Re: 2 degress frost

I'd have to agree with Bob's assessment here. The setup sounds unnecessarily complicated. I think the first question that needs to be answered is if this is a setup someone is recommending? If so..who?

Or...is this a setup you've configured? I know 2 Degrees Frost has pre-configured, turn-key solutions for video editing so I'd be curious as to why you'd need a custom configuration like this.

We spent 2 months researching low-cost shared video storage systems, and there's an incredible amount of confusion out there...with a lot of it being created by the manufacturers themselves. Most of them throw around terms like block level, volume-locking, file-level, stacks, and layers...which means absoutely nothing to most facility owners or production managers tasked with buying and implementing these systems.

Another important distinction is SAN vs. LAN. The lines are blurring between these two transport methods, especially with 10 gigabit ethernet becoming affordable. That said, there are still advantages and disadvantages to the various transport protocols (LAN, iSCSI, Fibre Channel, and AoE which is Sata over Ethernet). One of the most popular low-cost shared video editing solutions is EditShare, a gigabit, LAN based system. And we use a 4TB, LAN based Apace vStor system. So before you go with a certain transport method, it would be good to figure out if it's the best method for your facility.

We do virtually no HD...so our needs were for a system that could support 4 edit stations using multiple channels of DVCPro50 SD video.

A lot of the systems out there were serious overkill, and we couldn't afford them anyway. The only ones that worked the way we wanted and that we could afford were EditShare and Apace's vStor. Apace guaranteed it would work with our edit system (VelocityQ), and EditShare wouldn't. We bought a vStor.

Using multiple disk-speed and data rate software utilities...the vStor tests at roughly 50-60MB/second sequential write speeds and about 60-70MB sequential read speads. Random access speeds are through the roof. But those speeds don't tell the whole story. We consistently get 4 channels of real-time SD video across 3 edit systems with video at DVCPro50 and higher resolutions. We can capture uncompressed all day long, and also play back 2 channels of uncompressed in real-time across 2 workstations simultaneously. Some of this performance defies explanation, since 10-12 channels of DVCPro50 video SHOULD require at least 75-90MB/sec data rates, which the vStor has never shown in tests. And that's not taking into account some of the overhead needed for the OS (Linux) and TCP/IP. So performance is about more than just raw data rates when it comes to video editing.

The best thing about it is that it's simple to install and cable, and relatively simple to setup and configure via software. They help you every step of the way, and once it's setup, it's pretty much transparent.

The bottom line is the setup you describe sounds really complex. From our experience...it doesn't have to be that way.



Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
www.videomi.com