High res 8k Red video files edited from Freenas Server

[mamalm]

Okay so I recently built a freenas server for my video editing needs (I edit 8k Red R3D footage} and I have a few questions about some of the configurations. I'm primarily interested in read speeds only and being able to stream my footage from the server to the editing workstation to edit. I've tested my peer to peer connection via 10GB and it seems great. The caviat is the initial clip playback in the timeline seems to have a delay latency and ramp up throughput. I need maximum intitial palyback of the clips since while editing I have multiple clips playing one after another (each cut can be a clip i.e. a video file firing off from the server to the edit workstation). Is this latency due to compression?

 

[morganL]

Have you worked out what bandwidth you need for 8K Red R3D editing?

Mirrors are best for max Read bandwidth and performance... especially on HDDs. All drives can be used simultaneously and the I/O sizes are larger.

 

[mamalm]

Well I do believe it's around 600MB if we shoot 5 to 1 redcode compression ( I could be wrong but I'm close). The problem is if we are working on a music video or a action film the cuts (switching between different video files) can be every few seconds so we need fast initial access. I've tried to lookup compression latency (I do believe latency is added to decompress on the server side) and had no luck.

 

[mamalm]

in our previous setup we had a video raid on the workstation with 5 4TB Samsung Solid State Drives and we had no problem, it was just to small for us.

 

[morganL]

Is that 600MB/s per Video you are streaming/reading? or total?
Compression can be disabled, but it should not have a major impact either positively or negatively since the video is already compressed.

Switching to a new video file requires the FreeNAS to start reading the file and then readahead caching to start working.... when stored on HDDs, theoretically, that may take seconds. Is that what you are seeing?

With FreeNAS on SSDs, it should be tens of milliseconds since read-ahead caching is not needed.

 

[NickF]

You may want to consider re-allocating your drives into a different pool configuration. If high performance is what you are after, you would be much better off than as a RaidZ2 as Morgan suggests. The more mirrors, and subsequently the wider your pool is, the better it will perform.