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Optimal setup for C1 and P40+

DT Equipment
I'm interested in setting up a Mac so that it performs as fast as humanly possible with a P40+.
Since this back pushes images out so quickly, I've been finding that after shooting about a dozen frames in rapid succession, the speed of playback on my display goes way down, and, as the session continues, C1's overall stability seems to degrade.

Assuming that I'm already using the latest and greatest Mac Pro with 32GB of RAM installed - what would be considered to be the best hard drive choices/configurations, and any software-specific settings (in both MacOS or C1) to minimize bottlenecks and provide the best capture/playback performance?

Looking forward to hearing both users' suggestions as well as Phase One's.


thanks!
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Comments

13 comments

Date Votes
  • Drew Altdo
    Assuming you haven't mortgaged your home after purchasing the latest and greatest Mac PRO;
    http://i40.tinypic.com/14v2urc.png

    Then the only other suggestion I can offer to maintain speed is to decrease the Proxie size and shoot to the Local Drive. That will give you all the speed you can have. The only other speed boosting option is an SSD drive which you would need to install on your own as it is not a box option from Apple.
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  • DT Equipment
    Wow, thanks for the prompt reply, Drew!

    If you wouldn't mind digging a little deeper -

    I've been doing a bit of research on hard drives, and I'm curious if making an investment into higher-performance ("enterprise class") hardware - things like Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) and 6.0Gbit/sec SATA cards and 10k/15k rpm drives would make a difference (and if so, how much).

    As I understand it, SSDs perform about the same as conventional disks when it comes to write-intensive tasks; their real advantage is with read-intensive work (like launching applications and booting the computer).
    I personally haven't had an opportunity to test an SSD with C1, however.

    And just so I'm completely clear:
    when you say "Proxie size", are you referring to the "Preview Image Size" setting under "Cache" in C1's Preferences dialog?
    and by "Local Drive", you're talking about an internal hard drive as opposed to an external or networked/mounted volume, right?

    thanks so much,

    -dg
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  • Drew Altdo
    [quote="dtouchNYC" wrote:
    when you say "Proxie size", are you referring to the "Preview Image Size" setting under "Cache" in C1's Preferences dialog?


    -Yes

    [quote="dtouchNYC" wrote:
    by "Local Drive", you're talking about an internal hard drive as opposed to an external or networked/mounted volume, right?


    -The internal BOOT Drive.

    In regard to "Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) and 6.0Gbit/sec SATA cards and 10k/15k rpm drives" you're splitting hairs when it comes to speed. If you have way too much coffee one day, perhaps you'll be able to keep up with the speed increase otherwise I don't think you'll see much difference for the price. In addition, from other forums, there is a reason the MacPro's aren't sold with the faster drives... heat. Since Mac's look good at the cost of cooling efficiently the faster (hotter) drives seem to have a shorter lifespan than the 7200rpm drives. This is the main reason I would choose an SSD drive over a faster drive.
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  • rap_digital
    What about raid 10 or 5? Will roughly double IO and still have decent capacity.
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  • Drew Altdo
    [quote="rap_digital" wrote:
    What about raid 10 or 5? Will roughly double IO and still have decent capacity.

    For storage, sure. To shoot to, no.
    Shooting to a RAID complicates an already complicated process. You won't gain any speed, in real terms, by shooting direct to a RAID. Although they do serve an invaluable purpose when used as backup/storage.
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  • DT Equipment
    Speaking of RAIDs, the next thing I was considering to try is taking two SSDs and striping them as a boot disk, using SoftRAID.

    Has anyone had experience with this?


    -dg
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  • Ulf Liljegren
    To go down the route with RAID the recommendation as always been to do this on a hardware level with a RAID insert card rather then software.
    If you have a software running which is handling this, then it will involve having yet another service running on the computer which will take both CPU and memory no matter how well written the service is.
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  • rap_digital
    [quote="Drew " wrote:

    For storage, sure. To shoot to, no.
    Shooting to a RAID complicates an already complicated process. You won't gain any speed, in real terms, by shooting direct to a RAID. Although they do serve an invaluable purpose when used as backup/storage.

    Wow really! I've been running five disk internal hardware raid 5 as a shoot to drive for the last few months and haven't had any problems 😉 I have the system on a single drive I understand that having the system on the raid can cause problems but......

    So what are the official optimal system specs for Desktop and Laptop?

    Hope you dont mind DG
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  • Drew Altdo
    [quote="rap_digital" wrote:
    ... I understand that having the system on the raid can cause problems but...


    It's that "but" that I've witnessed entire shoots to get lost over time and time again. No matter what RAID your running, redundancy and striping can fail (obviously redundancy less so). And when a striped RAID fails, nothing is worse than having 3/4 of a file. The method that I've had the best results with is shooting direct to a 7200 rpm boot drive (or SSD) and running a live backup sync to an external Hardware RAID 5. On all the machines that I've implemented this on, not a one has had a corrupt or lost capture due to drive conflicts.
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  • DT Equipment
    Okay, so software-based RAID is clearly not the best choice for C1.

    What about a hardware RAID? Using a HighPoint or Apple RAID card, and 3 or 4 high-speed drives in a Mac Pro, configured as a RAID-5 array?

    Also - can anyone shed some light on what/where the bottleneck is in C1 specifically with regard to getting the captured images up on screen? It feels like the files are making it from the back to the computer pretty quickly, but the process of preparing the files for display is where the hold-up is.
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  • rap_digital
    The Apple card sucks I have a highpoint 4 drive raid 5 in one of my towers and its been fine for the last 5 months or so. I have the OS on a single drive inside the second optical bay. I think thats the secret with raid keep the os off it. I'm now looking at installing a 100gb SSD into the top optical bay and see which wins.
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  • dale11833
    [quote="Drew " wrote:
    [quote="rap_digital" wrote:
    ... I understand that having the system on the raid can cause problems but...


    and running a live backup sync to an external Hardware RAID 5. On all the machines that I've implemented this on, not a one has had a corrupt or lost capture due to drive conflicts.


    Hi Drew,
    What is "live backup sync to an external Hardware RAID 5"
    thx, Dale
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  • rap_digital
    Ok so I have a couple setups same tower specs but one has 100gb SSD and the other 6TB raid5 (4x2tb internal hardware raid5) both systems boot of a separate 1tb Wd Black drive. I cant see the difference between the towers and I have actually been on set with both, tethering two shoots side by side!! That said once my 6core 3.33 MacPro arrives I'll put 2x ssd (one for OS other for tether sessions) and 3 or 4 2tb 3.5 inch drives for Os back up and session backups, and just run carbon copy cloner while outfits are being changed.

    I'm surprised by the comment Drew made about raid5 as I thought that the OS wouldn't be able to tell the difference between hardware raid and a single drive. All DIT's on digital feature film shoots rely on large raid volumes and I would think that they have considerably more demand on IO than us.
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