What goes on Fastest Drive?

We've been cutting long form docs for years and moved from Avid to Premier to Final Cut.  And I mean years...

We like FCP's freeform magnetic ability to create stories and quickly jazz up with effects, etc. to screen for stakeholders.

We've been cutting on iMac Pros and MBPs mostly and now use many TBs of SSD for optimized and proxy footage shot with digital cinema cameras in 4K.  We have hundreds of hours per project. We store everything on separate individual drives(not NAS, RAID etc.) not in the library.  We have triple backups of everything and keep the cam original cards/drives (like in the old days of film and tape.)

The workflow with SSDs is great.  We slide them into hubs and get the speed we want.  Rendering is sometimes tough because we like to layer lots of EFX inc third party and then send out optimized cuts.

We are bringing into the fold a newer m.2 SSD with much faster speeds and throughput.  The first test drive will be a 4TB and will hold only some of a project's material.

Would you recommend we copy to the new SSD:

1. proxy footage (which we use for roughs daily and test effects/looks)
2. optimized footage (which we render, play down, and export with final effects)
3. original footage
4. the Library (which is small and can probably sit with and of the 3 above on the new drive)
5. something we didn't think of...

Obviously if we could fit everything on one drive it would be cool but we are running over 32 TB on the bigger projects and like the ability to pull SSDs out for lightweight travel.

Since one of the best assets of any good editor is to be critical I'm sure some of you will be ready to share some negatives but please stay on point with the question. We would like your perspectives.  😊

Thanks!

Emmmmmy wrote:

...The workflow with SSDs is great....Rendering is sometimes tough because we like to layer lots of EFX inc third party and then send out optimized cuts....We are bringing into the fold a newer m.2 SSD with much faster speeds and throughput. The first test drive will be a 4TB and will hold only some of a project's material....Would you recommend we copy to the new SSD....proxy footage...optimized footage (which we render, play down, and export with final effects...original footage....the Library (which is small)...

Sorry about the delayed response, I was doing some testing to try and give a better answer but ran out of time. I've edited very large docs in FCP with over 8,500 4k clips, 220 camera hours and 150 multicam interviews. That was mostly 4k H264 with some ProRes, on a 10-core iMac Pro and earlier on a 2017 iMac 27. I now use an M1 Max MacBook Pro 16 and external monitor. Most of that media was on four 32TB OWC 4-drive RAID-0 arrays, but some on two 16TB OWC 4-drive SSD arrays.

Beyond a certain point there is often limited benefit to increasing I/O. A chain is only strong as the weakest link. I've done tests where I've moved all media from 4-drive mechanical RAID-0 arrays to 4-drive SSD arrays, and it wasn't much faster. The mechanical arrays gave a visceral impression of slowness because you could hear them seeking. Intuitively you think "they are slowing me down", but when relocated on SSD arrays it's quiet but not vastly faster.

However that depends on the acquisition and mezzanine codecs. With 4k ProRes 422 HQ you can easily hit an I/O limit on multicam. My M1 Max is so fast at creating 10% ProRes Proxies from 4k ProRes 422 originals that it hits 1.3 gigabytes/sec reading rate on the input drive. That is likely due to dual ProRes decode/encode accelerators. Transcoding Long GOP material is a lot slower (albeit faster than typical x86).

In general you want the library on a fast dedicated SSD, since the I/O profile to the SQL relational databases is small and random. But if it's already on a 1 gigabyte/sec SSD, going to a faster one might not show an improvement.

Likewise proxy is already a lot smaller, so I/O burden is less. Putting that on SSD might not yield a significant improvement. Optimized media is a lot larger so if not using proxies that can be a limit, esp. for multicam.

The main difficulty is assessing where the bottleneck is. In general it tends to be a compute bottleneck, not I/O. Unfortunately the monitoring tools on MacOS are not remotely as extensive as Performance Monitor on Windows.

However it's possible using DTrace command-line tools to roughly assess the I/O profile and I/O queue depth. Doing that requires booting into Recovery Mode and disabling System Integrity Protection. Use these at your own risk. I re-tested them on Monterey a few days ago and they seemed to work (caveats below). For more info see:  dtrace.org/blogs/brendan/2011/10/10/top-...cripts-for-mac-os-x/

The iopending command can show a histogram of how many outstanding unfulfilled IOs exist. Unfortunately it appears on Monterey the -d argument no longer works so target a specific drive but you can still examine IO queue depth and by deduction or reconfiguration figure out what drive is backed up. E.g:

diskutil list (lists disk names for each attached drive)

sudo iopending -d disk8 (omit disk name in Monterey and maybe Big Sur and Catalina to see system-wide disk queues)
The command bitesize.d shows an IO histogram for the designated process (generally FCP for this case). To first obtain the FCP PID, use:

ps -ax | grep Final

sudo bitesize.d -p PID (print IO histograms of specified PID obtained from above ps -ax command)

sudo iosnoop -p PID (Show IOs from specified PID)

If you are using proxies and optimized media, newer Apple Silicon machines like the M1 Max have the promise of totally bypassing that and editing the original files. However this varies widely by codec. The Xeon-powered iMac Pro does not have Quick Sync acceleration and Apple's 1st-gen P2 accelerator is quite limited. Thus the iMac Pro can be very sluggish on many Long GOP codecs. From the standpoint of longer-range strategy it's likely good to plan for M1 Max machines or higher when available.

