Re: Ram requirements for FCPX Multiclip

Happy Thanksgiving Ken, Ronny and all,

I want to make sure I have enough ram in my 2013 MacPro to do 4 camera multiclips in FCPX.

Sometimes it takes 5-10 seconds for the head to start moving when I click play. Really frustrating.
Praying the problem goes away when I add 3 more 4TB Hybrid drives and a 120GB M500 mSATA Internal SSD Cache to my Drobo 5D only running on 2 drives. But that RAID system only pertains to through-put doesn't it?

But I have (4) 4 GB, DDR3 ECC, 1867 MHz Ram cards installed. Is that enough?

Thanks, and enjoy your day.

Hi Trig,

First you need a decent RAID to play back the simultaneous streams. You don't just need to add a few extra drives to you Drobo, you need to set it up as a real RAID. This means:

- You must have 5 exactly the same drives to put in your enclosure. All the drives need to be new, they must have a drive speed of at least 7,200 rpm and they need need to be of a good quality. Cheap drives are useless in a RAID because you will have drive failures much faster than with good drives.

- You must stripe the 5 drives into one single RAID 5 volume (5 drives = RAID 5). Striping the drives will combine the speed of these drives to give you sufficient throughput for playing back multiple video streams. The RAID 5 configuration makes sure that when 1 of the drives fail (and every drive fails at a certain point) you won't lose your footage. The Drobo has a custom UI that allows you to configure your RAID without too much hassle.

Second you need to know how to work with multicam. The longer your individual clips are the more RAM you will need to cache the streams. Working with full HD timelines that are longer than 1 hour is never a wise thing to do unless you have at least 32 GB RAM and a very fast system. And even on a maxed out system experienced editors will always divide a very long timeline into multiple timelines with manageable lengths (20 to 30 minutes) and assemble the timelines into the final edit after every timeline has been cut. This is the case with any NLE you use.

Best wishes,

Ronny

Wow, thanks Ronny,

I got my remaining 4 matching drives in yesterday and installed them in the Drobo. The Drobo tech told me that it automatically creates a RAID5 configuration. The two drives that were previously in the bays were 99% full when I put in the other three drives. Will this be striped correctly?

Also, if I have 2.5 hour clips, can I simply pick matching in points and random 25 minute out points to make the mutliclips, then do the same with the next 25 minutes?

Thanks,
Trig

Ah, cool. I didn't know the Drobo did the striping automatically. Just be aware that every drive you put in the Drobo will be completely erased and re-formatted when the drives are striped to RAID.

Once you have the RAID system working you should do a test with a long multicam clip. As you have a new MacPro with a fast RAID now it might not be necessary to split the 2.5 hour multicam after all. But if you do feel performance hits with a 2.5 hour clip you can blade the multiclip into portions of 30 minutes and put the different parts in different timelines. This will certainly go faster. Then you can join the edited timelines into a single one for finishing and exporting.

Best wishes,

Ronny

Ronny, when I get my revived drives back from Seagate and copy them over to a new formatted drive that matches the others, can I simply put it into the DROBO or will it get formatted? I thought a new drive needed to be formatted, but once formatted, you can pull it out, copy files to it on my other computer and put it back into the DROBO without loosing the files.

Now, on the multiclip, OK, it is bogging at 14 minutes into the timeline. This is a 30 minute timeline that is already chopped up; just tweaking the video and audio. In FCP7 I could collapse the multiclip so it didn't have to read all of the angles. Is it possible to do that in FCPX?

Or do you think I don't have a good RAID system since two of the drives are 99% full.
Is there a way to inspect the individual drives to see what files are on what drive? Mostly curiosity.

Trig

Hi Trig,

At this time you don't have a RAID system at all. You have two separate drives that are 99% full inside a Drobo enclosure.

First of all any drive that is more than 80% full becomes utterly useless because it gets slow as hell. There is also a big chance that a drive will crash once it is more than 90% full. So you absolutely need to clean up those drives ASAP, and you don't want to use these drives in a RAID because they are not new anymore.

Second to have a Drobo RAID you first need to put 5 new exactly the same and untouched drives into the Drobo enclosure, then you need to let the Drobo create the RAID. This can take up to 24 hours. While creating the RAID all your drives will be erased and reformatted. Once the RAID is created your Drobo with the 5 drives inside will show up as one single drive on your computer. If you have never installed a RAID system before, contact the seller and let him explain exactly how you should do it.

Best wishes,

Ronny

Ronny, if all my work on two projects are spread out and redundent on those now 5 drives, what do you suggest I do to retrieve that work after I set up a new clean raid. How do you introduce files spread out on those 5 'old' drives to the new raid system?

Is there a way I can gather what I need onto a single drive (I have an extra drive) then format the five old drives to the new RAID array?

Wishing the best,
Trig

How does the Drobo appear on your desktop? As one single drive or as multiple drives?

Best wishes,

Ronny