Warwick Teale wrote:
Hi, I'll just add my thoughts on Compressor.app. (fast file systems is least of consideration)..see why.
FAST DISK SPEEDS for TRANSCODE? (myth buster time) HUMBUG indeed... ℹ : hmm well this factors or adds quite low in the workflow mix...example a single 7200 RPM single disk spindle will be fine for the average (18Mbs H.264 target).. and will service a typical WRITE from a transcode..
- monitor your usage and you will see.. the FILE SYSTEM access is mostly READs (like editing) and a small amount of WRITE
- check yourself... and break out of this myth
- sure Compressor.app loads/launches very very fast from an SSD (like my OWC acelsior_e2 PCI SSD).. no help for actual transcoding .
- your filesystem activity friend is the unix fs_usage command - check it out to detail monitor the compressord processes.
FWIW, our production source and target is usually a very fast DISK ARRAY (8 x spindles over an R380 card with 2 x SAS interfaces.. tops at 7) hosted on a topped out MACPRO.
- These resources source and target file system is shared over a DEDICATED GbE network (with its own DNS and DHCP via OSX 10.9 server) to srvice nodes (mac-minis).. no noise on this. It services reads very well!
- the above from AJA system test whacktest.app very nice for FCPX however of small benefit for transcoding (Compressor.app)
- each client job has it's own source and distribution
HTH
Warwick
Hong Kong
You have to take into account other variables when people (including myself) said fast storage was more important. When that was generally said I dont think that was meant for people with just 2 machines in their cluster, or for local only encoding. Using 4 minis and a MBP (2 instances for each machine) I can see the hard drive read/writes at anywhere from 50MB-70MB/s at times, during the beginning of segments and final assembly. That is a max, disk read/write are lower as well. Gigabit is always maxed at 115-120MB/s. This is a common scenario of say Prores 422 to H.264, using auto file sharing. Now, go back a couple of years and replace the minis with Mac Pros or Xerves with 4-6 instances per machine. And now instead of 4 machines, move to something modest for a production environment like 10. And maybe they used MPEG2 instead of H.264, and Uncompressed 8/10bit or one of the many camera codecs instead of Prores. Anyways, it adds up when you scale up. Fast storage used to be a big deal, but now even the 5400RPM drive I got with my Mini which I tossed into a USB3 case can do 100MB/s.