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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 :)

4K for $5k

Neil W. Smith

Neil W. Smith

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Just finished our first 4K MADE EASY training day ... man, did we cover some ground in four hours, or what ... my head is still spinning.

Kudos to Sam Mestman for having so much knowledge at his fingertips on Apple's FCP X and RED's EPIC workflow ... really dug under the hood on the power and functionality of FCP X and even then he didn't go into detail on half of the things he could have covered.

Lots of great questions from the attendees and some very good feedback at the end on how we can make the next training day even more valuable and useful.

We had the Eizo CG276 monitor and SEIKI UHD TV on display ... great combination of a very accurate color grading monitor ($2700) plus a beautiful looking 50 inch 4K client monitor ($1500) ... mix in a little BlackMagic 4K Extreme DeckLink ($995) and for around $5200 you have a totally viable 4K imaging backbone for your 4K grading and viewing pipeline.

Attendees were really impressed with the image quality of the calibrated SEIKI UHD TV .... as a client 4K monitor it's going to be pretty hard to beat.

We also demoed the ExaSAN range of RAIDs and SAN switches .... ran the Blackmagic disk speed test on the Windows Resolve machine and was getting 1100 MB/s write and 1300 MB/s read sustained throughput .... all from 12 x 3 TB drives .... at under $9k for 36 TB of super high speed storage, the ExaSAN PCIe express architecture offers tremendous value over comparable Fiber Channel based solutions.

All in all, a fascinating day ... 4K workflow made easy and 4K monitoring for $5k really starts to deliver on Jim's vision of 4K everywhere ....$5K is the new 4K takes on a whole new meaning!

Thanks to everyone who came along - see you at the 4K Master Class.

Cheers,
Neil
 
Hi Neil

The ExaSAN sounds like a very interesting proposition. What else is required other than the Array for shared storage? A PCIe switch? Client side software? Do you know if they support Mac?

Ben
 
was this training recorded for web viewing?

Id pay to see that :)
 
Tonaci - it seems as if the 4K Extreme DeckLink card needs some driver tweaks at this point before we'll know what it can and can't do. Neil has been in contact with BM and they are working on it, hopefully Neil will have news he can share about that shortly as it could tick a lot of boxes.

Got a lot out of the session, first time I had seen FCP-X 10.0.8 in action and being used for professional applications. Some of the terminology is confusing, and, as is typical in software these days, it's most vexing when it tries to make things easier. That said, when used with some third party apps that Sam showed us, the latest version of FCP-X does look capable of being a genuine professional tool with more far more plusses than minuses.

I was impressed with the image on the Seiki after calibration, it won't make you want to throw your Dolby PRM-4200 in the dumpster but it holds its own. If there was a bang for the buck award for monitors it would be hard to beat.

Thanks to Neil, Sam, Sung and Kevin for an information packed day.

Cheers - #19
 
Neil,
BlackMagic 4K Extreme DeckLink is PCI Express 4 lane generation 2, compatible with 4,8 and 16.
Do you think we can get same result as you mention above, if we use 4K Extreme DeckLink with Sonnet Echo pro and push out 4k signal from MBpro (retina) to SEIKI UHD TV ?
Off-course I will be using second thunder bolt for HD (above 1100 MB/s)
 
ExaSAN RAID Storage Area Network (SAN)

ExaSAN RAID Storage Area Network (SAN)

Ben Holmes said:
Hi Neil

The ExaSAN sounds like a very interesting proposition. What else is required other than the Array for shared storage? A PCIe switch? Client side software? Do you know if they support Mac?

Ben
Click to expand...

Hi Ben,

The ExaSAN PCIe express approach is definitely worth checking out ..... faster and cheaper than anything else on the market at the moment ... we've tested all different kinds of storage topologies and ExaSAN delivers tremendous bang for the buck ... if you want to edit and grade RAW 5K EPIC files it's the way to go.

