At the Larry Jordan ‘Power Up’ 4K Training Day held in Burbank on January 14th, 2014, LumaForge demonstrated an Apple based workflow for production and post-facilities looking to leverage the power and simplicity of Apple’s new Mac Pro cylinders and Thunderbolt 2 connectivity.
LumaForge set up a demonstration using the following technologies:
Two Apple new Mac Pro cylinders
ARECA Thunderbolt 2 8 bay RAID
Promise Pegasus 2 8 bay RAID
Magma ROBEN 3 Thunderbolt 2 expansion chassis
Fusion-IO ioFX MLC memory card running in the ROBEN 3
RED Rocket-X card running in the ROBEN 3
nVIDA Quadro 4000 GPU running in the ROBEN 3
Blackmagic Design UltraStudio 4K Thunderbolt 2 breakout box
SEIKI 65 inch 4K UHDTV
Apple FCP X 10.1
Blackmagic Design DaVinci Resolve 10.1
Thunderbolt 2 Bridging using OSX Mavericks
CEO of LumaForge, Neil Smith had this to say about the Apple based technology demonstration: “Though we are in the early phases of the Thunderbolt 2 product rollout it is clear that Apple is leading the charge into a new era of computing and workflow. With the 20 Gb/s throughput of Thunderbolt 2 and the power of the new Mac Pro cylinders we have a platform to deliver tremendous speed and cost savings for productions and post wanting to implement fast and efficient 4K workflows.”
Using the Blackmagic disk speed and AJA system test, LumaForge showed the large audience of professional editors transfer speeds of over 1100 MB/s from the new Mac Pros to the ARECA Thunderbolt 2 RAID storage. In front of the packed audience, Smith demonstrated file copying over Thunderbolt 1 versus Thunderbolt 2. Using a 120 GB folder, Smith copied the files from a 1TB SSD to a fast Thunderbolt 1 RAID and the same folder from the Fusion-IO MLC storage in the Magma ROBEN 3 expansion chassis to the ARECA Thunderbolt 2 RAID. Members of the audience timed the transfers on their iPhone stopwatches. The results speak for themselves:
using Thunderbolt 1, the 120 GBs file transfer took over five minutes
using Thunderbolt 2, the 120 GBs file transfer took under two minutes
Smith commented. “The audience saw for themselves the speed difference between Tbolt1 and Tbolt2 using a 120 gig file. Imagine the difference in waiting time that speed improvement makes when you want to transfer terabytes of data between different machines and storage. Our mantra at LumaForge for this last year has been ‘storage and bandwidth’ and the importance of fast data for creative work. With 4K workflows the challenge facing all of us is where are we going to store the tons of data and how are we going to get it from A to B in the most efficient way possible? The new Apple Mac Pros combined with Thunderbolt 2 storage and Magma expansion address that issue head on and deliver a solution that is fast, elegant and cost-effective. Waiting is no longer an option for creatives.”
About LumaForge
LumaForge specializes in configuring and implementing fast, secure and robust 4K workflows for Film and TV productions and post-production. Based in West Hollywood, Los Angeles, LumaForge offers workflow consulting and optimization services as well as systems integration, training and support. Neil Smith is a Certified Apple Consultant specializing in networking, storage and workflow. www.lumaforge.com