the newer cards).

Have you worked with Areca support to see if they can help improve this number? There are a number of vendors (like Small Tree and Maxx) that sell systems that have been profiled and tuned to do this kind of work off the shelf.

Steve

Steve Modica
CTO, Small Tree Communications

[Steve Modica]

I filed this bug: 7420889
I used RedAlert to reproduce it and provided stack traces system call traces showing this same exact issue. I worked with one of the AFP engineers to nail it down to a quicktime library issue. The bug was closed with this:

15-Oct-2010 12:38 PM Apple Developer Bug Reporting Team :
Engineering has provided the following information:

We will not be developing additional fixes for this issue due to resource constraints.

We are now closing this bug since our engineers are aware of the issue and will continue to track it offline.

EDIT: It looks like the issue isn’t really “2GB files” per se. It occurs when one segment of a quicktime container is larger than 2GB. So if your quicktime doesn’t have any elements larger than 2GB, it could be any size and be fine. This is in part why it was so hard to figure out, many large files would work fine.

Steve Modica
CTO, Small Tree Communications

[Steve Modica]

I filed this bug: 7420889 (Nov of 2009)
I used RedAlert to reproduce it and provided stack traces system call traces showing this same exact issue. I worked with one of the AFP engineers to nail it down to a quicktime library issue. The bug was closed with this:

15-Oct-2010 12:38 PM Apple Developer Bug Reporting Team :
Engineering has provided the following information:

We will not be developing additional fixes for this issue due to resource constraints.

We are now closing this bug since our engineers are aware of the issue and will continue to track it offline.

Steve Modica
CTO, Small Tree Communications

[Steve Modica]

[John Davidson] “would a single gigabit line be theoretically capable of digitizing HDCam ProRes 1080i to a disk over ethernet connection?”

Sure. Pro Res is only 20MB/sec (and normally a lot less).

Steve Modica
CTO, Small Tree Communications

[Steve Modica]

[Edward Stevens] “Thanks for the reply. I was in understanding that FCP7 would not work with Lion either.
Do you say that FCP studio3 will work with lion? Can the imac be downgraded to Snow leopard?”

I’m running FCP 7 on my laptop running Lion right now.

In general, downgrading a mac (when it’s a new piece of hardware) is a bad idea. Apple routinely releases new firmware that won’t work with the older OSs. So it won’t boot or whatever. In fact, Zelin just posted something like this a couple weeks ago.

I’d move up to FCP 7. You’ll have better luck

Steve Modica
CTO, Small Tree Communications

[Steve Modica]

I’m assuming you are trying to load a pretty old version of final cut (because it’s built for PPC). Why not get a used copy of FCP7? It’ll work better with Lion anyhow.

Steve Modica
CTO, Small Tree Communications

[Steve Modica]

[PJ Palomaki] “Steve (who has posted to this thread) said that they have tested their cards with the Magma and the mLogic devices with good results. He also said that they have Thunderbolt-enabled drivers for all their cards. Is this right Steve, I’m not misquoting you?”

This is correct. Our driver work (10Gb and 1Gb) is done. We’re just waiting for vendors to put finished product on the market. Everything I have in house is pre-release.

Steve

Steve Modica
CTO, Small Tree Communications

[Steve Modica]

[Rainer Wirth] “That is interesting. I’ve got a question to Steve. As you work for small tree, one of the best raid storage producers, you say, that it doesn’t matter wether to use a HUA or HUS drive in a let’s say 16 bay SAS or FC Raid. Which drives do you use in the small tree products. Do you list the HUS drives within your small tree specs?”

Hi Rainer

We use SATA drives. When you’re doing video editing, it’s not about the bandwidth benchmarks. It’s about how many simultaneous streams you can sustain before the spindles can’t keep up with the framerate. I’d love to have a SAS product that could handle more streams that I could sell for 4X the price. We’ve tried buying much faster raids to test against but they can’t beat our stream counts.

Steve

Steve Modica
CTO, Small Tree Communications