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System Configuration and RAID Storage

One of things that I want to talk about is configuring the system because there's a lot of conversation about this and I get emails saying what's the best computer and what's the best camera any mac any mac except the mac mini can run final cut pro tem any mac that can run final cut ten is powerful enough to edit hd media this obsession that we have about kenny the absolute fastest computer is wonderful but we're wasting money any mac and I mac mac book mac book pro a mac pro old mac crowed new mac pro any mac can run final cut sorry period and hd is not that big a format anymore what you want to do if you want performance however now clearly some actual run final cut ten faster than others some will do maur be more capable but that doesn't mean that you that you have to buy the absolute most expensive macintosh to do video editing what yes sir rp sees chips final cut ten requires a system capable of running ten nine or later so you have to be on mavericks or later to be able to run on...

intel so the gating factories can it run mavericks and the answer is most older systems can't run mavericks that are more than safe four years old final cut is designed to take advantage of the latest operating system and that requires processes which are sixty four bit compatible the way that final cut is now designed unlike say final cut seven is the graphics processing in it the gpu is mohr important than the cpu the graphics processing unit is doing more heavy lifting than the central processing the microprocessor so if you're going to invest money in the computer you want to spend money get the best graphics card that you can afford eight gigabytes of ram is the minimum sixteen gigabytes is better thirty two gigabytes is fine if you have the money but it's not necessary and mohr than thirty two gigabytes most of the time is more than you need now if you've got the money spend it but if budget is important investor money first in the gpu get the fastest highest quality gpu your computer will support get a reasonable amount of round but don't max it out necessarily mohr ram is always better but the gpu is more important and this is the most important statement media needs to be stored separately from the boot drive now remember jim when he was modelling his computer he was waving about this computer has exactly one hard drive in its own ssd drive but there's only one this is wonderful for doing things like updating facebook pages or reading email or writing word processing documents even number crunching a single boot drive is perfectly fine but it is not sufficient for editing with editing we must have to orm or drives must I called one of these the internal drive I call that the boot drive the boot drives the one that holds the operating system and the second drive, which can be either internal or external depending on what kind of computer you've got. A second driver is the one that holds your media and this is really, really important before I die aggress on storage question bernard well, just a quick question about why the why you feel in the mac community is not a computer to run five foot ten it has ah graphics card which is inadequate so it's using until chip which is ok but it isn't fast enough to do any kind of serious video editing and because we can't upgrade the graphics card inside the mac mini it it's just it's just inadequate it's a wonderful server back in the office I've got four mac minis for servers but it just doesn't work for final cut we obsess about the computer we obsess about oh it's only three point four gigahertz it needs to be three point five gigahertz that extra point one gigahertz long the computer is not the issue. Storage is the issue you will spend farm or on storage than you will ever spend on your computer virtually any computer connected video mac mini as the exception. However, not all storages optimized for video video files are huge with long durations raids are ideally suited for video now music creation music sampling an audio editing tend to use smaller, shorter files but many files for audio editing when you're working with lots and lots of small files what's called a j budd just a bunch of discs j bod system is preferred but for video editing because the video files are very large and very long duration a raid his ideal a rage stands for a redundant array of inexpensive and here a fistfight breaks out it's either drives devices or discs whichever you prefer a redundant array of inexpensive devices gang in multiple hard disks together to act as a single drive hang on I'm just reflecting for a second there are multiple types of rage there's a raid zero raid one five, six and fifty there's also a raid three, ten, eleven sixty and probably more and I'll just ignore those last ones which are just for bar fights anyway a rave zero is fast it's cheap has no data redundancy, it has exactly two drives in it and what happens is we write data toe both drives at the same time. So a piece of my data piece of my file is on first driving a piece of my file is on the second drive and because I'm writing simultaneously to two different drives, I get twice the speed that I would get off a single drive a raid one is just the opposite of a raid zero also two drives but this time I write the entire file both to drive one and to drive to this gives me two complete copies of the file red ones our slow there also inexpensive and they provide total data redundancy raid zero simultaneous writing to both drives very fast but if one of those drives dies because pieces of the file are on dr too and on drive one if drive to dies I've lost all my data no and I don't