hard drives

[samsc]

What did you need to do to get optimum speed from your UL4d? I just added a UL4d and a Atlas IV 10K and am not seeing the improvment I was expecting. It is in the 133 slot, however it did not seem to come with any special software. Is it really PnP at 133mhz?

Thanks
Chris

slots dont matter.
You have to make sure its terminated + are you fitting internally or externally?

[samsc]

Multiple U320 drives in a zero striped set down 2 channels. A good example would be 2 drives on one channel and the other 2 on another, or more. Use AppleRaid (disk utility) to build a 0 striped set.

With a single drive you aren't going to see much difference, at least you have the foundation to add more drives as you get them, they all must be the same capacity or they will get truncated to the lowest capacity drive.

A single drive won't do much more than a single SATA drive.

Christian

Having a dual drive setup makes no difference at all to everyday catalyst usage. And in several cases can be worse than a single drive.

If you are playing back dv files it wont make a sausage of a difference.
Not a thing.

You only get any improvement if you are going to be trying to playback uncompressed or near uncompressed movies.
And thats a different game - because you wont see much of a different in image quality either - all other things considered-

[samsc]

What did you need to do to get optimum speed from your UL4d? I just added a UL4d and a Atlas IV 10K and am not seeing the improvment I was expecting. It is in the 133 slot, however it did not seem to come with any special software. Is it really PnP at 133mhz?

Thanks
Chris

what files are you testing with?
dv files?

You have to download attos drives and configuration tools, from their website. and make sure the pci card flash ram is up to date.

It doesnt make any difference to the performance of photojpeg or any other codec. it doesnt suddenly make photojpeg work. it makes dv-ntsc work on 4 layers at 30fps. thats it.
This information is all in my testing charts.

everything else is processor limited not drive limited.

[litemover]

Having a dual drive setup makes no difference at all to everyday catalyst usage. And in several cases can be worse than a single drive.

If you are playing back dv files it wont make a sausage of a difference.
Not a thing.

You only get any improvement if you are going to be trying to playback uncompressed or near uncompressed movies.
And thats a different game - because you wont see much of a different in image quality either - all other things considered-

4 Raptors in a zero stripe array will play back blackmagic 10 bit best encoded files at full speed 30fps accross 4 layers. Just tested this on F24 6 layers.

It will play back 6 layers at 29 dipping down to 17 at times but with 4 it is a solid 30fps. I encoded some native photojpeg content that was about 2.1mb/s data rate into huge files that play faster. Wierd that black magic 10bit huge files play faster than photojpeg at half quality.

Just thought you might find this interesting.

Christian

[Spam Butterfly]

This rather supports Richard's earlier assertions. The Blackmagic codec is an Uncompressed codec. The processor is not doing much work to decode this. With uncompressed video you need lots of drive bandwidth to get it off the drive, which is why RAID arrays are essential for uncompressed work.

With compressed video, it's the physical speed that the data can be accessed on the hard drives patters that's the key - not the sustained data rate. RAID does not help for this.

Photo-Jpeg performance has nothing to do with drive speed at all. Photo-Jpeg is an off-line format. It's generally used by content providers because it provides great compression ratios with a minimum loss of quality. However, it's heinously processor intensive to decode and encode - hence the shit performance.

Hugh

[tylerr]

So on that note should be be converting our files to some other format that the one originally specified by High End? I believe that it was Photo Jpeg medium quality.

Tyler http://chaldee1.gotadsl.co.uk/~richa...quote=1&p=949#

[litemover]

So on that note should be be converting our files to some other format that the one originally specified by High End? I believe that it was Photo Jpeg medium quality.

Tyler http://chaldee1.gotadsl.co.uk/~richa...quote=1&p=949#

I know I'm going to be now. Getting full speed accross the board without barely any compression is worth it for me.

The downside is that it takes a lot more space and you need a multi drive zero striped array.

Christian

[Spam Butterfly]

I guess if you have the budget for the RAID array, then go uncompressed, if it's giving you the performance and quality you are after.

However DV PAL/NTSC is still the best codec to use for Catalyst, performance, and always has been. At least in Europe, DV PAL's 4:2:0 colour sampling gives better perceived colour than NTSC's 4:1:1 - hence I get less grief about this, and Tyler, I would keep your files in DV NTSC.

The content that High End has supplied in the past has been a mixture of DV and DVC Pro in NTSC format, + photojpeg stuff at medium quality.
The original v.1 media servers made in London had Photo-Jpeg content in Best quality, which was the format that it was delivered to me in (and in PAL hehehehe).

Photo-Jpeg has a number of drawbacks - the most significant is that it takes considerably more grunt to decompress it, hence this discussion. However, it has one significant advantage, other than being a great off-line format, which is that it supports resolutions other than standard definition. If you have a series of images that you want to use in your show, you may find that it's better to render these as a 'slide show' movie, and you'll get better performance.

[samsc]

The original v.1 media servers made in London had Photo-Jpeg content in Best quality, which was the format that it was delivered to me in (and in PAL hehehehe).

which will not work on multiple layers in catalyst v3- you get the worst of both possible worlds. big files and slower decompression.

[tylerr]

Has anyone tried a 15k RPM drive? Is there any amazing differance in preformance for twice the proce of a 10K?

Tylerhttp://chaldee1.gotadsl.co.uk/~richardb/upload/newreply.php?do=newreply&noquote=1&p=958#