RAID and HD editing!

[pie3195]

Hi,

Can anyone tell me if 2 hdd working on RAID -0 will make it possible to edit HD footage. I have a HD camcorder which records in full HD AVCHD format. I have been told that a couple of drives in RAID will make the encoding double the speed and will therefore solve the problems i have at the mo with the footage being jerky and lagging behind the audio and just generally nunviewable and impossible to edit.

Please i need to know if its worth investing time and money on a RAID system.

The second part of my question is as i have heard that RAID 0 is risky due to backup. If i had 2 250gb hdd working on RAID 0 and 2 working on RAID 1 could that make that problem better. Can i take a mirror of the RAID 0 setup with RAID 1 . My mobo says it support RAID 1 + 2 at the same time. Is that what that is.

Any help will be greatly aprretiated

Thanx

 

[sminlal]

RAID 0 with two drives can, under optimum conditions, give you up to twice the transfer rate of a single drive. That can often help when you need to read and write very large files as in video editing.

But AVCHD is also very CPU-intensive. It's possible that your bottleneck isn't the disk, but the CPU. I'd run Task Manager (Ctrl+Shift+Esc), select the "Performance" tab and watch the CPU graph while you're doing the editing. If the CPU is maxed out then upgrading your disk subsystem probably won't help.

 

[pie3195]

Hi,

Thanx for the advice. Would upgrading my RAM do any good to my situation?

Also if i had 3 drives working on a RAID - 0 would that increase the speed even more?

 

[pie3195]

And i just tried what you advice, yea the cpu maxes out for a couple of seconds then it drops down to about half when trying to playback HD footage. It then goes back up again, no idea why. However if you took the strain of by using RAID then wouldent that take the pressure of the cpu and improve thats work.

Its an intel core 2 QUad so im suprised it struggling that much.

Is there anyway of improving the cpu in windows setting. Like when you improve the ram by giving it virtual memory.

 

[sminlal]

For video editing generally the more RAM you have the better off you'll be, because you'll be able to keep more of your timeline in memory without having to read and write to the disk so much. It depends on the software you're using, though - some programs may not be able to take advantage of more than 2 or 3GB of RAM (and you also need 64-bit Windows before you can even access more than 4GB).

Speeding up the disk subsystem won't make the CPU work any faster. If it's already maxed out then speed up the disks will just max it out even more because it won't have to spend as much time waiting for them.

AVCHD is a very CPU-intensive codec - it will challenge just about any CPU. Some of it depends on the software and whether or not it can multi-thread, as well as whether your graphics card processor has encoding capabilities (and whether the software can use it).

 

[pie3195]

Ok,

I am using Adobe premiere pro 32 bit on a 64 bit windows 7. I mnight be upgrading to 64 bit adobe in which case it has unlimited RAm use.

I might give up on the RAID thing and just add another 4gb or RAM to my system and then ill have 6 rather than my crap 2gb.

Thanks for all your advice its been very helpfull.

Can i convert the avchd to a easier codec and still keep the full HD quality. ASt the moment i have to convert to mp4 and its quality is worse than my ordinary dv cam

 

[rand_79]

could you possibly post the specs of your computer?

hard to give advice on best plan of action with little information

 

[pie3195]

Intel core 2 quad - 2.7ghz cpu
2gb ddr2 RAM - 800mhz
1TB sata hdd - 7200rpm
ATI Radeon HD 2600 xt - 256 mb
Abit Fatility FP-IN9 SLI mobo


It was built originally as a gaming computer but i dont game any more.

And also i am into 3d rendering so it would be great if i could upgrade to help with that as well as hd footage diting.

Dont know if RAID helps rendering?

 

[scotu]

Both of those tasks are usually CPU bottlenecked. If you're running 64-bit Windows with only 2GB of ram, you'll likely notice an improvement right off the bat with a RAM upgrade, probably even for normal computer usage. Next bet would be to upgrade the CPU, but that'd involve changing your motherboard and possibly ram too, so you're best off just upgrading your ram (also making sure that you're using the fastest ram your motherboard supports).

Also, as far as strain on CPU goes, many HD video codecs scale well to 16 cores, and your CPU is 2 "generations" old

as for raid, check the Disk activity section of the resource monitor under the task manager to see if your disk usage approaches what you can do with your hard drive, if it's near max, then you very well may see an improvement adding a RAID 0 drive for either your source or scratch video, and writing the destination to your existing drive. As for data backup, you'd use either RAID 5 with 3 drives, RAID 3 with 3 drives, or RAID 1+0 with 4 drives to get redundancy to disk failure and a performance gain. RAID 0 just has the drawback that if one of two disks fail, then the whole logical drive fails, meaning not that you're more likely to lose data, but that for any given data, you're more likely to lose it (i.e. You lose everything on both drives instead of just 1).

 

[pie3195]

Hi,

I am not worried about data loss as i am going to keep my 1tb hdd of the raid and im ganna do a weakly backup to it. So thats all good.

I dont really understand the disk monitor but when i open premiere pro both graphs over the the right of the monitor immediatley max out completely i assume that means they are maxing out all together. Then when i play HD footage it defianely maxes out no bumps just max.

I think i will benefit from raid if thats the case. Please tell me if im reading it wrong.

I agree about the RAM too i need a RAM upgrade as well.

 

[scotu]

What you'd actually be looking for in the disk activity page, is MB/s Disk I/O number, as the graphs will frequently change their scale to make them easier to read. If that # is something quite high for a single hard drive, then RAID 0 will probably help as a source/scratch disk.

 

[pie3195]

Thanx for the help everyone.

I decided to go for a RAM upgrade last night and see how that improves things before i start messing with the tricky RAID stuff and re-installing my os (which i really can't be assed to do at the mo)

However RAID is the next upgrade on my list if this doesnt improve things greatly

 

[pie3195]

Just to let everyone know i have managed to edit HD footage now.

I now hav e 6gb of RAM and 64 bit cs5 premiere pro and it works fine so thankyou.

 

[sminlal]

Congratulations!

 

[scotu]

Just to let everyone know i have managed to edit HD footage now.

I now hav e 6gb of RAM and 64 bit cs5 premiere pro and it works fine so thankyou.

Nice! Also, if you wanted to RAID in the future, there's (potentially) nothing stopping you from just adding 2 more drives to your system in RAID 0 together and using those for just videos, you wouldn't need to reinstall your OS or anything. The "trickyness" would just be a few simple BIOS and hard drive settings.