Currently the fastest workflow task on the M1 Max is transcoding from 4k ProRes 422 to 50% ProRes Proxies -- it is staggering. 50% Prores Proxies are about 1/15th the size of originals. If a proxy-only workflow for remote collaborators is desired, this implies once M1 Max is available consider using 50% ProRes Proxy, not H264 proxy. It's not as small as H264 but it generates vastly quicker.

The M1 Max is also fast at decoding Long GOP codecs, with some variation. On Neat Video the GPU is about 2x faster than the Vega 64 in my iMac Pro, but on other compute-intensive plugins like Digital Anarchy's Flicker Free, it's about equal. The performance implications of each plugin and effect must be evaluated separately.

Any plugin that examines a sliding window of frames such as Neat Video or Flicker Free should be placed 1st in the effect stack. Otherwise they will force recomputation of each effect above them for each frame examined.

Sometimes the editing machine is actually faster than your SSD external. The other school of thought is "everything" so that your main machine is empty for edit.

Thanks of the awesome detailed response.  You are confirming our thoughts.  We are waiting for the new M1 iMacPros to take advantage of the new architecture and speed.  

We will run some tests here.  The newer NVMe drives are more compact as well as faster so we are moving in that direction.  Let's see how much of an impact they make in RW editing.

If we discover anything that adds to your post we will share again here.  

Again, really appreciate the time and work that you put into this.  

I am really curious to see how you get on with the NVME drives. I have been close to pulling the trigger a few times.

I've been cutting on external SSD's for a while now and they have been great, but the NVME speeds excite me. Please keep me updated on how they translate to RW speeds and applications.

My workflow (and this could be wrong or improved but it has worked for me) is all footage on an SSD (backed up on a RAID and another HDD, the library file on the internal drive. I don't find any real bottlenecks on that workflow. Since moving to the Sony FX6 and an M1, I no longer need to generate proxies. It's astonishing how quick the M1 is without proxies (I came from shooting Red Raw and an iMac and had to proxy everything) I'll usually have a copy of the library file on the Raid as a back up and replace that every few days or the end of the week. At the end of everyday, I export an XML into a seperate location for peace of mind.

bjrE wrote:

...Since moving to the Sony FX6 and an M1, I no longer need to generate proxies. It's astonishing how quick the M1 is without proxies...

I also have the FX6. Part of the performance is the M1 and part is the All Intra XAVC-I codec of the FX6. It is pretty fast to edit -- not equal to ProRes but fairly smooth. It is about 1/2 the size of ProRes 422 and mostly equal in quality if at the same resolution, bit depth and chroma sampling. For some reason that codec in the MXF container is faster and smoother to edit than the similar All Intra XAVC-SI codec in the MP4 container used by the FX3 and A7SIII, even though they are all the same bit rate.

joema wrote:

bjrE wrote:

...Since moving to the Sony FX6 and an M1, I no longer need to generate proxies. It's astonishing how quick the M1 is without proxies...

I also have the FX6. Part of the performance is the M1 and part is the All Intra XAVC-I codec of the FX6. It is pretty fast to edit -- not equal to ProRes but fairly smooth. It is about 1/2 the size of ProRes 422 and mostly equal in quality if at the same resolution, bit depth and chroma sampling. For some reason that codec in the MXF container is faster and smoother to edit than the similar All Intra XAVC-SI codec in the MP4 container used by the FX3 and A7SIII, even though they are all the same bit rate.

I agree totally. I am currently cutting a project with footage from FX6 and A7siii and wanted to test out the H.265/HEVC  footage in my workflow. I read so many complaints about it not being user-friendly and did a few tests that were fine for me, so I wanted to see if it is feasible on an actual project. My M1 mini is handling it fine, and apart from the odd dropped frame, the biggest issue I have noticed is that when using the mouse to scrub over footage in the browser, the MXF footage scrubs fine, but the HEVC footage wont scrub smoothly. Not a deal breaker for something this size (one shoot day - 2 min finished product) but anything larger, I would probably reconsider or proxy the footage.

bjrE wrote:

...test out the H.265/HEVC footage...My M1 mini is handling it fine, and apart from the odd dropped frame, the biggest issue I have noticed is that when using the mouse to scrub over footage in the browser, the MXF footage scrubs fine, but the HEVC footage wont scrub smoothly. Not a deal breaker for something this size (one shoot day - 2 min finished product) but anything larger, I would probably reconsider or proxy the footage.

I have two A7SIIIs and the M1 Max and I have about the same experience. The Sony 4k 10-bit 4:2:2 HEVC material can be edited in smaller pieces, but even the M1 Max isn't fast enough to do large multicam clips smoothly. That is probably because the M1 Max has the same decode acceleration for H264/HEVC as the M1. It is theoretically faster on export and way faster on ProRes transcoding, but on H264/HEVC playback it's about the same. In theory a dual or quad-CPU version would be faster.

We haven't brought the new drive into the workflow.  We decided to copy over all the optimized footage first (or at least as much as would fit.) We will test that first.We shoot on the Canon cinema cams.  The doc work mostly on c200s.  We do not use RAW unless it's an EFX shoot. Otherwise we record with the 4k MP4 codec.   We never had any issues cutting with the original footage. But once we started color correcting or adding efx/titles things got choppy.  We try a lot of looks and styles in our roughs. And we use multicam often.  What bugged us was that even rendered we had issues with original footage even on SSDs.  It drove us crazy (lots of calls to Apple and forum posts.)  We finally gave up, started uisng proxies and optimized for everything.  The problems melted away.But this takes up tremendous space and makes us less portable.  But we are working well now. The new SSDs are just another step in tweaking the speed and flow.  The new iMac Pro and Mac Pro should make life more fun too.We will keep you posted. Thanks all.