In this week’s Sponsored Post, Katie (Garrison) Rivera, Marketing Specialist, at One Stop Systems discusses High Performance 4K Video Storage, Editing and Rendering.
Advancements in video technology have slowly pushed applications like video editing, video rendering and video storage editing into the High Performance Computing world. There are many different video editing programs, including ones that are pre-installed on most computers, that can cut, trim, re-sequence, and add sound, transitions and special effects to video. But with the introduction of 4K/8K video, a simple laptop isn’t powerful enough on its own anymore, especially for online editing. Video editors are more likely to use custom configured or custom built systems for their video editing needs. A video editing server running a program such as Adobe Premier Pro CC could use multiple GPUs to add performance and speed. The One Stop Systems Compute Accelerators support from one to 16 GPUs. Adding a GPU enclosure to an existing video editing system helps boost the application’s performance exponentially and not take up a large amount of space (1U-3U).
In 2003, the first commercial 4K camera was released. Ten years later, Google released a new video coding format called VP9 specifically for 4K video. A few years from now, most people will have a 4K capable TV in their house. When it comes to filming in 4K, it takes a lot more storage than older video formats. There are a lot of factors to consider when determining how many GB or TB of storage is needed when shooting in 4K: how many cameras, how many hours the cameras will be shooting, frames per second, video compression type, etc. According to Videomaker, “one hour of standard definition DV footage requires approximately 12.7GB of storage; approximately 217MB per minute. By comparison, one hour of RAW 4K content requires close to 110GB of storage; approximately 2GB per minute.” If a single Hollywood movie has more than 200 hours of raw footage, that equates to more than 22TB of data before any post production work has been done. With the emerging large format 8KUHDTV standard, that storage requirement is expanding even further.
During post production, the raw footage needs to be rendered or edited, which can be done with a variety of GPU accelerated applications. With traditional video storage, the data is stored on SSDs and transferred from PCIe RAID controllers via SATA or SAS back to PCIe for the GPUs, creating a bottleneck during the transfer. PCIe flash is the better memory option rather than traditional SSDs because the data is being transferred across the PCIe bus eliminating the bottleneck. The OSS Flash Storage Array (FSA) offers up to 200TB of fast flash storage, which allows plenty of capacity for hundreds of hours of raw 4K footage and the vast amounts of edited or rendered footage as well. In addition, because the flash is PCIe based the rendering and editing programs can access the stored footage much more quickly than SATA/SAS SSDs.
The Flash Memory Summit will be taking place this week (8/9-8/11) in Santa Clara, CA. There is a Media/Entertainment session track where visitors can learn about how the demand for flash memory is growing with the use of 4K in film production. One Stop Systems will be exhibiting our line of OSS and Magma flash memory products in booth #119. We will also be introducing a new all-in-one flash product that combines the server and the flash into one system to reduce footprint and completely remove integration from the picture.
This guest article was submitted by Katie (Garrison) Rivera, Marketing Communications at One Stop Systems
