Quote Originally Posted by Gian View Post
I have a client what wants (because wants) to playback a HD movie uncompressed. You can make a test for me please, on a 2.66 MacPro Dual ( I belive you have one of those) and a MTRON disk, you can test a Uncompressed 1920 x 1080p. We use 30 fps, but if you tested on a 25 fps is fine too.
you have to take a different approach to uncompressed- MTRON not so important-

the data rates are very large-

you can also investigate whether apple's pro -res codec or DVCProHD is "Uncompressed" enough... for your client.
( I could get almost 50frames per second total - from Pro-res 1080p ( seems to be around 30MB/s ) and DVCProHD 1080p ( around 15MB/s ) using MTRON and quad 2.66Ghz Intel )

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one second is 1920x1080x ( 2 or 3 - yuv or rgb - depends on codec ) x30 bytes = 186MB/s or 124MB/s
one second of standard definition 720x576 uncompressed is only 17MB/s - you can normally do 2-3 layers of this from a single 15k scsi disc if the wind blows in the right direction -

you need more than one disc- you might need up to 4 or 5 discs to do 186MB/s consistently-
This is the only time when a RAID solution is required.

First of all - you need to begin by making a little test using a RAM disk.
Check CPU and bus limits with RAM Disc-
i could only get esperance dv to create a 2GB ram disk-
So create one for yourself- create a Hidef- movie - a few seconds long - and see if it will play in catalyst from Ram disk.

Does it playback? from ram disk?
How many minutes does client need?

Then you need to start to do a lot of research on the RAID cards on the market-
SATA or fibre channel - internal SATA RAID on Mac - how many discs needed for length of content required?