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fukawi2

Ex-Administratorino

From: .vic.au

Registered: 2007-09-28

Posts: 6,230

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Video Production Storage for Home Environment

I know what I'm about to talk about is relatively quite small compared to many businesses, but it's quite large for a home environment (and budget!)....

I've recently started doing some Video Production using kdenlive; my last project was a 12 minute video and all the files for the project totalled ~120gb.

I want to do more VP work, but I'd like to get some ideas on storage for this kind of work; lots of space, but also fast access needed. At the moment I'm using a 4-bay external enclosure in RAID-10 connected via USB3 which seems to work OK, but I'm wondering if I it would be worth turning that into a RAID-6 (more efficient use of raw disks) for archiving projects, and build a smaller internal RAID1/10 array of SSD's for doing "live" work?

Do you do this? How do you handle it? What are your suggestions?

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whoops

Member

Registered: 2009-03-19

Posts: 891

Re: Video Production Storage for Home Environment

I'm not sure I'm understanding it right, maybe I'm totally missing the point...?

Do you have the project you're working on on the same storage as the ones you don't currently need? Does that mean you need fast access to the old projects, too?

My setup and requirements are far below yours, but so far I'm doing fine with 50-300GB projects on a normal internal drive with only the 2-3 projects I've been working on last (<3 that velociraptor 1TB hd). Isn't one internal drive usually already a fair bit faster than such an USB3 RAID-10? Depends on what bottlenecks play the lead I guess...

In background, I simply sync that drive together with the rest of my system to my backup "array" that keeps hardlinks to deleted files in folders by date... so I can just delete files from the work-drive without fear of loosing anything. Those backup arrays aren't raid either - I simply use backup HD's like it used to work with those C64 "cassette drives" - if it's full, I dump the directory tree to a text file for later reference, put a label on the backup hd, put it in a drawer and stick the next big, cheap, slow, empty HD into my cheap slow USB3 dock. In my case, the redundancy that results from this method turns out just right (all projects end up on at least 2 HDs in the end, only small ones on more than 4). That it works out so well might be partly coincidence though.

I tried to involve RAID arrays in the past... turned out to make more problems & work than it had advantages in my case. I'm clumsy and also like to misplace hardware on occasion. Without raid there's a lot less room for me to mess things up.

Last edited by whoops (2013-07-29 11:45:04)