How much throughput for 1080 4:4:4?

[Evin Grant]

With a Rocket in an 8 core Macpro how fast a drive/Raid do I need to play out full 23.98 4:4:4 to an SRW1 deck for transfer to tape (I know, I'm trying to talk them out of it). It seems to me that playback from a regular 3G SATA drive is almost making it in single link, but not quite.

[Jeff Kilgroe]

For uncompressed 10bit 1080p @ 24fps, you typically need about 192MB/s sustained for read or write. I typically just say 200MB/s or more to be on the safe side. You won't be able to rely on any current single-drive solution to do this. Any decent RAID-0 of 3 decent HDD's these days will handle it just fine, many 2-drive solutions will too.. If you want uncompressed 16bit, then you need about 307MB/s, and I usually try to push for 325MB/s or higher to be sure.

[Stephen Lovett]

Hey Evin,

Aja has a free iphone app for data rate calculation.

According to it ProRes 444 is:

2K x1080p24 = 40.1MB/s
2k x1556p24 = 57.7 MB/s
4kp24 (RED) = 169.1 MB/s

But that is for a single stream, and you'll want some headroom as Jeff suggests.

Cheers,

Steve

[Jeff Kilgroe]

I just realized that my answer doesn't have much to do with Evin's question. Now that I'm reading it again, it seems he's asking about playing out RED footage as 1080p 4:4:4 via the RED Rocket.

Yeah, to get full performance out of it, most single-drive solutions tend to choke at times, or just almost do it. Any decent 2-drive RAID-0 connected via eSATA will handle the playback just fine.