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View Full Version : Feature storage medium and post process



William Wedig
04-21-2008, 08:06 AM
I was wondering what storage solutions people are doing to work with Red footage.

For 40 hours of footage, working off the proxies in FCP, you need around 4 terabytes (very rough estimate, about 100gbs and hours X 40 = 4.000 gbs/hour).

The second option is using the L&T window to convert to proress 422 (non-HQ) but that's still around 2.7 terabytes.

Third option is using Red Cine to convert to something super low rent like DV NTSC in which case 40 hours runs about 500 gbs. Totally do-able on one external firewire 800 drive, but it could be hard to see sharp focus on a lower res file. Completely do-able, but not preferential. Plus losing the sound or having to retrieve it in some ass-backward way would totally suck ass.

The cheap version of storage is a stack of 1 terabyte (with 2 X 1 terabyte drives inside in a Raid 1 case) external firewire 800 drives that can be bought for around $500 USD. My question, is after you daisy chain that many drives, how well does it really react on playback? I figure it would take a long, long time to load the project and generally FCP just wouldn't be happy dealing with that much media.

What options are other people doing and has anybody tried to daisy chain 4 tera of drive space together to work on a feature shot on Red? Are there any cheap server/tower type storage out there that a small indie feature could afford (less than 4 or 5 thousand) to store all the media, backed up at least by a Raid 1? I checked out Drobo, but I don't think the access speeds on it are great enough to deal with the footage over a usb connection.

Thanks,
Will

ThomtheEditor
04-21-2008, 03:27 PM
If you look around online you can get all the pieces for a Sata RAID with about 3-5tb worth of disk space + the card for around $600-800 (if you're willing to build it yourself). These give extremely fast performance for the price point, these raids have between 4 and 5 drives depending on the caseing you want; we have them on several machines and they continuessly run fast enough for us to use them to layoff uncompressed 8-bit HD 1920x1080 4.2.2 timelines to HDCam decks with no dropped frames.

The drives are also hot-swappable so you can easily move them from machine to machine. and you can upgrade the casing with higher capacity/speed drives when you can afford them down the road!

William Wedig
04-21-2008, 04:20 PM
Ok, sign me up!

Where can I look for that? Any sites or specifics I need to know? What brand do you use?

Does that device include the storage media with it? 6-800 sounds low to me...

ThomtheEditor
04-21-2008, 05:46 PM
we goto Fry's electronics, here's a list of store locations, hope there's one near you!

http://www.frys-electronics-ads.com/frys-store-location.htm

when we bought our casing (Venus T45) they supplied that casing, the cabling and a 2 port e-sata card (meaning you could hook up 2 casings on one card and even though it's 2 separate enclosures raid them together into 1 8 drive striped raid set) for $250per and then whatever drives you want to stick in them is the extra cost, if you find cheaper drives online you could use them as long as they're sata capable.

JeffVFR
06-13-2008, 03:18 PM
Ok, sign me up!

Where can I look for that? Any sites or specifics I need to know? What brand do you use?

Does that device include the storage media with it? 6-800 sounds low to me...

Hey William - I'm on my first day of researching this same question and found your post from a few months ago. Can I ask you what solution you ended up with? I'm launching a documentary on RED so I'm going to need lots and lots of storage, so I'm looking for the most cost efficient way to go.

Thanks. Hope it's all worked out great.

Jeff