Thanks Javier! Great to see a closeup of the 10gb Ethernet port install. I upgrade one of my Mac's (M2 Pro Mini) in preparation to get a NAS this year or next. A relief to see how easy it might be to get the NAS compatible when pick one up. Excellent video with tons of detail and value thanks again! TJ
Love my Synology DS1520 NAS and my Synology RT6600ax Router. Producing Zoom events, downloading large recording files, editing in Premiere Pro - I’m the slowest part of the operation!
I have my Synology for couple of years now and yeah, it's awesome! And not only you can use their app for photos, videos, but you can also create your own server in your NAS and you can use it for a prive communication like whatsapp, but it's in your own hands. Meaning, no data are being stolen and sold on your behalf by accepting shady rights agreement whenever you install and use 3rd party app like whatsapp/FB messenger etc. Same with e-mail. Plus, you can easily create LAN storage and connect that storage to your TV and then play movies on TV for your kids without adds etc. It's quite a handy tool worth it's money.
Very cool, been wanting to upgrade to NAS for years but the price point has always scared me, but probably worth the investment in the long run. Hope you keep exploring the topic and do a follow up some day with more info on how you use it with your workflow
I have an 8bay Synology NAS, with 8TB drives. And I totally love it. I recently got the expansion unit, that I still need to install. I'm a video-editor _(and camera operator)_ as wel. But, I have this little nerd-alter-ego. And that proved to be very helpful. It didn't take long to get everything, including the 10GB networking stuff going. I tried other NAS'es. But I never found something as good as the DSM stuff. The little nerd inside, is also an app developer. So, I created a _Docker_ app, that runs on the NAS. The app is basically a media-manager, on steroids 😎 The media-manager stores file data, and some clever database records. One record that describes the file. And another record that is basically a reference. So, when a store a file, it saves the data, and creates the records. But when a file already exists, only the reference is stored. In the years of production work, I had a lot of duplicate files. When I create a project, I have a project folder. When I re-use footage, it will be stored in some subfolder. But this results in duplicates. And over the years those duplicates add up. At one point I had about 30TB of files on the NAS. After installing and implementing my app, I was able to remove about 8TB of duplicates. I think it was even more. When un-archiving a project, meaning that it would construct a project folder, with all the files and structures, it was identical to the structure I used before archiving. Now, I'm expanding my NAS, and the app. I want to be able to do full project management with it as well. As wel as giving clients access via a portal, where they can get to their final video's. As well as a means to give feedback, add project info (like names, titles, scripts, etc). I love the app as is. But with the things I have in mind (even transcribing, auto captions, etc), it would be something to put in some app-stores.
Wow, very cool to see that you are building apps for NAS systems Edwin! I feel like my world has opened up to so many options now with this kind of infrastructure. Thanks for the input!
I just built a NAS. My current workflow is to put all the footage on there but put all the proxies on my desktop drive. Everything gets a proxy. You get a proxy and you get a proxy and you get a proxy. Then just do the render. It takes a longer amount of time obviously coming off of the NAS but I don't risk losing my native files in the middle of a project
I myself have a Synology NAS, and I just today bought 8tb drives to upgrade my server. Been using this since last year and Im still amazed by this solution vs apple cloud and google & Dropbox etc...
We’ve had Synology unit shared between two main stations for a little over a year. If I was going to do a video that summarized everything we went through and everything you learned it would’ve been Word for Word what you posted here. Exactly the same learning curve, exactly the same trepidation. The only thing that I would add is I wish there was a service out there where someone could review our system settings make sure we’re optimized as much as possible for Video editing, because I’m still not 100% certain that it’s as fast as it could be.
