Retroscan Universal Hardware Requirements

[Ryszard]

Hi

I recently purchased a Retroscan Universal with 2K camera and 8mm and 16mm gates. I am using the scanner for fine-art related projects as well as some archival work. I do all my editing, grading and post-production work on a iMac workstation in Adobe Premiere Pro and After Effects. To date I have been running the Retroscan Universal 2k software through bootcamp on a MacBook Pro (details below). Everything is pretty much running smoothly. I have been able to capture and output at full 2k with no compression without any dropped frames or data problems. However, I am feeling a bit constrained by the limited HD (500 GB) space, ease of operation and stability this set up affords me. I am looking at buying a dedicated Windows based machine to exclusively run the scanning software on. All the documentation I have read regarding hardware requirements for uncompressed 2k capture is pointing me in the direction of a RAID 0 setup. As I am successfully using a solid state drive in bootcamp to capture uncompressed 2k files I thought I would check on what hardware setup others using the Retroscan Universal 2k scanner have. As physical space is at a premium I would really like to avoid a tower and go the route of a single solid state drive (laptop) if possible. Any tips on successful SSD setups would be greatly appreciated.

[jagabo]

Why don't you just capture on your current laptop then copy the files off to an external drive?

But regarding the hardware requirements -- isn't the device a scanner? It shouldn't require a lot of CPU or disk bandwidth. It will just run slower if you don't have enough. That's unlike video capture where a new frame of video arrives at a fixed frame rate and there's no way to tell the device to wait while you finish dealing with the last frame.

[JVRaines]

The RetroScan does not throttle its scan rate. It has two fixed motor speeds.

[jagabo]

The RetroScan does not throttle its scan rate. It has two fixed motor speeds.

Ah, so CPU/IO speed does matter.

[Ryszard]

Why don't you just capture on your current laptop then copy the files off to an external drive?

But regarding the hardware requirements -- isn't the device a scanner? It shouldn't require a lot of CPU or disk bandwidth. It will just run slower if you don't have enough. That's unlike video capture where a new frame of video arrives at a fixed frame rate and there's no way to tell the device to wait while you finish dealing with the last frame.

Thanks for the reply. The current arrangement, even though it works, isn't the most stable - too many crashes when setting up etc. As others have pointed out the fixed speed of the scanner means that capable CPU and disk speed are crucial.

[ozymango]

I am looking at buying a dedicated Windows based machine to exclusively run the scanning software on. All the documentation I have read regarding hardware requirements for uncompressed 2k capture is pointing me in the direction of a RAID 0 setup. As I am successfully using a solid state drive in bootcamp to capture uncompressed 2k files I thought I would check on what hardware setup others using the Retroscan Universal 2k scanner have. As physical space is at a premium I would really like to avoid a tower and go the route of a single solid state drive (laptop) if possible. Any tips on successful SSD setups would be greatly appreciated.

Boy, I wish I had your problem. But seriously I hope you're having fun with all this stuff and as a PC person, I'll see what assistance, if any, I can offer.

I'm not terribly familiar with the Retroscan and I no hands-on experience at all, but am I safe in assuming the software both controls the operation of the scanner and somehow works with your 2K (?) camera to stream the signal to your computer in real time? In other words, you've got both multiple processes and multiple data streams (and a big fat data stream at that) being pumped from the Retroscan to your Mac?

If so, this one's easy: For starters, get an i7 quad-core laptop (USB-C/USB-3), e-SATA external connection, 16gb RAM, SSD main drive (however big you can afford) and then get however large an eSTATA external drive you can afford (SSD or spinner, either will work) to use for external storage. That's your base -- you can easily stream/edit/save video files to hell and gone on such a setup, and it's small (relatively) and portable (relatively) and then later on if you decide you need to attach some kind of NAS or RAID array you can easily do so.

As for drive "setup" tips, it all comes down to one question: Is failure an option, and if not (or if so), what kinds of failure can you tolerate? RAID 0 will give you speed on a pure level, but I don't think it'll give you much real-world advantage with your actual hardware/software install, and -- importantly -- if a drive fails then you could lose everything, if you haven't got some pretty serious backups (which means a bunch more drives). But a good laptop and good eSATA external drive are a great start and you can always upgrade your storage options from there depending on $$$ you can squeeze from whomever you're doing the work for (and/or how much you can request in a grant proposal if you're a grad student).

Good luck out there and more importantly, have fun!

[themaster1]

People underestimate the effect of the allocation unit's chunk size. You're working with 2k (large files) so you clearly need the highest chunk size (512 KB i think that's the max?) . By default it's 4Kb (for windows system files) so you see the gap here... Doing so will give you more I/O speed.
And secondly not all the ssd drives will give you the max speed (despite what they claim on paper) so read articles/test to make sure.
And also some MB chipsets are better than others, again read benchmarks articles

[ozymango]

People underestimate the effect of the allocation unit's chunk size.

Ryszard is already able to capture successfully on his current rig, a Mac running Bootcamp, so no we don't need to concern ourselves with the allocation unit's chunk size (large cluster sizes). Theoretically can you get speed improvements by increasing cluster size for large files like big video files? Sure. Can you easily increase the cluster size on a Windows machine without a lot of hassle at this time? Nope. Yup there are tools to do that (google "Acronis Disk Director") and it can be fun to play with, but again the real-world results wouldn't get me to do it for a scanning rig -- my hardware recommendations will easily suffice for that kind of throughput.

Now we can definitely have a nice long side discussion on the care and feeding of SSD drives vs. spinner drives, and how SSD does not always equal the preferred/fastest device depending on what you're doing with it, but for this kind of work, a fast laptop with an SSD for OS and external (eSATA) storage will be more than enough to make this all work just fine.