Dean Abrigana
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Advice on Hard Drive Selection for Hour length Documentary
- Thread starter Dean Abrigana
- Start date
joe hedge
Well-known member
Read the Red FCP white paper on the Red site, Avids might work natively with r3d's but FCP sure as hell doesn't. You either have to transcode to ProRes or work with the proxies.
If you're shooting 4k it's more like 100 gigs an hour, which has to be backed up so now it's 200 gigs an hour (on separate drives) and the ProResHQ transcodes (in 2k) are only a little smaller than the raw files themselves. A 1 terabyte drive is only 930 gigs after formatting, and you want to leave at least 20% of it empty or it'll bog down or crash. All this adds up to about 2.5 hours of footage (with transcodes) per 1 terabyte of storage.
You can backup raw camera files in your remote location, but you're strongly advised to do the transcodes (which after you try to edit with proxies on laptops you will want) on a 4 core or 8 core MacPro. Doing the transcodes in FCP Log and Transfer is horrendously slow, laptop or not, because FCP is not multi-processor aware, whereas RedRushes is.
Once everything is transcoded to ProRes your processor/drive speed demands drop dramatically - to the point where you might not even need RAID to edit if you are using eSata drives through your express34 slot in your laptop. Esata on a laptop runs 100 to 120 megabytes a sec, ProRes HQ bit rate is 26 megabytes a sec.
Also on a laptop you are limited to the bus speed of the express34 slot, so a G-Tech G-Speed is overkill without a MacPro with a raid controller card.
Forget about blu-ray, have a post house do LTO tape backup if you want long term storage.
Hope this helps.
If you're shooting 4k it's more like 100 gigs an hour, which has to be backed up so now it's 200 gigs an hour (on separate drives) and the ProResHQ transcodes (in 2k) are only a little smaller than the raw files themselves. A 1 terabyte drive is only 930 gigs after formatting, and you want to leave at least 20% of it empty or it'll bog down or crash. All this adds up to about 2.5 hours of footage (with transcodes) per 1 terabyte of storage.
You can backup raw camera files in your remote location, but you're strongly advised to do the transcodes (which after you try to edit with proxies on laptops you will want) on a 4 core or 8 core MacPro. Doing the transcodes in FCP Log and Transfer is horrendously slow, laptop or not, because FCP is not multi-processor aware, whereas RedRushes is.
Once everything is transcoded to ProRes your processor/drive speed demands drop dramatically - to the point where you might not even need RAID to edit if you are using eSata drives through your express34 slot in your laptop. Esata on a laptop runs 100 to 120 megabytes a sec, ProRes HQ bit rate is 26 megabytes a sec.
Also on a laptop you are limited to the bus speed of the express34 slot, so a G-Tech G-Speed is overkill without a MacPro with a raid controller card.
Forget about blu-ray, have a post house do LTO tape backup if you want long term storage.
Hope this helps.
Stephen Lovett
Well-known member
Joe's advice is solid.
A couple of things to add however.
ProRes is vbr, and so it goes higher I'm pretty sure I've seen over thirty, and that's for 1080 60i Psf. Plus if you are going to be editing you obviously will be using multiple streams so plan for that. And then there is audio...
Drobo's haven't been around long and have a checkered reputation.
Go with a real raid card, (easier/cheaper and more choices on PC's if that's an option), good choices on the Mac too.
I've had good luck with 3ware and LSI (who recently acquired 3ware) and Atto. Also I have a Caldigit HDOne that I've had for about three months, and so far so good.
If you can afford it, buy a card with more ports than you need, leaving you room to grow and/or a spare mini-sas connector. Over the long run it is cheaper if you either a.) want to add more drives later, (you don't have to buy another card), and b.) you can use one of the mini sas connectors in pass through mode for connecting to a LTO drive. This pays the added benefit of saving a precious pci-e slot, and saving you the expense of a separate sas HBA just for the tape drive.
Don't buy consumer grade drives, get the Western Digital enterprise or Seagate Barracuda ES series. I won't bore you with the details, but consumer drives are a poor choice for numerous reasons.
I'm just now installing an LTO 4, because blu-ray (or professional disk) gets pretty spendy fast, and takes up a lot of room. It's not really a viable archive solution IMHO.
That said if you need to go there, checkout Primera. I've got one of their disk duplicator printers, and I'm pretty sure I got the cost of printable blu-ray media down to under seven bucks when buying spindles of 25.
I'll leave it to others to debate the wisdom of working in native format. That said, I personally think you are making your life harder and more expensive needlessly.
All the best,
Steve
A couple of things to add however.
ProRes is vbr, and so it goes higher I'm pretty sure I've seen over thirty, and that's for 1080 60i Psf. Plus if you are going to be editing you obviously will be using multiple streams so plan for that. And then there is audio...
Drobo's haven't been around long and have a checkered reputation.
Go with a real raid card, (easier/cheaper and more choices on PC's if that's an option), good choices on the Mac too.
I've had good luck with 3ware and LSI (who recently acquired 3ware) and Atto. Also I have a Caldigit HDOne that I've had for about three months, and so far so good.
If you can afford it, buy a card with more ports than you need, leaving you room to grow and/or a spare mini-sas connector. Over the long run it is cheaper if you either a.) want to add more drives later, (you don't have to buy another card), and b.) you can use one of the mini sas connectors in pass through mode for connecting to a LTO drive. This pays the added benefit of saving a precious pci-e slot, and saving you the expense of a separate sas HBA just for the tape drive.
Don't buy consumer grade drives, get the Western Digital enterprise or Seagate Barracuda ES series. I won't bore you with the details, but consumer drives are a poor choice for numerous reasons.
