What is Drive Read/Write Speed for Apple Color R3D Workflow ?

[Vigen Vartanov]

Good day . Found that i need faster HDD for Color , and my R3D files.
My Main SAN Raid is format as Mirror , sow it is more fast then same . Now i want to get separate drive , connected directly to Color Station , where i will put 1 project footage , and work with it . I need min Raid 5 configuration as i understand , with ESata connection .
Want to know minimum Read and Write Speed that i need to get for best result.
Thanks.

[Patrick Tresch]

It dipends also on graphic card and how you configure your Color setup/user pref. Enable RGB on or off (be carefull it's not good to have it on for critical colormatching) update UI...

Pat

[Vigen Vartanov]

Thanks , great question about Graphic Card , I am still can not select card that i need to buy. Quadro FX is out of my budget , but also cards that are on Apple.com ,
looks like will not give full performance.

Question - Why R/W speed is depend on Graphic Card ?
You mean if my render time is slow because of GPU it dose not need high Write Speed because HDD have inafe time ?
And what about Read Speed on PlayBack time .

[Patrick Tresch]

It's good to have great R/W perfomance but like a puzzle, all pieces have an influance on overall speed.

Sorry I don't know wich graphic card would suite best your needs...

for rendering of 4K files and DPX: a graphics card with at least 512MB of VRAM
For 32-bit rendering: a graphics card with at least 256MB of VRAM

http://www.apple.com/finalcutstudio/specs/

Pat

[David Battistella]

Vigen,

An important note is that Apple Color uses GPU processor for rendering and all or most if it's tasks.

There is not an Apple Solution that will give you Real Time r3d decoding even with the fastest mac and the fastest processors and the fastest drives.

You could convert to DPX in which case you will need fast Fiber Channel, E-sata or SAS drives in a raid configuration that will sustain high data rate transfer, But color still uses GPU for the bulk of it's processing so the GFX card you choose is the most important part of the equation.

David

[sander kamp]

You don't need that high speeds for r3D files in Color since the data rate of r3D files is 28-36 MB/s, which most hard drives these days can do easily. I do think it is important that your hard drive is not fragmented. I just did a project on a USB drive and actually it worked fine. Mostly I think because it was a new drive and it had nothing else on it but the r3D files.

[Patrick Tresch]

Don't forget that you can also use Playback proxy of the R3D (as when working in DPX) as a quality setting that speeds up the playing frame rate... The quality is not great but if frame rate is really important it could be of use.

Pat

[Cüneyt Kaya]

will color take advantage of redrocket sometime in the future?

[Michael Romano]

will color take advantage of redrocket sometime in the future?

That'd be nice!

The sad reality is that 4K is just not going to work out in real time for Color as things are now. Use the proxy playback option and get RAM+CPU power. I do projects based off of FW400/800 drive all the time and not a glitch in sight and I also have a lower end video card (NVIDIA GeForce GT 120 w/512MB) but it still performs admirably. In fact, Color 1.5 offered up a huge boost on my GPU and our studios ATI card just with the software update!