know about you but one word that scares a lot of people is I've lost all my data this generally causes editors to nash teeth and tear hair waved an option we need something which is fast and protects our data this is a raid five a raid five is very fast not necessarily cheap but if we lose one drive our data is still safe a raid six is fast also not cheap but if we lose two drives at the same time our data is still safe now arrange fifty is really fast and really not cheap but gives us data redundancy within men speeds and philip you khun buy me one for christmas so when you have in your spare cash the best balance we have between protecting our data and speed is a raid five the problem is with the release of thunderbolt first thunderbolt won in thunderball too with the exception of promised technology and a couple of other companies, raid fives have been really, really, really scarce because with thunderbolt, the problem we've got with thunderbolt is it's both a data protocol used for hard disks and a display protocol used for monitors and certifying something which is both for monitors and for storage requires technical expertise that a lot of storage developers didn't have and the specs are really, really tight so it's taken a lot longer for thunderball raid five devices to be certified plus it's taken longer for chips that's to be developed plus in the middle ofthe the raid one of the of the development of thunderbolt won we had thunderball two announced so all that thunder bowl one development had to get scrapped it had to go back to thunderbolt too and everything had to be re certified. We're seeing now at the n a v show in november that were getting announcements on raid five thunderball two devices they're going to start to ship this month and july and august will see most of them out in the market. I cannot wait a raid five is just really, really exciting because it gives me data protection, high speed, reasonable price and immense storage this is a a side note, one of things that we run into an editing as a process called dropped frames what this means is that your hard disk is too slow to play the video format that your editing sometimes it's caused by editing a video format like h dot to sixty four, which is mathematically intense uh, and your computer's too slow to be able to play it back, but a drop frame is almost always an indicated that your storage is too slow to do what you want to do. The best way to prevent dropped frames is either to buy faster storage or switch to editing using proxy files, and we'll talk about proxy files and we talk about importing in the next section. But a drop frame whenever you get that error message automatically points the fickle finger of blame to your hard disk. So justus the thought on the drop frame isn't it? Your source? Media is never affected your source media is always safe always, but we can't necessarily play it back fast enough, and the drop frame is a playback problem, not a damage to your source media problem. Okay, here's the math class take a deep breath, you'll survive this. How we connect our storage has a material difference in the speed the storage is able to create if you take a hard disk like I've got a hard disk attached to my computer and if I attach it via usb two to a macintosh because windows numbers are slightly different if I touch it to a mac, I'm going to be able to get performance at the ten to fifteen mega by the second range. Reasonably slow usb two is optimized for very slow mice and scanners and keyboards, not optimized for hard disks. An older standards. Firewire four hundred will give me a data transfer rate between twenty and twenty five megabytes a second. First, we can't buy firewire four hundred vices anymore, though there's millions of them hanging around ah better child choices. Firewire eight hundred, which total deliver state around eighty eighty five megabytes of second for older systems. I'm max and macbook pros before a couple years ago, firewire eight hundred was the fastest that we could get going into our computer, a stand alone external hard drive, spinning media, not sst. When it's connected perfectly well, just say, however that's defined is going to give us a data transfer rating between one hundred to one hundred twenty megabytes of second. This is an important number will come back to it in a minute, one hundred to one hundred twenty megabytes of second and ssd drive, which stands for solid state disks, is much faster, but the speed of an ssd drive varies wildly based upon the protocol that it uses for connection somewhere between two hundred and five hundred megabytes a second sateh which is an older standard but was very used in the old mac prose has a variable data rate it's around three hundred megabyte for second depending upon drives thunderball one is upto one point one gigabytes per second depending upon drives and thunderbolt too is up to two point two gigabytes per second depending upon drives now it's this depending upon drives that I want to talk about for just a minute remember that a single dr goes between one hundred and one hundred and twenty megabytes a second so philip I want to do some math forming grab a microphone if I have a single hard drive how fast is that hard drive going to go? I was communication major you're going to have to the math for me okay but if I connected perfectly looking at the screen how fast is a single hard drive go I'll give you a hint the one twenty there one hundred twenty megabytes a second if I connect that dr via east satya how fast is it going to go on e satya the answer is states of one twenty ok if I connected the a thunderbolt won how fast is it going to go one twenty by connected the a thunderbolt to