[Uli Plank]

I can only second this! Data Rescue has saved the a.. of some of our students a lot of times – usually they learn to make backups the hard way, even if we tell them about it’s importance from day one…

Recently I was able to recover footage for a friend who had been severly hit by a fault of the controller in his RAID (yes, don’t even trust a ‘secure’ RAID) and been told by a ‘professional’ data rescue service that his chances were very low. Data Rescue made his day!

Director of the Institute of Media Research (IMF) at Braunschweig University of Arts

[Uli Plank]

I think we should consider the restrictions the electronics in a camera like the 7D impose while we ask for full-frame full-speed decoding and storage. The size, power consumption and price of a 7D vs. a RED One can tell us something. And then, the debayering happens in camera while RED moved full quality decoding into post, where we have much more computing power.

So, I think it’s a tad unfair to say Canon is deliberately limiting DSLRs. The video mode in these excellent stills cameras was intended for jounalists doing web video, not for the big screen.

Obviously, even RED is having a hard time to put all this into a smaller and cheaper camera, but I believe sooner or later they will deliver. Maybe Canon is believing that as well and doesn’t want to put a lot of development costs into something where RED has a head start…

Director of the Institute of Media Research (IMF) at Braunschweig University of Arts

[Uli Plank]

Yes, but the aliasing problem can’t be overcome soon. You have your OLPF either optimizes for video or for photography. The only alternative is what Red is doing: always shoot full frame at full speed and downscale later with a good algorithm.

Director of the Institute of Media Research (IMF) at Braunschweig University of Arts

[Uli Plank]

IMHO the biggest problem besides RS and audio is aliasing. Beware of fine regular patterns in focus!

Director of the Institute of Media Research (IMF) at Braunschweig University of Arts

[Uli Plank]

The free MPEG Streamclip does a pretty good job downconverting in software.

Regards,

uli

Director of the Institute of Media Research (IMF) at Braunschweig University of Arts

[Uli Plank]

Thanks everybody for the great info!

I’m very aware of drives being slower when getting filled up, but wouldn’t that affect all cards in a similar progression? I haven’t heard yet of manufacturers to develop schemes for distributing data in a way to compensate for that effect (if at all possible), or are there any ?

Anyway, I think I’ll go for the CalDigit card, since I’m not aiming at ultimate speed, but rather expandability – fill the MacPro internally now, get an external box later.

Best regards,

Uli

Director of the Institute of Media Research (IMF) at Braunschweig University of Arts

[Uli Plank]

Thank you both for your responses.

The AMUG report was detailed and very helpful.

I have used Highpoint cards in the past. While the performance hit on the CPU might be unimportant on an 8-core, at that time they were very unreliable. Alarm going off without a real disk failure, disks disappearing and re-appearing and the like. Our three cards all went back to the dealer.

Don’t know if they sorted out their problems by now, but with such an experience you don’t really trust a RAID card any more.

Areca seems to make the cards for some highly respected RAID systems from the US too. Can anyone confirm this?

Regards,

Uli

Director of the Institute of Media Research (IMF) at Braunschweig University of Arts

[Uli Plank]

AFAIK, 4000 px is the absolute limit for FCP.
Are you using those large images for zooming or panning?
If not, I’s scale them down. If you so, try to pre-render them (maybe using a different codec) and copy the result into the time-line.

Hope this helps,

Uli

Director of the Institute of Media Research (IMF) at Braunschweig University of Arts

[Uli Plank]

Motion3 has it.

Director of the Institute of Media Research (IMF) at Braunschweig University of Arts

[Uli Plank]

No, even with 6 GB RAM I don’t see Compressor being faster. Please check if the “Frame Controls” in Compressor are activated.

When you compare the footage, look carefully for fast pans or the like and check if the are not stuttering.

If that’s fine, you can go with Compressor.

Regards,

Uli

Director of the Institute of Media Research (IMF) at Braunschweig University of Arts