Hard Drive Lag

jrazz wrote on 10/31/2008, 8:25 AM

I have two WD 640GB 7200rm drives (high bit density) raided to be seen as one drive. This is where I have stored my captured footage. The problem is, I can be working on the timeline and the frames on the preview will hang (in both preview, good, and best) and the hard drives will have to catch up (sometimes taking a minute or two) before I can move on. If I am playing through the footage the audio will continue to play, the scrubber will continue to move, but the preview will be stuck trying to display the frames (kind of like if you are working with a bunch of 3D track motion with the opacity slider down).

-My project is standard 4:3 SD footage NTSC. The media is the same. No fx, nothing has been done to the footage after it was ingested.

-I am working in multicam mode with three A/V streams. I don't notice a set pattern (like if I was to experience the lag everytime I switch takes), sometimes it does it and sometimes it doesn't.- however, it did seem to do it more when I would go back and edit a take switch and then start the playback up.

-I turned off the thumbnail previews on the timeline as I noticed they were extremely slow to regenerate after a new take was selected.

-I am working in 8.0c with 8 gigs of ram and 8 cores running at 2.5ghz.

-My disc setup for this project: Store all captured footage on the two drives mentioned above set up to be one drive and encode to a 10,000 rpm sata disc for SD mpg. So far, this is not working. Surely I would not need to have all three cams seperated to 3 different hard drives right?

-I checked the discs to make sure they were set for optimal performance and not safety of content.

Any ideas? I think after this project, I will ungroup the hard drives and use them independently of one another.

j razz

Comments

tcbetka wrote on 10/31/2008, 8:48 AM

Probably a silly question as you said you were going to un-group the drives after this project...but have you ever run this set-up with the HDs *not* as a RAID system? And if so, how'd that go?

I looked into a RAID configuration when I built my new system, but it just didn't seem like a two-drive system would give that much benefit over a non-RAID system, especially when I could easily back-up critical media to an external HD. It was a while ago and I am by no means an expert on RAID configs, but it seemed to me that it was more trouble than it was worth, with two drives...

TB

jrazz wrote on 10/31/2008, 9:37 AM

I never ran it without it being raid. Although I have never had this issue, I also have never an 60 minute long files from this drive (3 streams at that). Maybe that is where the issue is coming in?

j razz

megabit wrote on 10/31/2008, 9:46 AM

Something is not right with your system. I'm working on a similar project (3 camera track, plus additional audio), and even in the multicamera mode, I'm getting Good/Half at full 25 fps on both the preview window, and the secondary 50" HDTV.

My files are full raster, 35Mbps 1080p, sitting on a RAID0 as well.

tcbetka wrote on 10/31/2008, 9:50 AM

Hmmm...long clips. I haven't noticed any more problems with my 20-minute AVCHD files, than I have with a 2-minute AVCHD file though. So you might try to maybe split and shorten the clip some, and try it again--although I'm not sure it'll make much of a difference.

But I have never streamed three cameras into Vegas simultaneously, so you got me on that one...although I would think that if you had them as separate takes on the same track, it wouldn't be an issue. I'm sure others here will advise you better there though.

TB

jrazz wrote on 10/31/2008, 10:09 AM

In the past, I have had no issue with multicam edits, but I have not used this particular set up for that purpose. So, it may be a combo of the above as the drive(s) have to read all three streams, update the thumbnails on the timeline and keep the audio in sync and running while obeying the commands I am giving through Vegas.

Once I finish with this project (another week or two) I will move the files to another drive, separate and run the project again to see if I encounter the same issue.

j razz

Steve Mann wrote on 11/5/2008, 10:21 AM

I don't think that your disk arrangement is the problem here. It could be simply something in the background that you are unaware of. Run the task manager and double click on the CPU column. This will tell you what processes are eating your CPU time. Leave it up on screen and edit your project. When you experience the lag again, look at the top three or four processes and look for a clue there.

FWIW, HDV and DV files don't need the speed of RAID arrays.

Zelkien69 wrote on 11/5/2008, 10:33 AM

EndItAll is my program of choice for those pesky background programs. Type EndItAll in google and you should be set. It works wonders.

musicvid10 wrote on 11/5/2008, 10:39 AM

A search for RAID on these forums will reveal that there are many opinions that NLE and RAID don't necessarily play nice together.

In cases where they do work together, I haven't seen any suggestion that doing so results in an advantage.

In cases where do not work together, reverting to a properly configured conventional drive arrangement solved the problem.

My own (brief) experiment with RAID 0 and Vegas was a disaster -- I ended up with corrupted AVIs that took many hours to recapture from the tapes. I have not since seen any need to repeat the experience.

jrazz wrote on 11/5/2008, 11:38 AM

There are no other processes besides windows and Sony. All I have on that machine is Sony Creative Software and Windows.

It is the drive(s) or rather, the setup I chose. If I turn off multicam mode and play the resulting events (with takes) it plays fine as it is only accessing one event stream at a time (plus audio). However, if I re enable multicam mode, it is pulling all three streams of video plus 3 streams of audio at the same time from the same disk array. That is where the lag is happening. So, once I finish the project, I will move my files to another drive, undo the raid and have two separate disks.

Thanks though.

j razz

Steve Mann wrote on 11/5/2008, 11:48 AM

"There are no other processes besides windows and Sony ..."

You are looking at applications. There are likely 40-50 processes running as well.

But copying all your files from raid to one disk then reformatting your drives to independent drives will probably help.

jrazz wrote on 11/5/2008, 12:35 PM

I was looking under the process tab when working in multicam. All of the processes I have belong to either windows or Sony Creative Software as there is nothing else installed on the machine. That is all I use it for is video. I don't even have any monitoring software on the pc.

I do appreciate the help/suggestion however.

j razz

marks27 wrote on 11/5/2008, 4:54 PM

Hi rjazz,

Have you checked what your memory usage is like? If you are getting to the limit of your physical memory you might find the O/S is starting to page heavily -- and I/O performance will turn to one metric load of crap.

If that is the case, you could try dropping your preview RAM setting (say to 512 or even 256Mb) to minimize the likelihood of Vegas and Windows fighting over resources.

Of course if that is not the issue, then i just did a lot of typing for nothing :-)

Ciao,

marks

jrazz wrote on 11/5/2008, 7:22 PM

Thanks Marks,

I actually have my memory set at 128mb. I am almost 99% sure it is the raid setup.

As for wasting your keystrokes- never! Someone else will come along and sure enough have the same problem and a little search will aide them in finding this and your recommendation could very well be the issue.

Thanks all for the responses. If after I finish this project I find out it is not the raid system, I will bring back this thread and have another go at it.

j razz