HD video playback. Please confirm problem
 

I just finished rendering my HD 6min claymation. The file is about 43GB and .avi. I tried to play the file in WMP, but it is very jumpy. The bit rate is 995540kbps which translates to about 124MBps. The file is on a single hdd and as a result does not have that kind of bandwidth. Am I correct in saying that I cannot play the file without some sort of RAID array capable of 124MBps continuously? How many modern 7200rpm drives in raid 0 would be required to play such files?

Using Premiere, what codec shoud I use to compress the file enough to be playable on most computers without sacrificing resolution?

Thanks

To compress it small enough for reliable playback will cause you to loose some resolution. The question is loss of perceivable vs. actual. First identify how you want to play it back, from HD, disk, web, etc. Then experiment with 1 min renders in various formats to achieve what quality vs. size is acceptable to you. 3 initial codecs to look at are H.264, WMV and Divx. Each will give various size and quality, render time and are good for various playback.

A sustained transfer rate of 124 MB/s requires some muscle.

Using HDTune Pro 3.5 it shows an average sustained transfer raid on a 2 disk raid0 array on a Marvell chipset of only 165 MB/s with two Samsung Spinpoint F1 disks. Just enough for your purpose, unless your disks are getting fuller. Then even a 2 disk raid0 array will not be enough.

On another raid, a 12 disk raid30, it is quite enough with nearly 700 MB/s. The size in HDTune Pro is mistakenly indicated as 2199 GB, where it should be 10000 GB.

That's pretty impressive performance, Harm.

Are you sure the 2199GB isn't the 2TB limit per volume from the old 32-bit days? Are you sure all 12 disks are being seen as a single volume, or could they still be broken up as separate 2TB volumes and then combined into a single drive letter? Because that's how the Areca used to set up my 7 1TB disks in RAID3 under XP: as volumes 00, 01 and 02.

Hi Adam,

Windows shows it as a single volume, however due to the difference between 1024 and 1000 as disk manufacturers often use, the net space in Windows is only shown as 9.1 TB. The image Areca shows about my disk array is like shown below:

Adam,

This may interest you as well. I wonder how your system fares in comparison:

At the time I don't know if I ran the full system benchmark test, but I'm sure it's nowhere close to yours. My notes show my CPUMark test for the dual Xeon 5430s as 6668.5, which at the time was pretty good, especially considering the cost. My notes say the overall system, though, was 3841. My HDTach speeds in RAID3 were about 550MB/s for the video drives.

I need to run all these tests again now that I'm using Vista 64, 20GB of RAM and one giant volume.

I found the SP2 release of Vista64 to bring between 2.5 and 5 % increase in performance. Well worth the update.