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$2000 storage solution for HD video and RED

P

peta

macrumors newbie
Original poster
May 8, 2009
2
0
Hey guys, I am buying a 2009 MP after WWDC (hoping for a price drop or FCP3 and blue ray integration). And I wanted to get an external storage solution for editing HD and RED 4k. I would budget about $2000 towards this, and I was wondering what kind of external enclosure you would recommend. I don't have any experience with xserve, but would this solution at my price point have the speed capabilities to edit RED footage? Thanks for the input, I really appreciate it. I don't know what kind of options there are in this level of storage. I have a bunch of LACIE externals, but none of them will be fast enough, even with eSATA, to edit 4k. Thanks again,

peta
 
give CalDigit a call, they're awesome. don't cheap out on this... $2k may not be enough for what you need (which would be like an HDone doing RAID5 or RAID6). talk to them, they'll walk you through it.

don't cheap out on storage, you'll regret it and end up spending more later.
 
Yeah, I think a lot of people underestimate and undervalue storage. A bona fine harware RAID5 would be best, but $2k might be a stretch.

Pro Avio seem to have a new product, the EBFR. It's lower-end, but might be an option if you have a strict budget.

Or you could piece your own together: an ATTO R348, a Pro Avio EB4MS and 6x1.5TB server-grade drives (2 int, 4 ext, RAID5; and you'd need to check power redundancy on that set-up.)

You can get great speeds from the likes of the CalDigit VR and G-Raid3. They're hardware RAID0, so you'd need to organise separate back-ups — but I guess you'd probably be doing that anyway with off-site back-ups for Red footage. As scratch disks, these are very economical.
 
I don't mean to be negative - and hopefully this is constructive, but if you're going to the expense of hiring a RED set up, with lenses, drives etc - then why skimp on the editing and attempt to do it on your own system? Why not just hire an edit suite for a couple of days at a post house - plenty of fully equipped small independent set-ups that are very economical indeed + they have facilities to play your final cut out to tape or even arrange printing onto film if you need to - all in the same shop.

I'm an experienced director and have used RED several times, the first time I made the mistake of trying to edit on my home system (which is fine for regular 1080p/i editing. What with spending hours messing with getting the correct codecs sorted, then constantly experiencing lag from my disk set-up on fibre (that in theory should have been able to handle at least 2k) - I wasted at least a day.

Given my daily rate is around £1600, and I am currently swamped with offers - thats £1600 + the cost of the disk space I could have spent hiring a pro suite where they would have sorted all my media for me before I even arrived in the morning, leaving me 16 hours or so to sit and edit, glitch free. Add in things like the time spend running back and forth, mounting disks etc when you actually want to get you're finished timeline played out back to disk at the post house (unless you have a HD deck setup, which if you do I'm not sure why you're only able to spend $2000 on storage) - then it's a no brainer.

Also something else to consider - if you're planning on editing 4k - I hope you have a 4k pro monitor to select your shots on, else you'll probably find that if you watch in a cinema afterwards, or even on down-converting to 1080p, half of your stuff looks horribly out of focus and badly exposed. And again, if you have paid for a 4k screen then - man - why are you bitchen about a few more K on hard disks seeing as you must be seriously in the cash?

ALWAYS check shots, do colour work etc on a monitor that can display ALL of the pixels you are working with. Else you WILL get nasty surprises later...
 
peta said:
Hey guys, I am buying a 2009 MP after WWDC (hoping for a price drop or FCP3 and blue ray integration). And I wanted to get an external storage solution for editing HD and RED 4k. I would budget about $2000 towards this, and I was wondering what kind of external enclosure you would recommend. I don't have any experience with xserve, but would this solution at my price point have the speed capabilities to edit RED footage? Thanks for the input, I really appreciate it. I don't know what kind of options there are in this level of storage. I have a bunch of LACIE externals, but none of them will be fast enough, even with eSATA, to edit 4k. Thanks again,

peta
Click to expand...

Try ProAVIO
they are selling 8TB with high point 3522 card for 2299
http://www.timelinedigitalinc.com/proavio-editbox-p-532.html
or
http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/575945-REG/PROAVIO_EB8MS_8_0TB_8TB_editBOX_8MS_Array.html
Both companies are ProAVIO authorized dealer.
The performance is around 550MB/s+
Fast enough for REDCODEC 4K.
 
peta said:
Hey guys, I am buying a 2009 MP after WWDC (hoping for a price drop or FCP3 and blue ray integration). And I wanted to get an external storage solution for editing HD and RED 4k. I would budget about $2000 towards this, and I was wondering what kind of external enclosure you would recommend. I don't have any experience with xserve, but would this solution at my price point have the speed capabilities to edit RED footage? Thanks for the input, I really appreciate it. I don't know what kind of options there are in this level of storage. I have a bunch of LACIE externals, but none of them will be fast enough, even with eSATA, to edit 4k. Thanks again,

peta
Click to expand...


