NASty Disk Images

Just got our first NAS going yesterday and trying to get our events into sparse disk images.

When you guys move events to a sparse disk image, does FCPX always give you the 'out of space' warning? I made a 20 Gig sparse image on the NAS for an event that was only 40 megs, moved the event via fcpx, and still got the disk full warning from FCPX and could either continue or stop file transfer. Plus, the image is 20 gigs, but with nothing in it but the 40 megs we wanted.

It seems to work, the image mounts on any machine, and nothing seems lost. Is this just a bug?

Thanks!
JD

John Davidson | President / Creative Director | Magic Feather Inc.

It's a Mac-Mini FrankenNAS! Craziest thing yet and it totally works!

The ingredients are as follows:
1 Mac Mini server with as much RAM as you can get (I got 8 but need to upgrade it to 16).
1 Areca 1882x with Thunderbolt Driver updates
1 Proavio 8MS with 8x3Tb Hitachi Deskstar Drives
1 Small Tree 6 Port Ethernet card
1 UPS w battery backup
1 Sonnet Echo Express PCI to Thunderbolt Box



All systems are running Mountain Lion. I wanted the Magma box but they're backordered for 6-8 weeks so I got the Sonnet.

Installed the Small Tree gigabit ethernet drivers. Installed the Areca drivers and thunderbolt update. Took the Areca out of a mac pro edit suite as well as the ProAvio box. Plugged them in. The system worked. 600MB/s up and down on the AJA test, although the test gives some odd outputs from time to time, it's mostly consistent.

Really can't say enough great things about Matt, Steve, and Chris at Small Tree for their help. It takes a little settings work to get this thing running correctly, but it's good. We're editing off of the media drives and I'm still pinching myself about it. We digitized HDCam using Blackmagic Media Express over ethernet. The fact that we were able to recycle some of the hardware elements we already have like the Areca and ProAvio make this an affordable option. If you're buying all new equipment it might be smarter to to get a ThunderNet or something similar.

We also have a Promise Pegasus that would have eliminated the need for the Areca/Proavio box, but our storage is much larger than what the 6 drive Pegasus can offer.

This is a great interim solution for us in the meantime to stream video to four separate rooms. Just sharing after effects projects and media is fantastic. Apparently this Mac Mini Server can do a whole lot more. I'm tempted to get another one and start hosting our own email and contact sharing info.

One other thing, the two Mac Pros we have are using both ethernet plugs. One port for external internet and another for the NAS. I'm pickled tink!

John Davidson | President / Creative Director | Magic Feather Inc.

Yes, you can work that way but if you're accessing the same media at the same time you will get dropped frames. The small tree card eliminates that issue. However, the server machine cannot be an editing machine. Its a bit confusing at first, honestly.

John Davidson | President / Creative Director | Magic Feather Inc.

I should clarify I'm copying and deleting from the source which prevents duplicate FCPX identifiers from confusing the program. This essentially does the same thing as Event Manager X. So far so good.

John Davidson | President / Creative Director | Magic Feather Inc.

I don't have a NAS but just an old spare machine connected thru ethernet which is used to backup some customer test projects.
The way it works here is to create a sparse(bundle) with my
own little app (http://www.spherico.com/filmtools/createDiskImage/CreateDiskImage.dmg) and move the stuff.
I never got an "out of space" error except the sparse disk image really was to small.
Might be that swapping files need a bit more virtual memory on this virtual drive. So maybe creating a 100 gig sparse disk image could solve the problem.

-Andreas

Spherico
http://www.spherico.com/filmtools