[Tom Cooper]

One of the most common problems appears to be that when you manually save it resets the autosave countdown. So if you have your autosave set to 10 minutes and manually save every 5 minutes you will never get an autosave. Then if your main project file gets corrupted or crashes during saving you have to revert back to the last auto save which could be a long time ago.

To get round this we put our project files in a Dropbox folder. Every time you manually save it is uploaded to Dropbox. On the Dropbox website you can view old saves of a file, so it’s effectively like an online auto save.

[Tom Cooper]

Hi Eric,

We don’t have any plans to edit 4K offline. We are shooting XAVC HD on our F55 so a couple of streams of that will be in the range of a few 100Mbps. We are actually shooting 4K for a few films but we are recording 4K raw to an external recorder and internal XAVC HD files to the internal cards for use in the offline.

[Tom Cooper]

That’s good to know because we are already planning to fix it. We’ll be connecting to the RAID via a 1GBe connection (possible 2 x 1GBe if that’s possible). We didn’t think it was necessary to go to 10GBe. I’m guessing that will be enough for a few streams of XAVC HD. The disk access speed of a RAID 5 should be what gives us the best improvement I’m hoping.

[Tom Cooper]

Hi Andy,

Yes we installed a PCIe USB3.0/eSata card in all our machines.

[Tom Cooper]

Sorry just to be clear the codecs for those cameras are:

F55 – XAVC HD
GoPro/5D – H264
BlackMagic – ProRes
XF305 – XDCAM HD

[Tom Cooper]

So I’m guessing the storage could cause problems in a few ways. The biggest problem would be if your connection speed was not fast enough (say trying to stream 5-6 streams of XAVC HD through a USB 2.0 connection) or if the drives weren’t fast enough (but 7200RPM should be plenty).

We’re connecting through USB 3.0 which should give us plenty of streams. This seems to be the case as we don’t generally have dropped frames during playback.

But is there something more complicated relating to buffering that occurs when you view an entire timeline? Is it trying to access media from across the whole sequence and therefore trying to access multiple parts of a disk containing rushes? If that’s the case we should see improvements in performance moving to something like RAID 5/6.

[Tom Cooper]

Hi Kevin,

Thanks for the response, that’s very interesting. We’ve got the following setup at the moment:

Internal Spinning Disk: Project Files
System SSD: Cache Files
External G-Tech eSata: Project Auto-Saves and Media

Are you saying we should have all of this on one external unit? We are currently planning to invest in a Small Tree 80TB 10GBe setup in the next few months so will no doubt have to change our workflow then.

Could you also let me know your other system specs and the exact model/spec of the attached storage you’re using, it would be really helpful!

thanks

Tom

[Tom Cooper]

Hi Jay and thanks for that feedback. I can understand that Premiere (just like Avid) would take such a long time to create an index for media when it is first loaded on a machine (Though Avid seems able to share these databases between machines). What is annoying is that it seems to “forget” a decent portion of this and have to rebuild it every time you switch on! It wouldn’t be so bad if this was just at the beginning of each day as we can start machines early but after a crash, when the editor is already frustrated, this will cause a lot of anger!

Maybe with the (supposedly imminent) release of the new version of CC this will be sorted out but I’m not too hopeful. What’s more frustrating is Adobe have an offer of 40% discount on year long contracts right now and I’d like to sign up a load of machines but this is making me falter.

[Tom Cooper]

Hi Jay,

No problem, this is pretty much the exact issue I’d like feedback on anyway. From your own experience do you think the long load times are caused by which of the following factors:

1) Large overrall project size
2) Amount of rushes in the project
3) Size and complexity of individual sequences
4) Number of complex sequences

Or a combination of all of the above?

cheers

Tom

[Tom Cooper]

Ah I did miss out an important detail and that is that we would like to have some kind of soft client area at the back of the room for viewings. This could be a sofa and table or arm chairs with an ethernet connection for laptops. Because the rooms would be shorter across the window side it would be more practical to have the desk against the window and the sofa at the back of the room. Having the suite the other way would mean we have to make the suites wider to have a little space between the desk and the client seating.

Thanks for the feedback though. There was a suggestion also to have two blinds, one which is partially opaque to block out harsh light and distractions outside but let in natural light, and a black out blind inside of that to block out everything.