thunderbolt question

[J Obertone]

what is apple thunderbolt, how would it apply to a RED workflow? for example, from a RED EPIC, am working on a system where RED footage from the SSD card is duplicated on multiple hard drives via macbookpro and then played back via RCx.

 

[Blair S. Paulsen]

Thunderbolt is a new I/O standard (developed by Intel as LightPeak) that Apple is promoting in their newest products. Due to its substantially higher bandwidth capacity and ability to work with storage devices, display devices and so on via the same small connector (and a regrettably expensive cable) it has huge promise.

At the moment, its greatest parlor trick is that if you can get your hands on a Promise Pegasus R6 RAID it can theoretically read/write in the 500MB/s neighborhood with plenty of bandwidth left over. When reading from the SSD media on the Red Station you can theoretically hit 225MB/s but I have never been over 150MB/s with either of my eSATA HBAs (I was writing to fast RAIDs so I'm pretty sure the read speed was the capper). It could be argued that if your max read speed is under 200MB/s, why have a catch drive array that goes any faster? Depending on what other operations you plan to have the drive sub-system participate in you could make a case for more throughput, but that's another thread.

In any case, snappy playback in RCX is dependent on several factors besides disk read speeds but its one base you do need to cover. Beyond that, by this time next year I expect to see lots of Thunderbolt peripherals that speed up r3d based workflows in myriad ways and perhaps will even prove to be the dreamed of one cable solution for feeding 4K displays.

Cheers - #19