PC Laptop for Data Wrangling on Low Budget Feature

[Louis Weissman]

I was brought on the camera department for a low budget (≤$1 mil) feature shooting on two Epics with a Scarlet on steadycam. Due to the number of cameras and only having five 128gb SSDs I've ending up doing on set DIT on a Macbook Pro. I'm not transcoding anything, merely dragging and dropping onto two hard drives, the rest is happening at the post house. Yesterday, day 1 of shooting, I was waiting for 3 hours after wrap to finish the transfer because I had two RedMag readers daisy chained to one Firewire 800 port and two portable harddrives each in its own USB 2.0 port. We had massive amounts of footage before we would reload so today I'm pretty much staying in the tent and swapping cards as quickly as possible to avoid the pain again, I'm also only running one Mag reader.

We're looking for cheap ways to speed up our process and I was wondering if anyone had experience using inexpensive laptops with high speed ports to do this. I was looking at the http://www.dell.com/us/business/p/vostro-3550/pd because it has two USB 3.0 ports and E Sata port. I could use the E Sata with the Mag reader and the harddrives can have 3.0 cables attached. I don't believe any of the computer's specs really matter since its only a conduit between the SSDs and the drives.

Pretty much I'm wondering if anyone has experience with this laptop or similar ones for this purpose and if it will help at all?

Thanks for taking the time to read this and offer advice, much appreciated.

[Paul J Steinberg]

That machine is similar to the Sony Vaio that I used to use for data wrangling. Do yourself a favor and get an eSATA express card and a small eSATA RAID (something like http://www.newegg.ca/Product/Product...82E16816111149). eSATA express cards will give you two more eSATA ports and an eSATA RAID will be able to keep up to the speed of the RedMAG's. USB3.0 is fast on paper but it seems to transfer in bursts, eSATA seems to sustain the higher speeds (at least on this Vaio). If you can't afford a little 4-drive RAID maybe an eSATA dock (something like http://www.newegg.ca/Product/Product...82E16817709017).

Good luck with it.

[joe hedge]

I'm not transcoding anything, merely dragging and dropping onto two hard drives, the rest is happening at the post house. Yesterday, day 1 of shooting, I was waiting for 3 hours after wrap to finish the transfer because I had two RedMag readers daisy chained to one Firewire 800 port and two portable harddrives each in its own USB 2.0 port. We had massive amounts of footage before we would reload so today I'm pretty much staying in the tent and swapping cards as quickly as possible to avoid the pain again, I'm also only running one Mag reader.

Yikes

Prepare for some interesting emails from the post house

Amazing that a million dollar production would not know better than this

[Brian Merlen]

faster ports are key, why aren't you using thunderbolt/esata? stop wasting the time and get faster ports...this aint HDV, ya know what i mean?

[Angelo Lorenzo]

There are a lot of issues here. I agree with Paul's suggestion: an eSata Express card with two RAID5's should do the trick. If your laptop has an eSata port already, you'll be rocking with three: one for the mag reader and one for each RAID. The RAIDs will probably be a personal purchase, unloading the footage overnight on production-bought drives so the posthouse can deal with them.

Do not use Finder(mac) or Explorer (win) to do file transferring. R3D Data Manager or Shotput Pro have considerable advantages: they copy to multiple locations at the same time with a read once-write many setup and they perform checksums on the data transfer, making sure nothing was corrupted. I tend to like the latter program as I also DIT on photoshoots so I'm not entirely RED-centric.

[Noah Yuan-Vogel]

I have a dell 15" XPS laptop with a similar (2) USB 3.0 and (1) combo usb/esata port configuration and consistently get about 100-125MBps sequential reads from my 64GB redmags over my combo esata port or through $15 bytecc USB3-to-esata adapters on the usb3 ports. If done correctly with USB3.0 or esata backup drives that are capable of >100MBps sequential (be careful since that will slow down as they get full) you should be able to get around 50MBps backups if ~100MBps reads from your redmag split over two copy operations becomes the bottleneck. This copy speed could be doubled with something like r3d data manager or another software package that allows one single read operation for multiple copy operations writing to different locations.

What are we comparing to? What speeds were you getting? I'd guess your bottleneck was the single USB bus shared between two hard drives possibly giving you backup speeds as slow as 12MBps. If that is the case, you stand to increase speed by 4-10x by moving to an inexpensive laptop with esata and usb3. I'd recommend not using bus powered 2.5" drives as your backup drives partly because bus power can be unstable and mostly because those drives tend to have rather slow sequential write speeds compared to larger drives with larger platters and therefore faster speeds at the same rpm. A lot of the cheaper USB3 portable HDDs you might find in best buy max out around 50-60MBps due to the physical limitations of the drive and slow to about half that once the drive is more full. Use 3.5" drives or even better a RAID or SSD to avoid bottlenecks.

If I may, I will also note that this dell laptop cost about $800 14 months ago and has nearly identical specs to a 15" mbp apple is selling for $2200 right now, except that this laptop has a better graphics card and a better 1080p RGBLED screen.

On the other hand if you happen to have an older MBP with expresscard, which these days is less likely, you could increase your speeds with an expresscard to esata adapter as others have mentioned. As for connecting RAID5's, RAID5 is great for further redundancy, but sequential writes to two normal modern 3.5" esata drives may saturate the maximum speed of an expresscard esata adapter as I have found some of them max out around 150MBps total for either or both esata channels. It is somewhat unlikely two RAID5s will give you much extra speed in that scenario, especially since a smaller, cheaper RAID5 may write even slower than a single drive with all the parity calculations, and since the expresscard adapter may still be a bottleneck even with two non-RAID drives. Also, if your redmag is still connected through FW800, your overall bottleneck will still likely be at 40MBps for two normal copies or 80MBps for R3D Data Manager copies to two locations.

[Ryan Sauve]

Just bought this guy today for $1,500 - http://www.amazon.com/MSI-GT60-0NC-0...words=msi+gt60

I added 4GB of ram for $27 dollars and I'm pretty happy. Through eSATA, it was offloading footage at just over 150 megabytes/second (a 64GB mag would offload in just over 7 minutes) and I can preview real time at 1/4, which is good enough for me. I haven't tried previewing it with heavy effects yet but this guy will definitely do. I re-partitioned the OS drive to 115GB and the other 885GB to a media driver. I'm going to get an external hard drive and figure out how I can offload simultaneously, if possible, to the laptop and the drive for redundancy. If anyone has any suggestions, I'm all ears. Got 2 eSATA ports (well, at least one, the other is suppose to be a USB 2.0/eSATA combo but it don't look like it - will have to call them tomorrow about that) and 3 USB 3.0 ports on this sucker!