Thunderbolt is becoming the interface of choice when it comes to peripherals. Lots of new boxes on show with Thunderbolt 2 connectivity now making the news.
Let us start off with something we would have loved to have left with at the show and to be fair, it could have fitted very nicely in our computer bag!
We have tested the Promise Pegasus2 M4 before, but that was with spinning disks. At the show, Promise were displaying a 2TB M4 populated with four 500GB SSDs. Using Thunderbolt2, read speeds of over 1300 MB/s were being measured in the now 'over clocked' Blackmagic speed test.
If we were to go on location for a DIT job or just simple card archives and loading of footage, this is the drive we would want. Super-fast SSDs in a RAID5 configuration for protection with Thunderbolt 2. It will also fit very easily into your hand baggage if you were catching a plane. One final thought, the M4's power cable is just that, a simple figure of eight connector, no bulky transformers or wall warts to cart around.
At the other end of the scale, G-Technology announced the new eight-bay G-SPEED Studio XL.
Sitting next to the similar shiny black Mac Pro for scale, the new drive holds up to eight removable enterprise-class 7,200 RPM hard drives to offer colossal capacity and performance of up to 1350 megabytes per second.
The drive can be supplied in a number of capacities and matching prices, 24TB for £2,699, 32TB for £3,479, 40TB for £4,199, 48TB for £4,499 and a massive 64TB for £5,250.
All of course have two Thunderbolt 2 ports, so you could daisy chain a few of these together for well over a quarter of a Petabytes worth of storage down one cable!
Vincent Laforet sees the new G-SPEED Studio XL as a replacement for his ageing Xserve RAIDS. You might be able to hear a conversation in that apartment now.
Stardom displayed a new product that hasn't been released yet. They have expanded their ST4 range of 4 bay 'empty' units by adding Thunderbolt 2. Although they say the unit will be available soon, no word on price, but we expect it to be very competitive. By populating it with your own disks, this could be the cheapest way to build a Thunderbolt 2 RAID.
Here you can see it sitting on the rack mountable DR8-TB which at the moment has only Thunderbolt 1 connectivity.
The 'sleds' pull out for easy drive swopping. The trays can accommodate different widths of 3.5" HDDs, 2.5" SSDs, and 2.5" HDDs
ATTO had a whole new range of Thunderbolt products on their stand. The star for us was the Thunderlink FC 2162 which offers dual 16Gb Fibre Channel to Thunderbolt 2. Possibly the quickest box on the market at the moment to connect a new Mac Pro via fibre channel to a SAN.
At the back, the unit has two Thunderbolt ports, not for sharing the fibres across machines, but for loop through. This could be important as the Mac Pro has 6 Thunderbolt 2 ports, but only three busses.
Also on the stand were three ThunderLink Desktop devices offering Thunderbolt conversion to Fibre Channel, SAS or 10GbE. The 10GbE would be a good fast choice if you want to connect a Mac Pro to ISIS storage.
Finally in the roundup is mLogic. We didn't manage to catch up with them on the show floor, but they did very kindly send us a press release.
Their new product is mTape Extreme, faster than LTO it offers high capacity reliable backups.
mTape Extreme is a 2U rack-mount backup/archiving solution offering unparalleled capacity and performance. mTape Extreme fuses the latest in enterprise class digital tape technology with the ease of use of LTFS. The system also features RAID 6 disk storage and dual bus Thunderbolt connectivity. mTape Extreme provides data transfer rates up to 360MB/second and 10TB (native) of storage capacity per tape cartridge. mTape Extreme is over twice as fast as LTO-6 and offers four times the storage capacity per tape.
mTape Extreme is designed for maximum reliability for 24/7 mission critical environments. The enterprise level error checking on mTape Extreme means that the chance of a bit error occurs only once every 12,499 Petabytes - this is five orders of magnitude greater reliability than enterprise SATA hard drive technology.
- The world’s first 10TB tape drive with Thunderbolt connectivity
- Supports LTFS for drag and drop functionality
- Integrated high-speed, 8-drive Thunderbolt RAID
- Compact 2U rack-mountable enclosure
I am the Editor-in-Chief of FCP.co and have run the website since its inception ten years ago.
I have also worked as a broadcast and corporate editor for over 30 years, starting on one inch tape, working through many formats, right up to today's NLEs.
Under the name Idustrial Revolution, I have written and sold plugins for Final Cut Pro for 13 years.
I was made a Freeman of Lichfield through The Worshipful Company of Smiths (established 1601). Though I haven't yet tried to herd a flock of sheep through the city centre!
Current Editing
2020 has been busy, the beginning of the year was finishing off a new property series (cut on FCP) for Channel 4 called The Great House Giveaway. I also designed and built the majority of the graphics as Motion templates. It has been a great success and the shows grabbed more viewers in the 4pm weekday slot than any previous strand. It has been recommissioned by C4 for 60 episodes, including prime-time versions and five themed programmes. The shows have also been nominated for a 2021 BAFTA.
Although both were postponed to later in the year, I worked again on ITV's coverage of the Tour de France and La Vuelta. 2020 was my 25th year of editing the TdF and my 20th year as lead editor. The Tour was the first broadcast show to adopt FCPX working for multiple editors on shared storage.
BBC's Snooker has played a big part in my life, I've been editing tournament coverage since 1997. I'm proud to be part of a very creative team that has pioneered many new ideas and workflows that are now industry standard in sports' production. This is currently an Adobe Premiere edit.
Covid cancelled some of the regular corporate events that I edit such as trade shows & events. I was lucky however to edit, from home, on projects for Amazon Kindle, Amazon Black Friday, Mastercard and very proud to have helped local charitable trust Kendall & Wall secure lottery funding.
As for software, my weapon of choice is Final Cut Pro and Motion, but I also have a good knowledge and broadcast credits with Adobe Premiere Pro, MOGRT design and Photoshop.
Plugin Design & Development
I'm the creative force behind Idustrial Revolution, one of the oldest Final Cut Pro plugin developers. It hosts a range of commercial and free plugins on the site. One free plugin was downloaded over a thousand times within 24 hours of release.
I also take on custom work, whether it is adapting an existing plugin for a special use or designing new plugins for clients from scratch. Having a good knowledge of editing allows me to build-in flexibility and more importantly, usability.
FCP.co
Now in its 10th year and 4th redesign, running FCP.co has given me knowledge on how to run a large CMS- you are currently reading my bio from the database! Although it sounds corny, I am pretty well up on social media trends & techniques, especially in the video sector. The recent Covid restrictions has enabled live FCP.co shows online. This involves managing a Zoom Webinar through Restream.io to YouTube and Facebook.
The Future
I'm always open to new ideas and opportunities, so please get in touch at editor (at) fcp.co. I've judged film competitions, presented workflow techniques to international audiences and come up with ideas for TV shows and software programs!