Thanks! I'll check it out. @@JavierMercedes When first starting up , the media linked to clips and the timeline can take a very long time to link up properly with Premiere waiting o "find it" again. After a while the timeline can be more responsive as the media is loaded into it's SSD drive buffer. I don't pretend to be an expert on Synology drives or NAS systems. I did my research, chose the Synology system and loaded it with a 10gb card, new ethernet Cat 7 cables, added extra internal SSD cards for buffering the most frequent media, and raiding the drives as per Synology's recommendations and carefully setting everything up the way many RUclips how-to videos recommend I do so. I'm editing on MacPro 2019 Intel systems with generous specs (3.2 Ghz 16 core Xeon W with a 32gig AMD Radeon Pro Vega II card, 96gig of DDR4 RAM, 10gb ethernet port)The only other computer on the network is our animator who shares the same project and files. She has been feeling her RAM previews have been slower than usual as well. (She has the exact same Mac setup as I do) Overall, the Synology has been a terrific workflow improvement in our office and we are happy with the purchase. But at times it's pretty sluggish getting that media to respond. I now have a habit of opening a project and then a timeline and getting a coffee while I wait for the timeline to "wake up". Not something I had to do with stand-alone drives. And I'm editing with low-rez proxies(!). I just have to wonder if I have optimized my NAS's settings to the most optimal set for video files. I even find just general file maintenance to be very slow and sluggish. If I try to move (not copy) a few hundred files from one folder within the NAS itself to another it can take an incredibly long time to complete the operation. I'd be thrilled to have someone say "Oh, I see the issue...you've got this setting wrong it should be this." and suddenly everything is super fast & responsive. When I watch and read the positive reviews of editing on a Synology NAS (including some fellow editor who ahve already done this) nothing seems to imply that there's a general lag one has to contend with. 🤔
Something (hopefully) helpful to note: Use NAS-spec drives such as WD Red or Seagate Ironwolf. I've been using Synology for about 15 years, and my typical unit over that time has been the 4-bay shown here. My most recent box absolutely DEVOURED consumer-grade hard drives; I was getting 3-6 months life out of them, regardless of brand. So far as I could tell it didn't used to matter, but maybe heavier duty drives have become necessary as NAS performance has improved? (Good news is that a drive failure in the 4-drive hybrid config shown here is not as scary as it might sound.)
For anyone who is watching this and uses a huge number of USB drives with archived footage, I bought NeoFinder (mac) that will catalog drive contents so I can search for footage without having drives connected. It's been great.
Good video Javier. It would be more cost effective to get 3 x 8TB drives, this still gives you the total 16TB of space the same as if you bought 2 x 16TB and still a drive of failure protection. 3 x 8TB drives are cheaper than 1 x 16TB in most cases.
thanks Javier! I got a synology nas a while ago and a UniFi 10GB switch to I could be 10GB end to end from my editing rig. I still do not get the super smooth time line performance you were showing...and I'm not even working in 4K 29 FPS Full HD 1920 x 1080 and the sequence is configured with those same settings. I use App ProRes Proxies as well media cache on a different share on the NAS then my project GPU Acceleration is enabled Not using LUTS of color correction until the end of the project, performance is still slow I have 64GB RAM total, 52 is for Premiere Any thoughts on how I could have Premiere misconfigured? thanks!
I had the same issue but it had to do with turning the setup to jumbo packets and IP address needed to compliment each other. Look up how to manually setup your ip address so that you get the most out of your NAS
This was really useful, thanks Javier! out of curiosity, have you covered your scratch disk/ media cache set up when working from a Macbook Pro in another video? It's easy enough to have multiple drives for my PC but I haven't quite worked out a solid workflow for the Macbook yet.
cool! Did you just use the DS923+ including the two 4TB drives and 10GBe connection? Or did you have nvme SSD´s installed for bigger cache? Or any other further components?
Hey Javier, might sound like a foolish question but do you have your NAS connected to your router, and then from the NAS to the adapter then to the computer? My router is nowhere near where my laptop will be. I just want to set it up to my computer first and then maybe down the road, hook it up to my network. Also, with working off a laptop, I’m assuming if you want to disconnect your computer, you just go in a do it like you do a normal external hard drive?
ive been wanting a NAS for a while...but ended up just getting an 18TB external HDD because it wasnt going to cost like $2k and it takes up less space, but it frequently disconnects and reconnects and takes a while to spin up and load when i havent accessed it in a while...so it worries me that i dont have that redundancy lol, also, theoretically, if you just get a NAS with a 10Gbps USB connection....that should yield the same results as the 10Gbps ethernet, but with less adapters right?
I’m not sure about the exact speeds with the 10 GbE connection but I didn’t see a drop in efficiency from when I would normally edit off of an ssd if that helps.
Wish I was more well versed in this subject so someone else could probably answer better than me but you can put ssd drives in there instead hdd. And depending on how you setup your raid, when you add more drives it actually gets faster because you’re drives work together. Hope that makes sense.
It's not necessarily quicker (that depends on the system and setup), but there there are a ton more options with the NAS. Plus the AI built in to many of the new ones makes searching for older content easier etc... (versus having to dig through those old SSD's).
Would to love to hear from anyone that is aware of the high chance of rebuild failure with Raid setups on high TB drives. I'd love to get 16tb drives but if the point of Raid becomes too risky with those might have to go for something smaller!
