With the latest version of catalyst being able to run on Tiger, my performance just shot through the roof, as the Xserve RAID drivers are MUCh better than they were on 10.3.x On my last show, doing all SD, I was able to have 7 catalysts playing back two files each, and an 8th server which was doing three seperate outputs (so 6 files playing back sometimes) and I did not notice a stutter anywhere, except for one file the art department gave me which had been encoded to Pjpeg at 100% quality.
Also, As a test when I first got the whole system set up on site, but did not yet have any projectors or LED walls up, I put one file of a fan that I had shot, slow motion, and let it play on all 8 catalysts, they stayed perfectly in sync with each other for around 4 hours. These had been encoded as DVntsc. This was not using the sync feature, just started them all at the same time and let them run.

I also used this sytem at the Latin Grammy's this year, and it performed very well. The only issue I had was that I had a really nasty delay on the SDI input (like almost 2 seconds), and they wanted to sync something with audio, so we had to delay the audio and roll it off of a backup profile.

While Xserve RAID is not cheap, it is not really any more expensive than the Huge systems arrays, or anyone else's for that matter, and when I was putting together this sytem, it actually ended up being around the same cost as doing SCSI for each machien, but with much larger disc capacities.
While SATA II does have faster throughput, the disc latencies are still the same as SATA I so it does not really help us all that much for Catalyst. The benfit, is that you can do port multiplication, and create larger arrays, and do more uncompressed stuff if you want.

If you could get Animation to work on a G5 using catalyst, then this would really solve your problem. You'll have to ingest from tape anyways and render out to whatever format you are using anyways.....

Yes, I am a little lucky in the environment I work in, however I still get artist's people coming to me 10 minutes before rehearsals with a beta all the time, and the same goes with people from withing the network who are not used to working with me, but I have trained most of the graphics artists to give me what I want and how, and we work to gether so that if it is something that can be easily accomplished in Catalyst, I handle it, if it's not, they take care of it for me ahead of time. It's becoming more and more of a challenge, because for each show, they put more and more on my plate, and I live up to it, so the tasks just keep getting larger and larger. It gets to a point where you hit a limit of how much one person can really handle.