10/09/2006
Save time recording to disk
If videography is your livelihood then you know that time is money. You want a faster computer for less rendering. You need faster DVD burners. Basically if it is faster you want it. The less time you can spend in front of the computer means the more time you have shooting, or pehaps going to Hawaii.
If you evaluate your workflow you'll find which tasks take the most time and then you can decide which products are available that can speed things up. Most editors will find that much time is spend transfering video from tape to computer. While some tape-less formats are becoming available they tend to either be expensive or use lower-quality video formats.
Recording directly to hard drive in the native DV or HDV format is a great way to save time. And think of all that money you'll save buying tape! Two solutions come to mind, one is a hardware appliance and the other uses your laptop.
Direct-to-Disk
 While there are some hard disk recorders available without all the features, the FireStore Recorders by Focus Enhancements have become the standard. Depending on the specific unit, they will record directly from your camera into the appropriate editing format for your NLE. So, you can choose to record in AVI, MOV, and RAW formats. There is no manipulation of the signal though, it is written to disk exactly as the camera sends it out the firewire port. And, because it isn't tape based, you don't have to worry about dropouts. To edit your footage you simply connect the FireStore to your computer's 1394 port. You can edit directly off the FireStore's drive or copy the footage over to another system drive.
The FireStore units also have can be slaved to your camera's record button. This will make a separate file each time you hit the record button. Can you say -- No More Logging!!!? Also, you can record more than one hour at a time. With the 40GB unit you can record a full three hours of video.
Lastly, the FireStore units are extremely portable and give you instant access to your recorded footage. They feature playback controls and the ability to delete unwanted clips.
Direct-to-Laptop
 Serious Magic took the video acquisition world be storm when they launched the original DV Rack software. Today, Serious Magic's DV Rack has become a valuable tool for videographers and studios alike. While DV Rack offers most of the features found with the FireStore their are some major differences.
DV Rack is software and, as such, requires a computer to run it. This means that it is less portable than the FireStore, but also means it can use your computer's monitor. While DV Rack can be used as a disk recorder, it is much more than that. DV Rack is a full set of field monitors. You can watch your video from the camera on your laptop just by connecting a firewire cable. It works with DV and HDV (with the upgrade).
Everything about DV Rack is designed to help you get the best quality video possible. You can monitor the stream coming in and it's virtual rack of tools will analyse the video and audio telling you when there are dropouts and audio pops or clicks. DV Rack includes the standard video scopes too.
If you edit on a laptop, your video will be ready to work with immediately after you've captured it. Otherwise, you will need to transfer it to your editing computer. Just like the FireStore, DV Rack will let you record to different formats and take care of logging for you. The only thing I think DV Rack is missing is the ability to record from more than one camera simultaneously. Maybe next version:)
Ashley Guy
09/05/2006
Striped RAIDs
Ever since we've been building video-editing workstations, we've tried to get as much performance as possible out of the systems. One of the biggest bottle necks is hard drive speed, although for many people this is no longer the case. Because of the demanding throughput needed when editing video, RAIDs became synonomous with Video Storage and, particularly the RAID 0.
RAID 0 or Striped RAID is a method of taking multiple disks and interleaving the data across each drive evenly. During reading and writing tasks each member disk can give or take data at its maximum rate. This means that the total read/write rate will be improved for the RAID group when compared to a single drive. The increase in throughput will be about equal to 75% of the sum of each member drive's throughput. There is some overhead from the CPU or RAID controller depending on how the RAID is constructed, but the more drives you have the faster throughput you will get. Once the drives are "striped" together you will only see one logical drive inside of Windows.
Deciding how many drives you need in your RAID, or if you need a RAID at all is as easy as determining what type of video you are going to edit and how many simultaneous streams of video you need. For example, our standard RAID for the AXIO LE systems is a RAID with 15 SATA2 drives. This will allow playback of three uncompressed 8-bit HD video layers. Our standard DV/HDV RAIDs are comprised of 2 SATA2 drives and will allow simultaneous playback of 10-15 layers of video. A single SATA2 drive can give the DV editor about five simultaneous video streams of playback.
The Dark Side
There are two bad reasons to have a RAID 0 that I can think of. One is more philosophical and one is more technical, but they both have to do with hard drive failure. First, the technical reason: If one drive in the RAID 0 fails, then all of your data will be lost. Since the data is spread evenly across each member drive losing even just one drive out of 15 means all the data is gone. Data recovery is sometimes possible but can be very expensive.
It should be understood that the main reason to have a RAID 0 is to increase the performance of your video storage. I recommend choosing the right size of a RAID based on your typical project size with enough room to expand. You should not use a RAID 0 for project archival. To keep your RAID 0 operating at maximum performance you should defrag it periodically, or even better, format it before you start each new project. You should not keep your only copy of important footage, pictures, or documents on a RAID 0. Yes, I know that big hard drives are cheap now, but if you want to archive everything consider a different storage solution that offers data protection like RAID 5 (Which I'll talk about later).
It is always sad to have to inform one of our customers that because one of their drives went out on their RAID, all their data is gone. Hopefully, you can understand a little better now the purpose of the Striped RAID.
Ashley Guy
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