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Capturing straight to a network drive

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  • NAS / RAID
  • Network Drive
Last response: in Networking
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September 23, 2014 6:07:34 PM

Hi guys,

I work for a media transfer company and we are currently trying to work in a large raid drive over a network so we can consolidate all of our files onto one secure place.

Right now we want to know whether or not it is possible to process our videos/film/images straight to the network drive? Or do we have to process to a local drive first and transfer it afterwards.

Thanks.

More about : capturing straight network drive

September 23, 2014 6:16:20 PM

It depends upon what you are using to record the video/film/images. Most programs would do better recording to the local drive, then save them to the network. Recording directly to the network could bottleneck writing to the drives and/or the network itself depending upon the number of users.
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September 23, 2014 6:24:08 PM

I don't see why you couldn't just write the the network drive directly. The big downside is throughput- I'm not sure of how the "processing" handles the data- if it's passing the data back and forth from the network drive and the CPU a lot, you'll suffer from latency. If the goal is to consolidate the files in one secure location, my non-media-professional opinion is that you'd want to do the "processing" locally with the benefit of gear like PCI-E SSD's and the fast PCI-E bus which can take full advantage of fast CPU(s) and then upload the product to the network drive when processing is complete for redundant storage.

another idea might be to set up a small render farm and have that connected to a pro level NAS to offload the rendering from the workstations and have all the work be on fault tolerant hardware from beginning to end although it sounds like you already have the hardware, and this solution isn't particularly cheap nor simple to implement.
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September 24, 2014 4:03:42 AM

At the moment we are processing the video files through a canopus capture card to a local drive then transferring to the network drive. However this process is very tedious and slow due to the fact we can process up to a tb on each of our 17 machines. So it would be easier to just process straight. I'm just worried that by doing so with multiple machines as well as our downstairs design team using the network all at the same time it may not be viable to do it this way.
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September 24, 2014 2:16:26 PM

It seems as though you'd need to look at more exotic solutions that very few people on a consumer hardware site will have been exposed to. I'd be reaching out to your VAR to explore possibilities with some NAS providers. possibly something from NetApp or Dell or HP's enterprise storage division. You'll probably be looking at multiple link aggregation or possibly 10GbE. Network Throughput is going to be key. I've got a little exposure to the class of solution you'll need but my experience is that at this level, you need to work with the manufacturer to find the right solution for your situation.
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