Editing H.264 Video Natively

As for when to transcode, do it all up front, get it over with, have faster performance from the get go to the final delivery. Why nit-pick (waste time) figuring out what clips to transcode, etc. It would be physically faster to transcode it all up front. If you're seriously doing that much work, you should be charging your clients enough to cover the extra storage needed.

It depends on the job, some stuff is just straight forward, fast and doesn't need transcoding at all.

It's one thing charging clients for storage/time, but there's more to it than that. Both time and data management can make administration a whole lot easier. Time itself is a very precious and limited commodity, it's the most valuable thing any human being has.

FCPX is great in that it lets you work away with the original footage while transcoding, but later messing around with loads of drives, combined with multiple clients, is time.

Also, for me, not all jobs are for clients. I am often (and hopefully solely one day) my own client. This is where the administration workflow becomes really important and the simplicity of charging the client becomes null.

Mac's don't get the full 6GB SATA with the current data bus used for drives. So there goes the theoretical video edit speed mentioned.

PLUS it has the same bottleneck problem if running media and the OS off the same drive.

I do NOT advice folks start piling up many, many individual external drives. If you're in business, run the business like a business. Get a RAID that will cover your client demands, work the price into your fees.

You HAVE to work the price of EVERYTHING into your fees to your clients, or you don't make a profit, and your business fails.

Here's my basic concerns with the hybrid drives.

Someone may confirm/correct this, but it's my understanding that the data is first written to the SSD where it is then managed by the OS in terms of how often it's used. More popular files being on the SSD less frequent on the HDD, perhaps there's even more to it than that.

As a hypothetic example the project is a corporate one. Any one of a number of stages has been reached where it needs signed off by the client. There are 4 or 5 managers all need to sign off on the job. This could take a day or 2 or a week or so, but maybe one of the managers is on holiday and an agreed extension has been arranged.

What happens to the source media, does it get thrown onto the HHD from the SSD, if it ever all fitted on the SSD, while working on another clients job. When returning to it does it then start swapping stuff around leaving parts of stuff on the SSD and parts on the HDD. Or worse, when editing a single project, and certain clips haven't been touched in a while does it move them to the HDD, so later on if they are used parts of the timeline become spread over the drive(s)

If this is all the case, all this time the drive is working away managing the files in undesired ways slowing down everything you need it for.

I'm with Ben on this, it's not looking ideal.

I do NOT advice folks start piling up many, many individual external drives. If you're in business, run the business like a business. Get a RAID that will cover your client demands, work the price into your fees.

You HAVE to work the price of EVERYTHING into your fees to your clients, or you don't make a profit, and your business fails.

No one is saying anything about how to run or fail a business Ben, and It's more complicated than that. It's not a one solution fits all. At the core I'm a freelancer and it doesn't always work like that. You need to adjust to the clients needs, not the client paying for the finished product but the production company in-between.

Sometimes, for me, this means having a drive delivered with a rough cut that gets returned finished ready for sound mixing. There are many situations that require many solutions, the idea of being able optimise a timeline with handles suits this one perfectly.

OK, now we're confusing issues...

NocoDave wrote:
I'm with Ben on this, it's not looking ideal.

No worries. If it doesn't do what I hope it will do, then it becomes the boot drive and I'll take my current 750GB, 5400rpm drive and put it in my wife's older 15" MBP as it appears her drive may be going.

After all this talk though, maybe what I'll do first before installing it is to test it out in my Voyager drive dock and see how it fairs when connected via eSata. If it does okay, I can put it in. If not, it's on to "boot drive city".

At this point, I spend a lot of time taking my kids to sports practices and it would be nice to be able to sit in my truck and get some work done on battery without having to bring an external drive. Even an hour or two would be great. (I just wish the SSDs would come down in price.)

In terms of the other discussion, I don't have clients so that's all moot to me.

Dave

Something else that just came to mind. What does a hybrid drive do with the FCPX motion templates folder and the effects that come with it? If you get that far with your experimenting I'd be curious.

NocoDave wrote: Something else that just came to mind. What does a hybrid drive do with the FCPX motion templates folder and the effects that come with it? If you get that far with your experimenting I'd be curious.

Regardless of what external drive I edit off of, I always have the Motion Templates folder within the "Movies" folder on the boot drive. Maybe I'm misunderstanding, are you asking if the 8GB SSD portion of the hybrid drive would essentially cache the Motion templates? If that was the case, I'm not sure how I would know if it was or wasn't.

Dave

Dave, the Hybrid drive won't solve the issue of why you need a second media drive (external on a laptop). If you're going to edit off of the OS drive, better off with a single SSD or 7200rpm HDD for the OS drive. They hybrid won't do data transfers any faster than a regular SSD drive. And most importantly, the data pipe is not any greater for the hybrid than any other OS type of drive.

I have a new 15" rMBP that I'm very happy with. I got the Elgato bus powered T'bolt SSD drive. Not huge, but affordable, and mega fast. And it doesn't seem to drain the battery all that much at all. I'm very happy with it. I use and is impossible to damage that I slip my Elgato drive into the pouch of and go. Very sweet, compact, light, easy to travel rig.

