[dan_hin]

Hello Mograph!

We're looking at upgrading our workflow to wring the last few drops of speed out of our current workstation, and I'm trying to find the most cost effective way of doing it.

As I understand it, the optimal HDD configuration (at least for AE) is to have a raid array for source video/images, a drive for the OS and a raid array to render to, in order to reduce bottlenecks. Can anyone confirm if this is an efficient setup, or should we be looking at other options?

Dan

[Jim Gravina]

Dan,

You definitely want to be working off of RAID arrays, especially if you are working with HD footage. I'm no "professional" and I don't work in HD that often but from what I have experienced with DV footage, having a RAID set up is the way to go. You could also look into solid state drives as those would be the fastest, but for the amount of space you will need if you have HD footage, it will get quite expensive as SSDs are still a bit pricey in my opinion. Now if you go with regular hard drives, I would wait a little bit till the SATA 6Gb/sec drives and motherboards become a little more popular, they are just starting to surface now and could potentially by twice as fast as the current 3Gb/sec SATA drives.

I will tell you to NOT get the Western Digital Studio II external eSATA hard drive. Its a 2TB 3Gb/sec drive in RAID...by itself, great drive. The problem is that it has this "power save" mode that is not user controlled and cannot be turned off. This is a pain because if you are working with files off the drive in AE and lets say you go to lunch with the project still open...well when you return, the drive has entered its power save mode and takes awhile to boot back up, sometimes it has even cause lock ups in AE for me.

Hope this helps...again, i'm not a hard drive expert, this is just what ive heard and experienced.

Jim

[dan_hin]

Thanks for your input Jim!

[scott frizzle]

dan_hin, on 09 February 2010 - 09:48 AM, said:

Thanks for your input Jim!

Working from a RAID is essential for HD+ resolutions. I'm still using the same RAID for source files and rendered output; I'd be interested to see if using a second RAID for output would increase performance significantly or not.

[rocknroller]

May I enter this thread. I'm currently also thinking about using a raid for After Effects and Cinema 4D mainly. I wondering what's more commonly used; internal Raid or external solution (CalDigit...). I think the internal solution with a Raid-5 Controller Card would be cheaper, wouldn't it? Both, Mac and Windows solutions would be interresting for me - working on Macs in the office and on windows-pc for freelance.

thanks in advance for your technical experiences and for performance infos on working with HD1080 motion design stuff in after effects.

daniel

[scott frizzle]

rocknroller, on 23 February 2010 - 06:45 AM, said:

May I enter this thread. I'm currently also thinking about using a raid for After Effects and Cinema 4D mainly. I wondering what's more commonly used; internal Raid or external solution (CalDigit...). I think the internal solution with a Raid-5 Controller Card would be cheaper, wouldn't it? Both, Mac and Windows solutions would be interresting for me - working on Macs in the office and on windows-pc for freelance.

thanks in advance for your technical experiences and for performance infos on working with HD1080 motion design stuff in after effects.

daniel

I don't know which is more common, but I use external RAIDs mostly because if you have a problem with the RAID, you don't have to power down and crack your computer open to deal with it. Externals are also convenient for moving to another workstation, and you have the potential for much more speed and capacity (8+ drives, etc.).

[dan_hin]

Having spoken to IT here at work it appears that the RAID would be pretty much pointless for C4D work (unless using massive file sequences or video as textures) but, as Scott Frizzle says, essential for AE/video work. I've also discovered bottlenecks with my RAM (Annoyingly we fell for the Armari review model from 3Dworld Nov '08, the end result was a PC with a max RAM of 8GB. Not good) so am looking to invest in a new motherboard and some more memory.

/slightly OT: I'd love to hear some recommendations from people who've gone for mobo updates - is it worth holding out for i7 boards or will the older dual-cpu ones do fine with a couple of Xeons?

Dan

[beckmanvfx]

While a raid is nice to have, it's not going give you any boost for 3D work. It'll certainly help with certain aspects of AE, but not all -it really depends on how you work. With grfx/compositing, you're definitely going to hit the wall with your processor & ram well before you are hindered by your need to pull files from your hard drive.
You can invest in all the hardware you want, but AE will never give you the real time performance of Turnkey hero systems. (not that we're necessarily talking realtime performance in this thread.) -that being said, I'd still rather have a fast raid than not, but it can definitely tip the scales on affordability.
If however, you're also editing HD with PPro,Avid,or FCP, then yes a raid is pretty essential.

-my two cents.
mike

[scott frizzle]

beckmanvfx, on 23 February 2010 - 11:02 AM, said:

While a raid is nice to have, it's not going give you any boost for 3D work. It'll certainly help with certain aspects of AE, but not all -it really depends on how you work. With grfx/compositing, you're definitely going to hit the wall with your processor & ram well before you are hindered by your need to pull files from your hard drive.
You can invest in all the hardware you want, but AE will never give you the real time performance of Turnkey hero systems. (not that we're necessarily talking realtime performance in this thread.) -that being said, I'd still rather have a fast raid than not, but it can definitely tip the scales on affordability.
If however, you're also editing HD with PPro,Avid,or FCP, then yes a raid is pretty essential.

-my two cents.
mike

I agree that analyzing your workflow can really give you a clue as to where to best spend your money. A lot of people simply want things to go faster and then start adding "go faster" elements haphazardly and are disappointed in the results. The CPU(s) is obviously going to effect the most things the most often, but from there things get more complex.

As far as AE goes, it helps to watch the update in the render queue that tells you exactly what the software is doing as you render. If your typical project is spending a lot of time processing effects, then it's going to be more of a CPU issue than anything else. If it's taking a lot of time retrieving frames from disk, a faster storage setup is going to be your friend.

Personally I think a fast RAID is a necessity in AE for any HD+ resolutions. You can certainly work from your system drive or a slower external drive, but those extra seconds loading frames from disk really add up over days and weeks. If you factor this into the "time = money" equation RAIDs aren't really as expensive as they might seem. Plus, you will pull less hair out of your head during tight deadlines.