In DAS mode (Direct Attached Storage) all you need is a single A12 enclosure with your choice of 2TB, 3TB or 4TB drives - the PCIe HBA installs effortlessly in both a Mac and PC ... just needs a x4 lane PCIe slot ... on rdMBP laptops, MacMinis and iMacs we use a MAGMA Thunderbolt to to PCIe expansion box (1T or 3T) and it works like a dream.

At the 4K Training Day we had the SEIKI UHD TV attached to a PC attached to an A12 running 4K uncompressed QuickTimes at the training day .. we also had four Macs attached to another A12 running Xsan and FCP X .... package pricing details are available on our web site - see below:

In SAN mode (Storage Area Network) you need a single A12 enclosure plus a SW08 switch plus a dedicated Ethernet LAN for all your machines to be able to talk to the MetaData Controller (usually a Mac Mini).

In terms of client side software there are several choices but if you're are running in a Mac only environment you should seriously consider Apple Xsan 3 .... Xsan actually comes from a company called Quantum and their SAN software called StorNext (totally rock solid enterprise worthy SAN software - BIG companies use StorNext all over the world in Mac, PC and Linux environments) ... Apple takes the StorNext File System and re-engineers it specifically for the Mac platform and incorporates it into Mountain Lion Server.

The amazing thing about Xsan is that it used to cost $999 per client license .... now it is FREE with each copy of OSX 10.8 OSX (Mountain Lion) ... FREE as in zero dollars ... all you have to do is go into Systems Preferences and once you have XSAN Server up and running a Xsan icon appears like magic - no kidding! ... even if Apple was still charging $999 per license it would still be worth it ... but FREE??? ... unbeatable value for a high speed, robust ExaSAN based SAN for your RED shared storage needs :-)

You'll also need a copy of Mountain Lion Server which will cost you a whopping $19.99 .... you heard me right - twenty bucks! .... if you have Mountain Lion running on a MacPro or MacMini or iMac you can go to the Apple App store and for $19.99 you download OSX Server which includes XSAN server ... or buy a MacMini server from Apple and it comes already installed.

At the 4K MADE EASY training, Sam showed a MacPro plus 27 inch iMac plus rdMBP plus MacMini all playing the same 5K EPIC sequence in FCP X at the same time off one A12 ExaSAN RAID all running Xsan ... no RedRocket anywhere in the pipeline ... all playing back EPIC files realtime!

The other cool thing to know about the FCP X plus XSAN plus ExaSAN SAN topology is that you can download as many copies of FCP X as you like all for the price of $299 .... that's correct - $299 for unlimited copies of FCP X ... if you use the same iCloud account you only have to pay the $299 once and you can install as many copies of FCP X as you like - Apple are even happy if you do that ... so, do the math for your self .... we were demoing FCP X running on four Macs and it cost us $320 bucks for the software .... plus a $1000 for DaVinci Resolve ... unfuckingbelievable.

We've researched many different options for multi-user editing, grading and finishing ... the combination of FCP X plus Xsan plus Resolve plus SMOKE all running over an ExaSAN SAN is pretty hard to beat in terms of price, functionality and performance ... just ask anyone who attended our 4K MADE EASY training on Saturday ... also, we don't just demo this stuff, we use it on a daily basis to edit and grade features, commercials and shorts ... and yes, we still also use FCP 7 and Avid and Premiere on shows as well depending on where the offline is coming from ... but FCP X is a serious option now and will only get better .... Sam is off to Cupertino on Tuesday to spend the merry month of May working with some engineers on some project he won't even tell me about ;-)

If you want to know more about ExaSAN RAID storage, I've put the KeyNote Overview we used at the Training event up on our website along with the pricing for DAS and SAN packages ... check them out and let me know if you have any more questions:

ExaSAN and Apple Xsan Overview:
http://www.lumaforge.com/photos-2/index.html

ExaSAN Packages and Prices:
http://www.lumaforge.com/page10/index.html


Cheers,
Neil
 
Great stuff Neil and thanks!
 
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