Is a RAID system the answer for my muticam edits?

I use multicam for music videos quite a bit and my main camera is a Blackmagic Cinema cam. I only film in 1080 but all shots need a LUT and some grading - this seems to slow everything down and playback is very jerky and sometimes won't play at all with angles showing (even in proxy mode)

So, is a RAID system the answer?


Cheers

Depends on what you're Mac specs are.

sonictimbo wrote: … sometimes won't play at all with angles showing (even in proxy mode)…So, is a RAID system the answer?
…

… even in proxy-mode? oops.
Where are media actually located?

Handling here up to 6 streams, even without proxy, on a very low-spec MacMini - but media distributed on three ext SSDs (=poor mans raid) …

Hi all
My Mac is a 2 x 2.93GHz 6 core Intel Xeon (Mid 2010)
32 gig memory
Graphics ATI Radeon HD 5778 1024MB

Running El Capitan 10.11.6

My projects are running on an external 2TB drive Firewire

sonictimbo wrote: ....multicam...Blackmagic Cinema cam....only....1080 but all shots need a LUT and some grading - this seems to slow everything down and playback is very jerky and sometimes won't play at all with angles showing (even in proxy mode)...is a RAID system the answer?....

This is an odd situation. I've never see a case where a 12-core machine can't play multicam well using proxies of 1080 original. Proxy is 1/2 the linear resolution or 1/4 the total resolution, so the files are pretty small even given proxy's ProRes encoding.

Is it conceivable you built the proxies but didn't flip the viewer to proxy mode?

The other possibility is it's a GPU bottleneck which is slowing down your LUT and color effects. Mac Tracker says the top factory GPU in your 2010 Mac Pro was a 1GB Radeon HD 5870. Those have a GeekBench GPU score of about 16000, which is about equal to a 2013 MacBook Air.

It may be worth considering a GPU upgrade. In general I'd stay with ATI/AMD due to better FCPX compatibility, but others may suggest differently. You can get the AMD R9 280X, which is the same as the D700 used in the New Mac Pro on eBay for about $120. I don't know if it's compatible with your 2010 Mac Pro, but you can investigate that.

Thanks for that!

I do select Proxy in the viewer and it does make it better - but not much!

sonictimbo wrote: …My projects are running on an external 2TB drive Firewire

Firewire is the bottleneck, get a USB 3 drive

I'd say put a second one of those GPUs in that old Mac Pro. FCPX and Motion are dual GPU aware, long as they're twins.

We just had an old 2010 Mac Pro with that same GPU die on us. A RAID would help, as would a second GPU. I say this from trying to make this old Mac Pro last as long as possible. I will say that even with twin GPUs and an eSATA RAID, it was better, but still slow. Multicams drove my assistant insane.

But yes, an eSATA RAID would help a lot. About the only thing that will give you significant performance increase. Anything after that is just a waste.

He's doing proxy of 1080 which is only 960 x 540. Proxy is ProRes but overall his data rate should be about 1/2 of a single 1080 H264 stream, multiplied by the number of streams (or camera angles).

OTOH a 2TB FireWire 800 drive can be quite slow, so he should at least run BlackMagic speed test on that drive and report the numbers. Even with proxy of 1080 you can quickly overload a single slow hard drive when doing multicam.

Another concern is he's doing lots of effects on multicam and that GPU is really slow. His CPU performance is pretty good but the GeekBench4 GPU results are about 16,000 -- roughly equal to a 2013 MacBook Air. According to Max Yuryev, the AMD R9 280X performs well on FCPX and had good compatibility -- even in a Hackintosh: