Using Ethernet Hard drive connections??

New job, new equipment none of it particularly happy. Big Final Cut house running FCP 6 on mac pro towers, powerful etc...Tiger...Media stored in seperate tape room on stack of drives 15 Tb in total..supplied to workstations via Ethernet? Is anyone out there using this technology? Is it a pain in the a** like what I'm dealing with?

Here's Apple's take : Final Cut Pro: Ethernet network volumes should not be used for capture or playback

Why are you cutting over ethernet?

Hi Jude...I do not know...new place new rules, lots of teething problems. I'm kinda old school now in that I like my G Tech and using FCP videoscopes and being my own guy. Now I'm dealing with new and still untried technology.

Well according to the Apple article,

"In most professional workflows, Ethernet will not provide sufficiently high sustainable bandwidth for the smooth transfer of video and audio data needed by Final Cut Pro. (This includes "wired" Ethernet formats, as well as wireless variants, i.e., 802.11a, b, g and n.)"

So I'm thinking it's never going to play nice set up like that.

OK. Me again...a SAN is the storage device and a fibre channel system that apple says has posibilites and "COULD" be OK is in use. In this cast it is not cutting it.. Exports are a problem, Playback is a problem (dropped frames) and laying off to tape in not possible at this juncture. The supplier says it should all be OK but is isn't. I loved my old mac pro with internal drives and GTECH externals with FW 800. Amazing to think that the technology used to land Apollo 11's lunar module on the moon can fit into a mobile phone.

A SAN is something different. For all intents and purposes, hooking up to a SAN is just like plugging in a direct-attached fibre channel storage device, only you brought all your friends to the party with you. It's slightly more complicated than that ? a SAN needs a thing called a metadata arbiter that makes sure, for example, that no two computers try to write to the same block of data at the same time. But from the computer's point of view, being plugged into a SAN is basically like having a locally attached storage device.

It sounds like what you're talking about is just plain old, garden-variety file sharing. And no, you can't reliably use that with Final Cut. It can work in a pinch; a few weeks ago a producer barged in demanding to see a job that had already been archived, and it turns out the easiest way to get her out of my suite was to open the project file from the server, over the network. It worked. I was able to play back the timeline. But it did stutter a couple times, so I wouldn't want to do that all day.

Final Cut needs tons of data delivered isochronously. Networks don't do that. So yeah, you're never going to find a solution that's based on Ethernet and that also gives you reliable real-time performance.

Thanks Jeff...watch this space I guess as it's new to me. Metadata Arbiter is a term I like, I will endeavour to find out more. Thanks mate.

Jeff, if you could email me your answer if that is convenient or allowed: phil@sassyfilms.co.uk

Thanks. PS: No problem if you don't have the time.

You could just email yourself the answer from here, Phil. Cut n paste.

Whether or not you need a "metadata Controller" [Metadata Arbiter] depends on the type of SAN you implement.

Although GigE Ethernet networks can provide sufficient file transfer bandwidth they don't work in this application because it is still uses TCPIP network protocol which requires your local computer to "pack and un-pack" each frame [packet] of data which depending on the resolution your working in consumes a huge amount of your system resources.

A SAN is a direct attached file systems that can stream large chunks of contiguous data which consumes very little system resource. To the user it just appears as a locally mounted drive. The trick is managing who can write to each file and when.

There are also different types of SAN's which share data at the volume versus File level. Although a Volume level SAN has a data base that must be mirrored they don't require a metadata controller to manage file locking because only one user can write to a particular file at a time. Everyone can see and use that file but the system administrator sets the permissions to determine who can write to it. That permission can be dynamically allocated. This is a very cost effective way to use high performance managed storage.

SAN's that share data at the file level on the other hand require a great deal more system administration and resources and although have improved since their introduction in 1994 they are more complicated and expensive than most post production facilities really need.

There is another alternative, Network Attached Storage, NAS. This is basically an Ethernet solution that adds an appliance to the network that packs and un-packs the data for the client. This is more of a server type of topology that works but the problem it is solving is using a network to transfer data when really what should be used is direct attached. So if your building or growing a facility I would not recommend NAS.

In the short run, use the Media Manager to make "Local" copies of the media of your current project on a hard drive or RAID connected to your computer. That way, you could work with high speed drives. Then, if someone wanted to see a cut, you could dupe the sequence and relink it to the network copy. Or whatever your workflow calls for.

Kevin Monahan
Social Support Lead, DV Products
Adobe
Adobe After Effects
Adobe Premiere Pro
Adobe After Effects and Premiere Pro Community Blog
Follow Me on Twitter!

Complicated.

Just for the record...

I am using an XRaid accessed via a dedicated gigabit ethernet line and controlled with a Xsan; and it works nearly flawlessly. Almost all our work is DVCPROHD, and I get some stuttering on long playbacks, but nothing that affects my workflow in any significant way.

So it is possible.

greg

But not recommended.

Stuttering on long playbacks is dropped frames, no?

I'm not sure I understand, Xsan is attached to your RAID via fiber channel through a fiber channel switch [the SAN], the file system is controlled by the metadata controller over Ethernet. All of the content for FCP is transfered via fiber not Ethernet.

If your getting dropped frames using a SAN then there maybe contention issues either in the switch or your metedata database might be having a problem.

Either way your system administrator should check it out.