PT10 working off of a NAS

[Frank Kruse]

Hi,

has some early adopter or beta-tester tried to work on PT10 off of a relatively "lo-fi" NAS? I mean not one of the premium $olutions like I$is, Unity, DDP etc.

If yes, does it work well? Which appliance are you using? Regular AFP, iSCSI or fibre? Does it work even with AFP?

Are you getting reasonable track count? How much? The PT10 what´s-new-pdf is pretty vague on this topic. The only info is that it´s now supported but nothing about what´s recommended.

Thanks for sharing!

Frank.

[Basstian]

Originally Posted by Frank Kruse

Hi,

has some early adopter or beta-tester tried to work on PT10 off of a relatively "lo-fi" NAS? I mean not one of the premium $olutions like I$is, Unity, DDP etc.

If yes, does it work well? Which appliance are you using? Regular AFP, iSCSI or fibre? Does it work even with AFP?

Are you getting reasonable track count? How much? The PT10 what´s-new-pdf is pretty vague on this topic. The only info is that it´s now supported but nothing about what´s recommended.

Thanks for sharing!

Frank.

I just tested it with a small tv production round 10 GB (100 min) something like 24 tracks some busses and plug-ins etc. It takes pretty long to load from a drobo over network, but as soon as it is loaded into the disk cache it is running absolutely fabulous, same performance, as it was on the internal hard drive.

For my PT 10 is a killer so far. 2 Days no issues no crashes and it is really fast.
It speed up my workflow a lot. Clip based gain is perfect and field recorder workflow is working a lot better and it is a bless not to have to import everything into the session. Just define, where to search and it is all there.

Just my first impression

By the way in the small project MXF linked working was fast and without issues.
Never worked on PT 9 for me.

Sebastian

[Frank Kruse]

Cool thanks! Was this a Pro Drobo via iSCSI or regular AFP?

[Mattiasnyc]

Just curious:

Wouldn't there be a big difference between streaming off of NAS versus loading into RAM? After all, if it all fits into RAM then does it matter what the actual streaming capacity is?

Or are you guys talking about the ability to load/save etc from NAS?

[Frank Kruse]

I´m talking about mounting a network volume. Opening a session ON that volume and working in that original session directly with all the audio sitting on the network-volume. Or working locally and integrating shared media from a server etc.

To avoid sneaker-net transfers of drive shuttles.

I guess one thing to watch out for is that a regular NAS has no intelligence to lock the used files for other editors to avoid conflicts if multiple clients open the same session.

So some care must be taken. Compared to Unity and other smarter systems.

Asking myself if a single set of production sound media could live on a server while each editor works on them and saves destructive AS processing locally.

That would spare us transfer and synchronizing referenced AVID media on every single mac of every crew member.

How does this disk caching work? Lets say your session is 30GB of audio and you have 12GB RAM. Once the RAM is full at what point will PT10 kick out unneeded data and load upcoming media. Will this lead to a "please wait for 10 minutes while I load the other 12GB I need for the next reel"? Or is this a background thing that happens quietly in B/G?

Another thing: AFAIK, disk caching is a playback feature. What happens if you record TO a network volume? Does this work as well?


Frank.

[C]

Frank, Check out my blog post on it.

www.cerithomas.com

Didn't write about it there in great detail but I ran a 186 track FX edit session over a wifi network and recorded 10 5.1 'pre dub' stems on my laptop.

The media was stored on a FW800 G-Tech drive attached to a G5 2.3 Dual core running 10.4.

Yes it's impressive, and with enough RAM it is seamless. Media is loaded a little in advance and a little behind, in the background. You can hit play immediately but it may take a little time to load if you have a lot of media.

[The Cargo Cult]

it really is working as you'd hoped Frank.
even "normal" cache setting seems to allow playback of pretty large sessions over Gig ethernet (AFP).
the question is, of course, how many concurrent users your server and storage can handle and you're not gonna know this till it starts to fall over.
you'll certainly benefit from having some more RAM but I was surprised how small (in terms of bytes) a large session really is.

as you point out there are some caveats around sharing etc but the devs have done some good work with alert messages when opening/saving a session that someone else is using.
we did manage to prove that 2 people can be destructively modifying the same file at the same time so you'd want to be careful with that!

the one thing I think is still missing is some better control over read/write access to the network drives - even in "P" (playback only) mode I can still pencil into a file. So we're still gonna be using those Mac OS file locks to stop modifications on shared files.

we'll also need to keep an eye on disk allocation - we checked a session that was copied to a server volume including it's Audio Files folder, opened it from there and it was still allocated to the local volume. So if you're working in both local and server modes you could get a bit tangled up.

I guess we'll hear soon enough what the limits are...

justin

[Frank Kruse]

That sounds very promising. Thanks guys. I´ll check it out on a second system drive.

Luckily I was within the amnesty period. Sadly I did a cross-grade last week to PCIe HD2 and PT9HD which now seem like 3000€ wasted given that a native rig is now current and plays more tracks. At the same time I saved 2000€ on the PT7HD to 9HD upgrade.
Definitely the craziest PT update since I´ve been using PT...
PT9/CPTK-users are definitely the lucky bunch. MORE tracks than a HD2 rig costing more than 6 times more just a week ago. Plus the upgrade fee difference. Insane.

Ah well...

[Frank Kruse]

Originally Posted by maggot

we did manage to prove that 2 people can be destructively modifying the same file at the same time so you'd want to be careful with that!

That´s an interesting detail Justin because the manual says:

Only audio files on locally connected hard drives can be processed with AudioSuite plug-ins. You cannot process audio files on remote hard drives over a network (unless it is an Avid Unity net- work)

So I wonder if the pencil-tool issue is an oversight. On the other hand pencil tool has always been destructive so what you wrote is logical.
How does AS processing on remote files work? Do you receive an error message like "can´t do it" or will PT first copy the file to the local drive and process that? Because if AS duplicate won´t work on network drives how are you going to get the remote file down to your local drive? On finder level? Or via manual re-import. That can´t be a good way.

Frank.

[Basstian]

Hey Frank I did not try as yet, but I will try that for you tomorrow. FYI I tried it with a afp drobo connected to a mac mini server via FireWire.

I can not give you information on how it handles session that do not fit into ram for I have 16 gb installed and addressed 12 gb to the disc cache and the whole 100 min show fits into disc cache. But I think preloading will be in background ones the session is loaded for the first time. I will try out stem recording tomorrow as well.

Sebastian