cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/469632
Looking to upgrade my Synology DS218+ to a 4 or 5 bay NAS because I am running out of storage. These past few days, I saw everybody and their mother say you cannot edit on anything else than a 10gig ethernet.
At the moment I am editing stuff from my workstation(AMD 5800x, 3060TI, 64GB, 1TB NVME) and I was curios how much worse would the experience be if I tried to edit from the NAS via my 1gig ethernet.
Most of my work is shot in 4k 150MBps and some even in 1080p.
So I copied around 5gigs of footage to my main NVME and the same footage on my NAS. First I added the NVME footage in a 4k timeline, chopped it up a little, threw 5 random LUTs, threw a noise reduction node and a camera shake effect. Playback in the edit page was ok, my GPU was gasping for air but playback was smooth. I rendered it at 16MBps and it came out in 5:22minutes.
Next, I deleted that footage, emptied cache and added the same clips from the NAS with the same cuts, LUTS and noise reduction. Playback was also super smooth and it rendered in 5:23minutes, so 1 second slower. That must be why everyone says you need 10GbE.
During all this time I had the Synology resource monitor on and it jumped at 30MBps at most.
So no real difference between the two. Next I took around 50gigs of footage and threw it on the same timeline, stacked it 4-5 times and indeed it was slow but it was because Davinci was caching stuff, when it finished the playback was super smooth.
All the time, proxies were disabled so the PC had to do all the work, if I add proxies it's a breeze.
I think that's where the difference comes in, Davinci is caching the clips and it doesn't really constantly read the original files.
I'm not saying you don't need more than 1gig, especially if you have more people working at the same time. If you work with RAW footage or footage that's 400MBps and up but the videos and posts I saw made it seem like even if you edit phone videos, 10GbE is a must....
Not a scientific test but I was super surprised to see that it made no difference if I was editing locally or from my NAS.
It's not about sustained bandwidth, it's about peak. Sure, you can smoothly playback whatever footage over 1gbit. But real time editing it can require more burst bandwidth. Moving up and down in the timeline of the video? How about doing that while splicing 5 different videos together? Maybe you are fine with waiting 0.1secs but professionals are more picky and their time more valuable.
In a professional environment, a couple thousands of dollars is nothing.
I've added 50gigs worth of footage and stacked it 4-5 times, after Davinci cached everything it was smooth playback. The highest peak was 30MB, nowhere near the 1gig limit.
Don't know if what I said came over as amateurish but I as pro as the rest of them and I am not doing this as a hobby...
Alot of times YouTubers actually have an entire editing team behind them, no? If 10 people are working on a video, that's 10x30MB peak, or 300MB/s. That's well over 1Gbps.
Maybe different workflows have different needs. I am not familiar with the subject, just offered a potential explanation.