array requirement to play HD?

[Aruna]

Are you looking to play this on a PC? Mac? SGI? etc?

I was attempting to do this as well, but without a 64bit PCI bus or PCI-X, you're going to run into trouble.

I did some calculations when I was thinking about doing the same thing. an HD frame at 1920x1080 is around 6MB uncompressed.. You want at least 24fps, so that's 24x6, 144megabytes per second. The bandwidth for 32bit PCI is around 133megabytes per second.. So regular PCI isn't going to cut it at all, if you're playing back uncompressed image sequences. If you're loading the sequence into RAM or using compression, it's a different story, and companies like Iridas have software to do that.

I've got a Seagate Cheetah 15k SCSI hard drive, and it smokes for playing back standard def footage in realtime. It's excellent. I think my sustained rate for the drive is around 50-60MB/s, but I haven't tested it in a while. It'll go up with a RAID array for sure, but if you do go that route, you will be limited by the PCI bus.

Hope that helps!

[beaker]

It depends on your playback mechinism. The guys over at Digital Voodoo/Bluefish 444 and Blackmagic Designs, have this really nice lossless codec for their cards that can playback dual stream 10bit full HD(1920x1080) material over a regular 32bit PCI bus.
http://www.onerivermedia.com/codecs/

[beaker]

Also weta uses old 500mhz g4 machines for playback of their uncompressed 2k frames for LOTR.
http://www.mactcp.org.nz/hidef.html
http://www.zdnet.com/anchordesk/stories/story/0,10738,2833554,00.html

[lhermittem]

Thank you guys! I'm working with pc, so I guess I'm stuck with Intel's xeon, the only Intel's motherboard with a 64 bits PCI slot.
Thank you for your help!
Marc

[beaker]

What are you using to playback the HD material? That will determine what you need for the HD setup.

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