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  • Hey all, just changed over the backend after 15 years I figured time to give it a bit of an update, its probably gonna be a bit weird for most of you and i am sure there is a few bugs to work out but it should kinda work the same as before... hopefully :)

DATA-INFRASTRUCTURE for Postproduction

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Daniel Kunz

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Hi
again i need some advice from those who have experience. Thank you for this forum RED!
I'll quickly state what i am working with now, and i'll list some expectations from there.

WHAT I WORK WITH NOW:
CAM: Sony FS100, G-LOG
PC: Win7, Sandy i7, Nvidia GTX470, 128GB SSD, PremiereProCS5.5, ColoristaII (4.5K plays natively at 1/4 with RCP ajustements)
NAS Fileserver: QNAP 859+ Pro set to RAID5 for redundancy
Field-PC: HP touchsmart tm2 2010eg i5, Macbook Air 2011 i7

WHAT I NEED
Fast offloading from REDMAGS
Fast online-editing with no Proxies in Premiere Pro CS5.5
NAS Fileserver for Backup of complete Projects

WHAT I THINK MY WORKFLOW IS GOING TO LOOK LIKE ON SET AND IN POST
1. Capture
2A. Offload REDMAG via E-Sata to a Laptop with 500GB of free Storage. immediate Backup to a USB3/E-Sata Disk(Field)
2B. Offload REDMAG via E-Sata to a small 4-SSD NAS Raid1 with 500GB of Storage. (Studio/Set)
3. Backup Footage to Backup-NAS with 20TB of Storage
4. Import Footage to Premiere from the small SSD-NAS
5. Edit Footage in Premiere on the SSD-NAS, Backup Project to Backup-NAS
6. Export to Backup-NAS, Delete bad takes and Backup whole project
7. Format SSD-NAS for next project

WHAT INFRASTRUCTURE I PROBABLY NEED TO INVEST IN:
1. SSD-NAS 600$
2. 4x 256GB SSD 1300$
3. Backup-NAS (10x3.5") 2500$
4. 10x 3TB SataIII HDD 2800$ (double price in 4 months!)
5. Cheap longlasting laptop with E-Sata Firewire and USB3 Port 600$
Total: 7800$

WHAT I WOULD LIKE TO KNOW FROM YOU
1. What do you offload your REDMAGS with?
2. How do you do backup? Do you backup EVERYTHING?
3. Where do you edit? Internal/Server/NAS?

Thank you
 
The redmag reader is used to offload the cards. It has plenty of connections, can handle esata, firewire, usb... Redmags use a proprietary connection for durability reasons.

I back up on externals but its slow unless your using the newest ports... If the job is paying its good to back everything up, avoid screw ups this way. Use checksums to make sure everything copies correctly, physically open the files to verify everythings working and nothing gets corrupted, all the typical DIT stuff.

Editing is best on the fastest connection you can get, depends really on what ports you have on your system and what sata connections you have inside... But internal typically trumps external unless you got some massively fast external ports
 
thanks for your reply Brian.
what is your experience in offload speeds? what port do you use? FW800? or e-Sata? What speed do you get on average?
 
You will need also a LTO tape backup system, because your NAS is not suitable for long term backup.
 
I was handling DIT at Camp Red this summer. Adobe provided and configured the editing systems- HP Z800 w/dual 6-core CPUs, 12GB RAM.
JMR provided their silverstore PCIe/raid expansion units with 10TB for each machine. Adobe also provided three HP High end Laptops for editing as well.

The silverstore units also held the Red Rocket cards.
With the ssd readers attached to esata I would typically get about 110 to 130 MB/sec, Attached to fw800 up to 90MB, fw400 up to 56MB/sec, USB 2 up to 26MB/sec

At times I had two of the JMR units attached to one machine got transfer rates around 600MB/sec backing up between the two raids.

During week 3, while we were at the remote location,I managed to cobble together a network after I found three cat5 cables ( I daisy chained them as we had no switches or routers. I got transfer rates around 200MB/sec over the Gig-E connections.
 
Daniel Kunz said:
Oh my gosh, i never even thought of that. I thought tape backup was old and totally out of date. but now this seems as a very good idea. THANK YOU for that input!
Click to expand...

Actually, your partially right - from what I can find there is STILL a clusterf**k as far as standardizing across manufacturers - and their recognition that small biz like ours don't need their pricey Enterprise-class systems for our workflows. There is a whole world of tape-less production folks out there now screaming for affordable (like: under $4K) and easy-to-use (!!!!!!) LT0-5 tape backup. I think it is coming. NAB next year could be a turning point, but for now I will wait and use cheap HDs....
Stu Aull
Alaska
 
LTO6 tapes are coming soon and it's the best and safest way to save projects & rushes for a long time (30 years) and HDDs are not cheap anymore.
 
Benoît, would you recommend waiting for LTO6 or go with LTO5 for the time beiing?
 
Does anyone have a LTO-5 Drive that he/she could recommend? i have Sata / E-Sata / USB3/2 / PCI-E at hand. what hardware do i need?
 
Just a thought but I wouldn't offload to a SSD RAID on set. I thought about it myself but SSDs are just way too unreliable still. I would feel a lot more comfortable with 10k drives even if it took more power.
 
The Thing with 10K drives is that they require to run on AC. so in case that you are in the field it would be great having a small mirrored SSD-RAID that you can offload to with only your laptop to power it.
Have you run into some reliablility problems with your SSD's Gavin? I'm much more scared of Harddrives getting knocked over, scratching the disks...
 
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