Small studio HD shared storage suggestions?
by Jeff Brown
on
Feb 1, 2007 at 3:56:04 pm
Hi folks,
I'm planning to upgrade to HD capabilities later this year, as my clients (mostly corporate/institutional) are slowing changing over. Ideally, I would like to have media storage that is HD I/O capable for one workstation, but also shared among a render farm. Simply sharing a locally attached RAID on the wkstaiton is not ideal, as I run into a 10-machine limit on shares (Win XP). So, I would like to have a psuedo-SAN without going to infrastructure that would be overkill for a one-person shop. Software to use with the media storage includes PremierePro, Combustion, and 3dsMax.
Re: Small studio HD shared storage suggestions? by R.Howard on Feb 2, 2007 at 5:25:27 am
Jeff,
We have been offering a solution to these needs for small and large studios alike. Specific features have been built in to allow a render farm to hit the box while getting I/O at the same time. In addition to the entire unit acting like a VTR for the other side of the workflow after the frames make it into the system. The larger facilities are not usually hitting RaveHD direct from the render farm as they have storage in between but the concept and features are the same.
We have a new product announcing at NAB that will be addressing the pseudo-SAN in addition to our SAN support for what we are currently doing.
Can refer to you to a few post houses doing this if your interested.
Cheers,
Ramona
Ramona Howard
SpectSoft, LLC
593 Hi-Tech Parkway Suite B
Oakdale, CA 95361
Phone: 209.847.7812 extension 104
Fax: 209.847.7859
http://www.spectsoft.com
Re: Small studio HD shared storage suggestions? by R.Howard on Feb 4, 2007 at 8:52:15 pm
Bob,
Not in detail. We are putting together an event in LA to announce this just before NAB rather than waiting until NAB (Will get info up as soon as we finalize details). I can say that it addresses the issues that the large houses have been asking us for.
Cheers,
Ramona
Ramona Howard
SpectSoft, LLC
593 Hi-Tech Parkway Suite B
Oakdale, CA 95361
Phone: 209.847.7812 extension 104
Fax: 209.847.7859
http://www.spectsoft.com
Re: Small studio HD shared storage suggestions? by Tim Kolb on Feb 4, 2007 at 10:09:36 pm
Hi Jeff,
I think when you think about this and try to aim for lowest cost, the HD harddrive storage shoulld simply be local to the video editing machine and have the master 3d machine with some amount of local storage to store renders. The PPro machine can be part of the render farm, but can also function separately and can be used while the other machines are all slaved to perform a 3d render.
Networked storage would be great of course, but in order to get it to be fast enough to edit HD media over a network, I suspect you might be spending unnecessary resources on a system that would be best exploited in a multi-user, collaborative environment.
I don't see any reason why you couldn't have a really simple device like a SNAP server or something similar on the network as a destination for renders...this would make moving the rendered movies to the editing machine only tie up the server and the editing machine, leaving the 3d machine completely available for production work during that period.
...just a couple of random thoughts as I've had to think through similar workflows several times over the years...i'm sure there are other thoughts as well...
Re: Small studio HD shared storage suggestions? by Jeff Brown on Feb 6, 2007 at 3:14:08 am
Thanks for all the suggestions. Time for more research. And, at least I _have_ time for the research.
Tim-- That is the current setup I use- one small RAID on my workstation, and a Dell NAS device that renders go to. The only thing is, I do a fair amount of compositing work, too, so if I want to have footage accessable to all machines, I have to copy it over to the NAS.
Just hoping to have it all...
Ramona-- I *will* be watching for the "psuedo-SAN". Might take a closer look at the Rave in the meantime.
Re: Small studio HD shared storage suggestions? by Daniel W. Kent on Feb 6, 2007 at 11:56:56 am
I would have to recommend going with a 4gb fibre Raid 3 NAS solution running Linux with 12 or more 750gb Seagate drives
the more drives the better if you require the Read/write performance for Rad 0 for SMPTE 292 HD, but also the security of Raid 3 for data recovery etc.
I would also go NAS rather than SAN if you wish to access the content on the drives from seperate workstations. SAN's tend not to play well if you use multiple OS's like me.
All depends on how much you want to pay.
Even if you are a Small one man shop the files you will be creating will be huge and for Realtime playback you will need to go big.
Anyway thats my 2 cents
Thier is always someone more knowledgable than you!!!
Re: Small studio HD shared storage suggestions? by R.Howard on Feb 6, 2007 at 6:25:53 pm
Thanks Jeff,
Email me off list and I can fill you in on a few of the details.
ramona@spectsoft.com
Ramona Howard
SpectSoft, LLC
593 Hi-Tech Parkway Suite B
Oakdale, CA 95361
Phone: 209.847.7812 extension 104
Fax: 209.847.7859
http://www.spectsoft.com
