SHRINKING AVIs BRFORE EDITING

[TEKnician]

I have AVIs that were avisynth'd and are now MOVs (because i'm a mac) and they are on average 17 GB each episode.

I have 17 COMPLETE COLLECTIONS OF ANIME and only a 1TB external HD. Can't i make them a little smaller in size without reducing quality (or dimensions)?

[mirkosp]

Lossless does that; there are somewhat smaller filesizes achievable (on windows), but the difference isn't all too great. YOU DON'T WANT TO KEEP ALL YOUR SOURCES IN LOSSLESS FORMAT FOREVER. You just want to make lossless clips of the scenes you're going to use in your amv and once the amv is done delete them.

[TEKnician]

It may sound selfish/ignorant of me, but i would like to keep all my footage in tact and ready to use at a moments notice so that i don't have to avisynth my VOBs again to make a new project. I like to have access to all my footage available so that i have a lot to pick from. It just seems like it would take even longer to extract clips and then when i'm editing be like "aww crap, if only i had more of this clip!" (I know that would just be a matter of knowing exactly what i want from the episode but i can guarantee that it's gonna happen).

So, Mirko, there's no method at all?

If not, then i appreciate your advice...really.

[Kariudo]

Not really

It's the price you pay for quality and ease of access.

[TEKnician]

OK! Time to go Hard Drive shopping!!!

[Mister Hatt]

12 disk striped RAID60 is the way to go. So you get a nice Areca RAID card with expandable RAM and some SAS expanders, then make a bunch of RAID6's with 12 disks each (I suggest 2TB SATA3 drives as long as the card supports it), giving you 20TB of storage per first level array. Then RAID0 these arrays in either a 2 or 4 vdisk configuration, giving you 40 or 80TB of usable space with very fast access times. This is actually a production setup I use for fast storage access.

I also have a RAID0 on 4 SSD drives with ECC for my actual footage I'm working on right at the moment, giving me read speeds on a slightly modified UTVideo of just over 1000fps on DVD resolution footage.

This setup is kinda insane and a bit pricey, but it is probably the best you can do for a large amount of fast storage without data loss. You could probably use RAID5 for less 'wasted' disks but you can only lose one drive per RAID0 stack that way, and you'd be better off using 10 disks per stack for 18TB first levels. The biggest thing for performance with RAID of course in this setup is using SAS expanders rather than SATA, and throwing as much RAM on the controllers as you can. Maybe even using multiple controllers and then software RAID0ing them.

gl;hf this is probably overkill for you

[TEKnician]

Would my more affordable option be to daisy chain a few firewire hard drives?

I'd actually like to take advantage of my computer's 2 thunderbolt ports and get the Lacie Little big disks and daisy chain THOSE BASTARDS. However, the thunderbolt drives are still friggin expensive. OH! What about a time capsule or two running to my computers ethernet port? I'd still get a gigabit transfer speed, right? If i'm doing fine on just a FW 800, anything would do at this point.

Advice is well appreciated!

[Mister Hatt]

I think I did 20TB for about $3500. No idea how much Thunderbolt stuff costs but going by Apple's site, it's around $2800 for 12TB iirc. This should be faster as you're directly on the PCIe bus, although maybe Thunderbolt uses that too, I forget.

[TEKnician]

LaCie 8TB 4big Quadra RAID

ooh! this one looks pretty! And it has 8TB to start me off! 4 drives, RAID, expandable to 24TB nice! Only $1000. I don't think i'll ever need more than 10TB, though. *adds to wishlist*