I'm just now installing an LTO 4, because blu-ray (or professional disk) gets pretty spendy fast, and takes up a lot of room. It's not really a viable archive solution IMHO.
That said if you need to go there, checkout Primera. I've got one of their disk duplicator printers, and I'm pretty sure I got the cost of printable blu-ray media down to under seven bucks when buying spindles of 25.
I'll leave it to others to debate the wisdom of working in native format. That said, I personally think you are making your life harder and more expensive needlessly.
All the best,
Steve
joe hedge
Well-known member
Steve I thought the 25mbyte VBR of ProRes HQ was the highball estimate and that it usually stays lower than that...could be wrong though.
ProRes HQ as I understand it is 10 bit 4:2:2, but really you could offline in any res and conform back to 10 bit and cc that in Color. Depending on what you're finishing to, you could conceivably edit in your finishing res and cc your locked cut without conforming, which is part of the whole rationale behind ProRes in the first place.
"...FCP can handle the native R3D files by wrapping them in a QT wrapper in the L&T..."
FCP can, yes. But you have to work in unlimited RT at medium/low quality, with sketchy playback frame rates in your timeline until you render, especially on a laptop, and all the r3d's have to be online while you're editing. Once you try it you'll see what I mean. Transcoding takes longer at first but once it's done it makes life way easier.
Also the concept of backing up raw camera files to Raid 0 is not good IMO because RAID 0 is 2 drives striped together. If one of those striped-together drives goes down you lose everything on both drives, which, IMO, doubles the chances of losing data. RAID is for throughput and access speed for editing and playback, which you don't need when backing up because you're limited to the FW800 speed of the Red camera drive. Backup to regular eSata drives and transcode from those to your gTech RAID 0's, but like I said, if you're editing on laptops, everything gets slowed down by the express34 bus speed of the laptop anyway...
You wouldn't be taking Avid classes at Video Symphony would you? I'm a grad and live 3 blocks away from there...
ProRes HQ as I understand it is 10 bit 4:2:2, but really you could offline in any res and conform back to 10 bit and cc that in Color. Depending on what you're finishing to, you could conceivably edit in your finishing res and cc your locked cut without conforming, which is part of the whole rationale behind ProRes in the first place.
"...FCP can handle the native R3D files by wrapping them in a QT wrapper in the L&T..."
FCP can, yes. But you have to work in unlimited RT at medium/low quality, with sketchy playback frame rates in your timeline until you render, especially on a laptop, and all the r3d's have to be online while you're editing. Once you try it you'll see what I mean. Transcoding takes longer at first but once it's done it makes life way easier.
Also the concept of backing up raw camera files to Raid 0 is not good IMO because RAID 0 is 2 drives striped together. If one of those striped-together drives goes down you lose everything on both drives, which, IMO, doubles the chances of losing data. RAID is for throughput and access speed for editing and playback, which you don't need when backing up because you're limited to the FW800 speed of the Red camera drive. Backup to regular eSata drives and transcode from those to your gTech RAID 0's, but like I said, if you're editing on laptops, everything gets slowed down by the express34 bus speed of the laptop anyway...
You wouldn't be taking Avid classes at Video Symphony would you? I'm a grad and live 3 blocks away from there...
joe hedge
Well-known member
"If we can't get a tower, I'm trying to put together a hard drive setup and file management system that is sufficient in size and with redundancy and speed in mind."
But you have to have a tower to get faster drive speed. And once everything is transcoded you don't need it anyway. Doesn't the school have 4 or 8 core Intel Macs you can transcode on?
But you have to have a tower to get faster drive speed. And once everything is transcoded you don't need it anyway. Doesn't the school have 4 or 8 core Intel Macs you can transcode on?
MichaelP
Well-known member
You are asking for several things here - sharing media from a SAN across several editors with any real time performance takes a bit more work that just putting them on a shared drive. You have a far better chance of that working with ProRes and DNxHD than native R3D - I use DNxHD 36 all the time off my MacBook Pro with great performance. As mentioned, consider the offline proxy workflow or proxy workflow at a finishing quality such as DNxHD 175x or Prores HQ. What is your final delivery - HD?
Michael
Michael
Scott Roberts
Well-known member
Photo JPEG - 4:4:4: http://codecs.onerivermedia.com/
http://codecs.onerivermedia.com/encodes/result.htm?codecTitle=Photo-JPEG&imageRoot=photo-jpeg_osx
This is a good codec. This codec can't include an alpha channel like most other 4:4:4 codecs can, but the quality is just about as good and is more than half the file size space (save Microcosm). This is a good codec for creating a lossless quality file with minimal file sizes (because it is lossy). Keep in mind that this codec seems to be spatial like the Motion JPEG codecs listed in the 4:2:2 section. This is also the same standard codec that is used in the AJA Kona SD and Blackmagic Design DeckLink systems for its offline/online compressed format scheme. The results are so good it's hard to distinguish it from its own uncompressed codecs when viewing it on an NTSC/PAL monitor.
http://codecs.onerivermedia.com/encodes/result.htm?codecTitle=Photo-JPEG&imageRoot=photo-jpeg_osx
This is a good codec. This codec can't include an alpha channel like most other 4:4:4 codecs can, but the quality is just about as good and is more than half the file size space (save Microcosm). This is a good codec for creating a lossless quality file with minimal file sizes (because it is lossy). Keep in mind that this codec seems to be spatial like the Motion JPEG codecs listed in the 4:2:2 section. This is also the same standard codec that is used in the AJA Kona SD and Blackmagic Design DeckLink systems for its offline/online compressed format scheme. The results are so good it's hard to distinguish it from its own uncompressed codecs when viewing it on an NTSC/PAL monitor.