How is the playback problem solved on comp workstation (Nuke/Shake) at big companies? I imagine that not every workstation has fibre storage attached, and the memory capacity (esp. with todays players being mostly 32 bit) is limited. How do compositors preview their shots (especially if the shots are long) - only in dailies/review? It's absolutely terrifying to playback your shot in chunks of 50-60 frames.
dbr
[ Editor ]
Playback software like RV and DJV have 64-bit versions, but the bigger problem is being constrained to 32-bit OS's..
That said, even with a 32-bit machine and the Linux bigmem patches, I've been able to load most shots into memory (bigmem allows the kernel to address more than 4GB of RAM, but individual processes are still limited to ~4GB each)
For longer sequences there was a review machine with a fast local RAID, and scripts to send shots to this machine
In an ideal world, a 64-bit OS with 64-bit playback software would make this a non-issue, but I wonder, could an average workstation decode Cineon files straight from a SATA II drive? Theoretically it should (~11MB * 24fps == 264MB/s, SATA II == 384MB/s), reality might disagree
I second the mention of RV and DJV, two worthy alternatives to the ubiquitous FrameCycler (sans the stupid interface). DJV is free, but buggy. At least it’s open-source, if you’re in the mood to tweak it. RV is not free, but is heavily customizable and super easy to integrate in a pipeline.
As for the theoretical possibility of reading 2K dpx files from a single SATA drive, if I remember well RV comes close to do it, but not for super long sequences. I will try it again tomorrow to have a more precise answer.