Final Cut X Raid config help
 

Hi All,
*
I have 4 bays free in my Mac Pro and would like to know what you think the best and safest way to work would be.
My OS and Applications will be installed on OCZ VTX3-25SAT3-120G Vertex 120GB SATA 2.5 inch SSD drive which will be placed under my optical drive.
*
I will be filming a lot of weddings in the next few months and I will be editing in full HD 1080, I want to A) make sure I am using my 4 bays in the best possible way and B) Make sure that if a drive fails I do not loose any work.
I have already purchased 2 x Western Digital 2 TB Black drives and thinking about purchasing 2 more.
*
Many Thanks

Re: Final Cut X Raid config help
 

If you are not planning to do any live capture from HD tape, I would suggest a four drive RAID 5 system. That has built in redundancy, however I am not sure if Apple's included hardware supports that RAID configuration. You might need to purchase a RAID board. Otherwise, you could make an extremely fast four drive RAID0 and use external backup using FCPX's media management or create two two drive RAID0 arrays and use one as the backup of the other. That's a RAID 0+1 configuration but you can administer it manually if Apple doesn't support it without third party options.

Re: Final Cut X Raid config help
 

Or you can make a RAID 0 from 3 drives, and have a separate 4th drive for project and audio files.

Re: Final Cut X Raid config help
 

This has been suggested to me which also sounds good

2 blacks + 2 greens internally.

For the greens I could concatenation (the third option in Disk Utility alongside mirroring and striping). This means they'll be treated as one big volume, but instead of striping them for performance they'll be just strung together.

The advantage of this is that if my black RAID0 and one of the greens should fail at the same time, the data on the remaining green drive would still be intact and usable. So I wouldn't lose all my data.

I can use Time Machine (easiest way) or set up Carbon Copy Cloner (Freeware) or SuperDuper! to make a backup regularly. All three are/can be set up as incremental backups (i. e. only the stuff that has changed since last time is changed in the backup).

Rendering files are large
 

Just recently started editing in FCPX and yesterday I was transferring my second video from my MacBook Pro to my Mac Pro via a 1 Terrabyte Passport drive which had some capacity used but not all that much. I was shocked to get a message that the Passport drive was almost full. !!!

The transfer process was unsuccessful as I aborted it. The Mac Pro was rendering the video at the time the process was stopped.

I was trying to follow the Apple procedure here:
http://help.apple.com/finalcutpro/ma...3/#verb8e5fcf4
(using the second option "Copy a project and its clips to another computer"

To avoid bloated rendering files I had un-checked the box "Include Render Files".
At least I was pretty sure I had.

Lesson learned: If the render files happen to transfer then it'll really fill up the drive.

By the way, I'm still trying to figure out what went wrong.

Un-check Rendering in background
 

Found the solution to my problem above: One has to un-check rendering in background.

Go to Final Cut Pro X>Perferences>Playback
Ensure box for Rendering in background is un-checked.

If it isn't un-checked then FCPX will do Rendering of the file on the storage media drive.

I submitted the suggestion to Apple FCP department that they include this in a workflow revision.

That is a nice website feature of theirs, by the way.
http://help.apple.com/finalcutpro/ma...3/#verb8e5fcf4
At the bottom of each subject is a place where one can send them a suggestion. Basically it's crowd-sourcing improvements.