@@JavierMercedes I am the defacto IT person at our small production company. We have a 12-bay Synology unit that backs up every night to our old Synology unit that now has an expansion. We have 10 or 16 TB drives in pretty much all the bays, and two main storage pools we work from, each with different RAID setups. We also have snapshot protection turned on with different retention rules for different shared folders. All that to say (which you're right Javier, the learning curve of the industry vernacular is a little steep....but so is video production, so it's not insurmountable ;), drive failure is just cost of doing business. I don't lose any sleep about waking up to an email from the server saying a drive died. We have at least one spare 16TB drive on hand at all times, so when a drive dies (only had one give us the warning it was 'prone to failure' once in ~4 years) we just replace it with our spare and the RAID rebuilds itself. You lose a little speed while it's doing that, which with a ~40TB data pool takes about a day or so, but that speed loss is worth the peace of mind knowing we can either just A) pop in the spare drive B) restore from a snapshot if it's recent enough or to recover from a ransomware attack, or C) we have our separate backup NAS to pull from, so we're at most 1 day delayed from any data loss in a worst case scenario. (I haven't touched on offsite backups, since I"m paranoid about security and don't want to list out on a public forum what our offsite backup strategy is).
Maybe you could have put a sticker on the outside of your backup drive listing the contents.. or maybe you could have a spreadsheet on your computer listing the contents of everything so you can search and find it immediately. Did this really not occur to you as you were randomly picking up blank drives looking for old projects? I get that you're selling Synology and I'm not saying a NAS isn't useful but it's a disingenuous comparison if you're going to do the traditional backups in such an illogical fashion.
To be honest those methods never occurred to me but make complete sense now, I just started a new backup drive every year. There are other software’s out there I’ve heard of now that store destinations on them without the drive connected, I think carbon copy cloner? But I didn’t know about those until now.
Thanks Javier! It reassures me that you’re still figuring out your NAS. I had it set up for me and love the accessibility of material via the apps.
Loving these comments! Giving more great ideas of how to use my NAS!
Thanks Javier! Great to see a closeup of the 10gb Ethernet port install. I upgrade one of my Mac's (M2 Pro Mini) in preparation to get a NAS this year or next. A relief to see how easy it might be to get the NAS compatible when pick one up. Excellent video with tons of detail and value thanks again! TJ
my number one channel now, Thanks for these great tutorials.
Groovy video. Lots of great information to process, thanks!
Thanks for your shared experience !
Great freakin video! Love your humble attitude my man.
Love my Synology DS1520 NAS and my Synology RT6600ax Router. Producing Zoom events, downloading large recording files, editing in Premiere Pro - I’m the slowest part of the operation!
I have my Synology for couple of years now and yeah, it's awesome! And not only you can use their app for photos, videos, but you can also create your own server in your NAS and you can use it for a prive communication like whatsapp, but it's in your own hands. Meaning, no data are being stolen and sold on your behalf by accepting shady rights agreement whenever you install and use 3rd party app like whatsapp/FB messenger etc. Same with e-mail. Plus, you can easily create LAN storage and connect that storage to your TV and then play movies on TV for your kids without adds etc. It's quite a handy tool worth it's money.
Thank you!
Very cool, been wanting to upgrade to NAS for years but the price point has always scared me, but probably worth the investment in the long run. Hope you keep exploring the topic and do a follow up some day with more info on how you use it with your workflow
I have an 8bay Synology NAS, with 8TB drives. And I totally love it. I recently got the expansion unit, that I still need to install.
I'm a video-editor _(and camera operator)_ as wel. But, I have this little nerd-alter-ego. And that proved to be very helpful. It didn't take long to get everything, including the 10GB networking stuff going.
I tried other NAS'es. But I never found something as good as the DSM stuff.
The little nerd inside, is also an app developer. So, I created a _Docker_ app, that runs on the NAS. The app is basically a media-manager, on steroids 😎
The media-manager stores file data, and some clever database records. One record that describes the file. And another record that is basically a reference.
So, when a store a file, it saves the data, and creates the records. But when a file already exists, only the reference is stored.
In the years of production work, I had a lot of duplicate files. When I create a project, I have a project folder. When I re-use footage, it will be stored in some subfolder. But this results in duplicates. And over the years those duplicates add up. At one point I had about 30TB of files on the NAS. After installing and implementing my app, I was able to remove about 8TB of duplicates. I think it was even more.
When un-archiving a project, meaning that it would construct a project folder, with all the files and structures, it was identical to the structure I used before archiving.
Now, I'm expanding my NAS, and the app. I want to be able to do full project management with it as well. As wel as giving clients access via a portal, where they can get to their final video's. As well as a means to give feedback, add project info (like names, titles, scripts, etc).
