Help for setting up encoding server

[Carsten]

You still get what you pay for - slighty less cost, slightly less speed. You have to decide where your personal sweet spot is.

Depends on if you have a hard limit, or if you need a solution quickly. Also, do you have limited space, then you would prefer a single machine maxed out, like the z600 in a rack tray, over multiple networked machines.

That 470€ offer from Belgium is available for order from the UK as well. Shipping is 30€ or something. This is a reputable IT reseller. They have 10+ of the 2*5660. I would get that one.

Other than that, yes, the 5650 will perform slightly slower, but not a major drawback. You can still upgrade CPUs later to a 3GHz pair if you can find a pair really cheap.

- Carsten

[KrisSP]

Speed is not really a massive concern for me, within reasonable limits. On average I'd probably be converting one or two films per week, for private screenings and regular short film events mainly. Whether it takes 5 or 8 hours is not really a huge issue, and as you say I can always build on it later.

I finally found the offer from Belgium, and will consider it up against the other offer. If the other one comes already with a Window license, I think the slightly slower one will turn out so much cheaper that I'll give that a go.

Thanks a million again, Carsten!

[cloud06]

Dear Carsten,

I guess you missed my question So I'll try again... Can you please tell me what do you think - what framerate should I get with two Mac Pros (Trashcan 2013, 6-core Xeon E5) connected in gigabit network?

[Carsten]

Framerates are always depending on source resolution, complexity, J2K datarate, etc. The Trashcan MacPro I believe uses an Intel Xeon E5-1650 v2 or v3. A single one operates slightly slower than a dual x5660 (my personal reference machine, see above ).

I would say, two Intel Xeon E5-1650 v2 in a network should give something around realtime performance, around 24, or, 20-30fps (2k) realistically. At least with Intel CPUs, so far, DOM J2K encoding scales pretty well with CPU passmark numbers.

Since 2.7x, there has been a signifikant improvement in encoding efficiency.

I'll try to mock up a simple relation, but this is really coarse: Look up the (aggregated) CPU passmark number of your CPU(s). If you use two CPUs, double them. Divide that number by 1000, and you will have a rough estimate of the encoding fps.

Let me see what that is for dual E5-1650 v2...

https://www.cpubenchmark.net/high_end_cpus.html

One E5-1650 vs/v3 CPU get's around 13.000 (slightly less than my dual x5660). Two E5-1650 sum up to 26.000. So, yes, could be something like 24fps, and slightly more with 'relaxed' footage or parameters. As long as you are operating in that range, the network connection should still sustain that speed and there should be little penalty.

These numbers are based on Bunny and Sintel. I get slightly less when encoding life footage from e.g. a Bluray. Keep in mind, scope has fewer pixels than flat, thus encodes faster. And all these numbers are for 2k.
Let us know how it comes out for your setup.

Again, this is very coarse, your mileage WILL vary. Don't know how the latest AMDs compare. They sure look promising.

- Carsten

[Carsten]

This one looks like a real bargain, it's just the right configuration, and it comes with WIN7:

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/HP-Workstatio ... SwS51ZjHlO

And they have plenty of them, one should buy two right away.

- Carsten

[KrisSP]

Yes, this is the one I found as well. This one has x5650s, not x5660s, but as it also includes Windows, I will go for this one.

[Carsten]

Yes, at that price, forget the slightly lower clock speed. Also, two/four more cores are always more important than a minor improvement in clock speed.
If you account for HT, it is actually 24 vs 16 threads compared to a 2*4core HT machine. That's a lot...


- Carsten

[KrisSP]

I bought one! Looking forward to getting it and see if I manage to set it up properly.

What I'm considering now is whether to run it as stand alone rendering machine, or as a headless server controlled from my main cinema computer, where basically storage and conversion all happen on the z600. To avoid having to have an extra monitor, it can be a space efficient option. (My main cinema computer is sadly a all-in-one that can't be used as an external monitor). Or, as I mainly want the z600 to do all the heavy lifting, I might as well install Windows on it, and start encoding over Remote Desktop from the main computer, and when needed hook up a monitor to it …

Another thing – I'm considering to have the machine double as backup/offloading of DCPs from the IMS1000 (possible installing another disk and running them in RAID). Any reason not to do that? Would be great not to need a separate NAS for that. Would it then need to be EXT3-formatted, or would NTFS do?

[Carsten]

You can leave it at NTFS - the file exchange protocol to your server would be SMB or FTP - that way, your IMS won't know which filesystem the z600 is actually running.

- Carsten

[KrisSP]

Received the computer now!

I have some trouble getting it up and running. First of all, it wasn't so easy to find a Windows 7 iso as I thought, but I managed to download one, and managed to burn an installation disk (as it doesn't support booting from a USB).

When trying to install, it seems that it simply cannot find the drive all. And it doesn't seem like the install disk is including necessary drivers.

This may seem a bit like a fuzzy problem, so might be hard to chime in. But does anyone have any experience installing Windows 7 on a clean machine, and have any idea how to work around this? Or would I need to have an HP specific OEM installation image?

From what I can see, they used to be available online, but now aren't anymore.