how fast is it going to go? I'll just stays there the protocol doesn't make a difference if the protocol is faster than the hard disk the hard disk gates the speed this is why when you look at a raid that sound dealer shelf, you're off the hook. Now you can relax if you look at a raid that's on a dealer shelf. The box says this supports thunderbolt too upto two point two gigabytes a second. If it has two drives in it what's the fastest it could possibly go one hundred twenty megabytes. The second times two, two hundred and forty megabytes sets all the faster I can get out of the hard drive. This is where marketing is running amok because the manufacturers air absolutely truthful. It connects the a thunderbolt too. But if it's only got two drives in it, you're not going to get thunderbolt to speeds that drives don't go fast enough now I can already see jim scratching his senses. Larry okay, great! I've got a single hard drive attached to a thunderbolt want it's going between one hundred one hundred twenty megabytes of second? Why do I care? We care because of this table. This is the second table of the math class. If I'm editing a vc hd, it takes up to six megabytes per second to stream. I can edit that with firewire eight hundred I can edit that with a single hard drive I got together with thunderbolt won at it with thunderbolt too but notices my codex changed, remember kodak is the conversion between analog to digital abc hd is a kodak devia three point seven five megabytes is a kodak x d cam seven point seven five megabytes is a kodak pro rez proxy it five or four to two at eighteen or h q at twenty seven or read at thirty eight ah, fully un compressed high definition image is two hundred and thirty seven megabytes per second, two hundred thirty seven I can't do that with a single drive. I can't even do that with two drives. It's too big a kodak now I'm doing multi cam editing let's say that I'm doing multi cam editing with pro rest for two to eighteen megabytes of second let's round that up to twenty just to make it easier, I've got ten cameras that I'm editing that's two hundred megabytes a second, I can't do that with a single hard drive, I don't care how it's connected a single hard drive only goes one hundred to one hundred twenty megabytes the second, so here you are trying to figure out why I can't edit this stupid multi cam shot because I've optimized media because larry says optimized media on my hard drive is in fast enough it's got to be the software no it's, the storage, everything everything comes back to the storage how fast I go the codex that I support, whether I get dropped frames or not, whether I do multi commodity it always always, always comes back to the storage people obsess about the computer. The computer is fast enough. It's the storage that traps you up. This is so critically essential. We move into hyde really high def high resolutions to kay and four k formats. Some four k formats are requiring more than five hundred megabytes a second, five hundred megabytes a second for a four k twelve bit raw image. I mean, whoa, a terabyte every few seconds I'm supposed to this on a single hard drive. Poor hard drive, it's going to die it's a little bit feet kicking up a near squirming and dying on the carpet can't handle it. We have tohave raids and the way of raid works in a raid. Five is I take dough I talk about that back up their raid. Five here's how raped five works a raid five requires at least three hard drives generally for somewhere between foreign five given there's two types of raid five years for dr raids and eight dr wright's so let's, take a four dr raid. My data is written essentially to three of those drives and then data about the data is written to a fourth drive now this is actually the structure of a raid three so you engineers out there don't yell at me it's just easier to explain so I have my information about my data that I've got I've got my files and I got information about the data. If I lose one of these drives the combination of the other drives will automatically rebuild the data. I can still access it. I still get the same performance. Life is still good, but I can then take that drive and replace it with all this good. Okay, because one drive is essentially reserved for data about my data. If I have four drives, the speed of my raid is the number of drives minus one. So I have three drives so afford dr raid is going to give me the storage capacity of three drives and speed of three drives. So the fastest I'm going to be able to expect a raid five with four drives in it, the workers around four hundred megabytes, five hundred megabytes of second and eight dr raid's gonna be about a thousand megabytes a second. The more drives you have, the faster it goes to dr raid about two hundred fifty megabytes of second now there's some fluctuation in here. But the more drives, the faster the deeper the storage, the fewer drives the slower regardless of how you connected this is such an important concept. It's, a combination of the kodak that you use. How big is the kodak, how much space is rick acquired? How fast does it need to have a data transfer rate? How do you connect your storage? Thunder bowl usb three forgot to mention usb three has a maximum speed of four hundred sixty megabytes a second, so I connect us be three it's, slower than thunderbolt, won slower than thunderball, two, but faster than firewire eight hundred. How you connect determined speed, the number of drives determined speed the kodak determines speed all of these together and notice. Not once did I say that computer you use computers important, but not. We're nowhere near as important as connection protocol, number of drives and a kodak that you use.