BenB wrote: Dave, the Hybrid drive won't solve the issue of why you need a second media drive (external on a laptop). If you're going to edit off of the OS drive, better off with a single SSD or 7200rpm HDD for the OS drive.

Ben,

Sorry about that, but I may not have made it clear in this particular post that I'm replacing the Optical drive with my current boot drive and then installing the Hybrid HDD in the slot where the boot drive is today. Here's the kit I just received:
eshop.macsales.com/item/Seagate/DDMB7K7HSG/
(I also picked up an external enclosure to house the Optical drive I'm taking out).

The reviews I read before purchase were quite good for this particular hybrid drive and some of the user comments said they had used it for video and had no complaints. Well, I guess I'm the test dummy for this one.
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Also, according to OWC, the issue with certain newer laptops not getting the full 6GBs were related to the optical drive slot and not the standard HDD slot. The problem was mostly with the 2011 models (which is what I have), but evidently, a firmware update solved the problem. Although, they still recommend you put the 6GB drive in the HDD slot-
blog.macsales.com/11895-2011-macbook-pro-sata-problems-resolved

2011 MacBook Pro 17" (Model ID MacBookPro8,3)
MAIN BAY: A 6G SSD may be utilized in main bay (move drive or second SSD into Optical Bay*) for reliable SATA Revision 3.0 6Gb/s performance in excess of 500MB/s.

2011 MacBook Pro 17" Now 6G Capable! Thanks to Apple's Macbook Pro EFI Firmware update 2.2 released on 9/14/2011, OWC has test confirmed proper operation of OWC 6G SSDs in all 2011 MacBook Pro 17"

(Model ID MacBookPro8,3) models. After successfully applying this update, your Boot ROM Version will be: MBP81.0047.B1E. Please read our very informative Blog Post for additional information.

OPTICAL BAY: The optical bay interface may either be SATA Revision 2.0 3Gb/s (300MB/s max) OR SATA Revision 3.0 6Gb/s. There is no way to specify/order this data interface with Apple, but you can confirm what interface version your optical bay offers by using 'About this Mac, More Info, Serial-ATA' info display.

*Testing has demonstrated that the 6Gb/s optical bay interface in 15" & 17" models is not consistently reliable. If your 15" or 17" model's optical bay has the 6Gb/s interface, we do not recommend the use of any OWC Mercury 6G SSD or other brand 6G SSD in the optical bay at this time. We only recommend the use of a 3Gb/s SATA 2.0 drive into 15" & 17" 2011 MacBook Pro optical bays.
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I guess the big question here is whether or not the 8GB SSD portion is gonna screw with the read/writes when editing and cause errors. I'll let you know as soon as I do.

Thanks,
Dave

Regardless of what external drive I edit off of, I always have the Motion Templates folder within the "Movies" folder on the boot drive. Maybe I'm misunderstanding, are you asking if the 8GB SSD portion of the hybrid drive would essentially cache the Motion templates? If that was the case, I'm not sure how I would know if it was or wasn't.

I never realised the SSD portion on these was as small, what I'd like to know is if motion templates (that need to be stored where you have them) that go unused for a while get moved onto the HDD. But you've brought something else to light, I was making an assumption that there would be a way to monitor what was on what section of the hybrid drive, I hadn't thought that there might not be.

NocoDave wrote: But you've brought something else to light, I was making an assumption that there would be a way to monitor what was on what section of the hybrid drive, I hadn't thought that there might not be.

Not that I know of, but this kind of drive is very new to me also. The price was very attractive as I can't afford a pure SSD at this time which is why I went with it. As I said before, I guess I will be the guinea pig for this drive in regards to editing. It came in the mail yesterday, but I likely won't get a chance to play with it for a few days and at that time I'll benchmark it externally via eSata and try an edit and see how it goes before I completely rip apart my MBP and install it.

(Sadly, I also received two external 3.5 drives from BHphotvideo yesterday, but one arrived DOA so I've got to mess with that too. Hopefully, this will be my last round of tweaking hardware for 6-12 months as I really need to get back and get some work done.)

Dave

NocoDave and BenB,

Since this thread went in a different direction, I started a new thread with benchmarks about all the stuff about the Hybrid benchmarks we were discussing. It's here-
www.fcp.co/forum/4-final-cut-pro-x-fcpx/...nally-and-internally

I'll let you take a look over there and I will keep updating it as I get more relevant benchmarks and info on the Hybrid.
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In a nutshell, the Hybrid drive seems just fine for editing. In this case, according to support at OWC and my experience, it works like a normal drive. It uses the SSD portion like RAM when it can, if it can't, it works like any other drive. It is easily as fast as my 2-drive RAID 1 setup, maybe faster. It's also very quiet, but if I don't want it to spin at all, I just right-click and eject it. I then go to Disk Utility or now SDH to re-mount it.

Here's some new benchmarks that don't have anything to do with the Hybrid drive, but were brought up earlier in this thread.