Peta

With your budget and hardware forget about 4k editing. Capture in 4k and then transcode to something like ProRes 422 2k or your computer is going to die trying to work on 4x the rez of HD. By capturing in 4k you can archive that data and as computers get faster you can always go back and produce a 4k version of your productions if necessary.
 
What are you guys being so negative? When we're talking about a 2009 Mac Pro, hardware is not the issue. If set up right — and that's a big if — editing Red footage will be workable. Red doesn't need super-fast or voluminous storage as its bitrate is lower than plenty of HD. And whilst dealing with it may involve some frustration and learning, are either of those things necessarily bad?

All that said, if you don't do the requisite investigation first, you'll end up wanting to cry at some point.

You should read up enough now so you know what you're getting yourself into; but if you still want to do it, you don't need a 4K monitor and a tape deck (you can take your edited movie to a post-house and they will happily master it for you — many will be very familiar with Red and can advise you on precisely what to provide them with and how).
 
KeithPratt said:
What are you guys being so negative? When we're talking about a 2009 Mac Pro, hardware is not the issue. If set up right — and that's a big if — editing Red footage will be workable. Red doesn't need super-fast or voluminous storage as its bitrate is lower than plenty of HD. And whilst dealing with it may involve some frustration and learning, are either of those things necessarily bad?
Click to expand...

I don't think it's being negative but rather realistic. While we may be able to capture in 4k to a fast array that doesn't mean we're going to be able to shuttle these 4k through the various stages of production with any sort of alacrity.

Workflow accounts for a lot and as long as you've got the capture in 4k your options for editing should correspond to the necessary output. Otherwise you're going to spend a lot of time trying to edit in 4k only to reach the end and find theres a dearth of 4k monitoring and playback solutions.

Also ...you will save money building your own array.

http://www.directron.com/e8msb.html The Enhance case used by Proavio

Get a Atto, CalDigit, Highpoint or Sonnet SAS card. Buy your drives and you'll probably end up hundreds below the price of a preconfigured system.
 
to the OP, you can't edit 4k in FCP... you'll edit at 2k. if you want 4k, then you need to conform it using a Scratch system.

With the 2 flavors of Redcode RAW being 224Mb/s and 288Mb/s i don't see how you can say that it's bitrate "lower than plenty of HD". This is higher than ProRes/Avid DNxHD and really Uncompressed is the only real editing codec that takes up more space. A RAID is required for both speed and integrity (especially with a tapeless workflow like RED).
 
bigbossbmb said:
With the 2 flavors of Redcode RAW being 224Mb/s and 288Mb/s i don't see how you can say that it's bitrate "lower than plenty of HD".
Click to expand...

I can say it on the basis that it's lower than HDCamSR, and lower than the various uncompressed iterations and "lossless" codecs (Animation, Sheer, etc.). My point was that Red was designed to bring 4k to HD editing set-ups. It's not succeeded in perfect fashion, but it is workable, and you don't need all of the paraphernalia suggested in this thread to make it so.

Whilst I wouldn't necessarily recommend 4k editing, Cineform have a codec that can chop it down to 4000 pixels wide, making it compatible with FCP. But best bet, as bigbossbmb suggested, is to edit at 2k.
 
I've worked post on several lower-budget RED projects and most likely, you'll be editing 2K proxies or rendered 2K ProRes off-lines. Either way, just about any Mac Pro equipped with appropriate storage (i.e. RAID systems) is sufficient for this. FCP can't handle 4K editing (at least yet) and though Premiere is supposed to be able to, I have no direct experience with that.

As bigbossbmb has said, 4K finishes require an on-lining suite like Assimilate Scratch. These systems are very expensive to buy; in most cases, you're better off hiring a post house that operates one instead. So then, it's a question of whether you really NEED a 4K finish, especially on a restricted budget. Most commercial features that use digital intermediates do 2K prints to film anyway.

Ultimately if you do a 2K finish (probably the right choice in your case), RED now has a plug-in that allows Color to work with R3D natively, bypassing RedCine for color timing if you want.

But don't let all of this discourage you. Another advantage to shooting in 4K is having more flexibility in post to reframe shots that might have not been composed to your liking when you sit down to edit.

Also something else to consider - if you're planning on editing 4k - I hope you have a 4k pro monitor to select your shots on, else you'll probably find that if you watch in a cinema afterwards, or even on down-converting to 1080p, half of your stuff looks horribly out of focus and badly exposed. And again, if you have paid for a 4k screen then - man - why are you bitchen about a few more K on hard disks seeing as you must be seriously in the cash?

ALWAYS check shots, do colour work etc on a monitor that can display ALL of the pixels you are working with. Else you WILL get nasty surprises later...
Click to expand...

I'm not sure that I agree with needing a 4K monitor to determine whether or not your shots are actually in focus and exposed correctly. I've never had this problem. It's really not that hard to tell on a properly calibrated broadcast monitor. I think Astro Systems is the only one with a commercially available 4K monitor and it costs $60k. Sharp has one under development and it'll probably be similarly expensive.
 
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