1TB 2-Drive RAID 1 becomes a 2TB 2-Drive RAID 0:

eSATA OWC Elite-AL Pro 2-Drive RAID 1 3/4 full (Quick Bench "Large file Test" from SpeedTools Utilities 12-24-12)
[With the "Allow Cache Effects" checked (5ms)- eSATA: Write- 97 MB/s, Read- 99 MB/s.].

eSATA OWC Elite-AL Pro 2-Drive RAID 1 EMPTY (Quick Bench "Large file Test" from SpeedTools Utilities 12-27-12):
[With the "Allow Cache Effects" checked (5ms)- eSATA: Write- 96 MB/s, Read- 155 MB/s.]

eSATA OWC Elite-AL Pro 2-Drive RAID 0 EMPTY (Quick Bench "Large file Test" from SpeedTools Utilities 12-27-12):
[With the "Allow Cache Effects" checked (5ms)- eSATA: Write- 96 MB/s, Read- 155 MB/s.]

eSATA OWC Elite-AL Pro 2-Drive RAID 0 1/4 FULL (Quick Bench "Large file Test" from SpeedTools Utilities 12-27-12):
[With the "Allow Cache Effects" checked (5ms)- eSATA: Write- 97 MB/s, Read- 156 MB/s]
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Not sure if I learned anything here except that "maybe" full drives don't Read as fast as empty ones, RAID 1 and RAID 0 do benchmark about the same (of course one has redundancy and the other gives you twice the space), and/or the Speed Utilities QuickBench 4.0 comes up with different numbers on different days.

For comparison with the RAID setups, here's how the Seagate drive benchmarked on the same day and time:

Seagate Hybrid 750GB internal slot- 6GB connection (Quick Bench "Large file Test"):
[With the "Allow Cache Effects" checked (5ms): Write-270 MB/s, Read- 134 MB/s.]

I think that's pretty good for a little ol' 2.5 drive. I'm assuming that the SSD portion must help the Write portion of it some how. In fact, as you watch the numbers for the 5 cycles, you can see the Write speeds go up.
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Oh, one other thing. Before the install and moving of the default internal drive, I did upgrade the firmware on my Early 2011 i7 MBP to 2.7. An unexpected nice result was that I moved the default 5400rpm 750GB boot drive over to the Optical slot so I could put the Hybrid drive in the main drive slot. Check out the benchmarks for the original boot drive:

Internal 5400 Drive original main slot: Write- 57 MB/s, Read- 57 MB/s

Internal 5400 Drive (optical drive slot 12/23/12):
[With the "Allow Cache Effects" checked (5ms): Write-90 MB/s, Read- 90 MB/s.]

I got a 50% bump up in speed which I do notice for opening apps, etc. Hopefully, this info helps someone, especially you guys who do the brunt of answering all the posts here.

Dave

In this case, according to support at OWC and my experience, it works like a normal drive. It uses the SSD portion like RAM when it can, if it can't, it works like any other drive.

I think these drives look like they could work different than I had thought, now I'm more curious.

I'm also very surprised that your write speeds are much the same for raid 0 and raid 1. By writing half the file to one drive and half to the other with Raid 0 it should write twice as fast as raid 1 which is writing the file to both drives simultaneously.

When I tested it I was on a PC with an internal Sata Raid setup and a hardware controller, so that should be the same speeds as eSata with an external hardware raid.

I timed manual file transfer tests as well as speed tests with whatever I used at the time, I forgot, but it wold have been something similar to the Black Magic speed test app.

NocoDave wrote:
I'm also very surprised that your write speeds are much the same for raid 0 and raid 1. By writing half the file to one drive and half to the other with Raid 0 it should write twice as fast as raid 1 which is writing the file to both drives simultaneously.

I was too, but it is what it is. In fact, I just received a new 2 TB Western Digital Black Caviar drive yesterday to back up the new 2 TB RAID 0 setup. Here's how it benchmarked in the Voyager drive dock:

WD Black Caviar 2TB in Voyager 1/4 FULL (Quick Bench "Large file Test"):
[With the "Allow Cache Effects" checked (5ms)- eSata: Write-93 MB/s, Read- 159 MB/s.]

You can see that this single drive is about the same as the RAID 1 and RAID 0. If I had known this prior, I never would have messed around with the RAID as it's caused me lots of problems and I've wasted lots of time on it.

Now, all this could be because QuickBench 4.0 sucks or my eSata card and ExpressCard slot aren't up to snuff, but those are the numbers. Later this week, I'll go back and try an edit or two with the RAID 0 and see how it feels in comparison to the internal Hybrid drive. I don't have time at the moment to go into the details, but as I said, the RAID and eSata have been a major pain in the butt since day 1. (According to my experience and the senior engineers at Alsoft, the Disk Warrior people, eSata via Expresscard slot is NOT hot-swappable. You have to deal with it like it's SCSI and re-boot. If I don't re-boot after disconnecting the eSata, I get a hard crash within 24 hours.)

Thanks,
Dave