I love the app as is. But with the things I have in mind (even transcribing, auto captions, etc), it would be something to put in some app-stores.
Wow, very cool to see that you are building apps for NAS systems Edwin! I feel like my world has opened up to so many options now with this kind of infrastructure. Thanks for the input!
@@JavierMercedes Well, see it like this: I'm a bit lazy. So, I try to automate as much as possible. 😉
Blazing fast :D great
I just built a NAS. My current workflow is to put all the footage on there but put all the proxies on my desktop drive. Everything gets a proxy. You get a proxy and you get a proxy and you get a proxy. Then just do the render. It takes a longer amount of time obviously coming off of the NAS but I don't risk losing my native files in the middle of a project
Yasss!!! This video gave me FOMO!!!
I myself have a Synology NAS, and I just today bought 8tb drives to upgrade my server. Been using this since last year and Im still amazed by this solution vs apple cloud and google & Dropbox etc...
Thanks for this vid also, amazing!
I know right! It’s so cool that you get to setup your personal cloud service that works great!
We’ve had Synology unit shared between two main stations for a little over a year. If I was going to do a video that summarized everything we went through and everything you learned it would’ve been Word for Word what you posted here. Exactly the same learning curve, exactly the same trepidation. The only thing that I would add is I wish there was a service out there where someone could review our system settings make sure we’re optimized as much as possible for Video editing, because I’m still not 100% certain that it’s as fast as it could be.
I think @SpaceRex does consulting and he is where I learned a lot of how to manage my machine. here is his channel, www.youtube.com/@SpaceRexWill
Thanks! I'll check it out. @@JavierMercedes
When first starting up , the media linked to clips and the timeline can take a very long time to link up properly with Premiere waiting o "find it" again. After a while the timeline can be more responsive as the media is loaded into it's SSD drive buffer.
I don't pretend to be an expert on Synology drives or NAS systems. I did my research, chose the Synology system and loaded it with a 10gb card, new ethernet Cat 7 cables, added extra internal SSD cards for buffering the most frequent media, and raiding the drives as per Synology's recommendations and carefully setting everything up the way many RUclips how-to videos recommend I do so.
I'm editing on MacPro 2019 Intel systems with generous specs (3.2 Ghz 16 core Xeon W with a 32gig AMD Radeon Pro Vega II card, 96gig of DDR4 RAM, 10gb ethernet port)The only other computer on the network is our animator who shares the same project and files. She has been feeling her RAM previews have been slower than usual as well. (She has the exact same Mac setup as I do)
Overall, the Synology has been a terrific workflow improvement in our office and we are happy with the purchase. But at times it's pretty sluggish getting that media to respond. I now have a habit of opening a project and then a timeline and getting a coffee while I wait for the timeline to "wake up". Not something I had to do with stand-alone drives. And I'm editing with low-rez proxies(!).
I just have to wonder if I have optimized my NAS's settings to the most optimal set for video files. I even find just general file maintenance to be very slow and sluggish. If I try to move (not copy) a few hundred files from one folder within the NAS itself to another it can take an incredibly long time to complete the operation.
I'd be thrilled to have someone say "Oh, I see the issue...you've got this setting wrong it should be this." and suddenly everything is super fast & responsive.
When I watch and read the positive reviews of editing on a Synology NAS (including some fellow editor who ahve already done this) nothing seems to imply that there's a general lag one has to contend with. 🤔
Thanks
Wow man
Hmm look like boom setup maybe one day I will be able to get it
Love your tutorial please make some more advanced technique of premier pro
Awesome video, better explanation than linus.
I just wish it worked with unraid
Something (hopefully) helpful to note: Use NAS-spec drives such as WD Red or Seagate Ironwolf. I've been using Synology for about 15 years, and my typical unit over that time has been the 4-bay shown here. My most recent box absolutely DEVOURED consumer-grade hard drives; I was getting 3-6 months life out of them, regardless of brand. So far as I could tell it didn't used to matter, but maybe heavier duty drives have become necessary as NAS performance has improved? (Good news is that a drive failure in the 4-drive hybrid config shown here is not as scary as it might sound.)
For anyone who is watching this and uses a huge number of USB drives with archived footage, I bought NeoFinder (mac) that will catalog drive contents so I can search for footage without having drives connected. It's been great.
Also a good resource!
Good video Javier. It would be more cost effective to get 3 x 8TB drives, this still gives you the total 16TB of space the same as if you bought 2 x 16TB and still a drive of failure protection. 3 x 8TB drives are cheaper than 1 x 16TB in most cases.
thanks Javier! I got a synology nas a while ago and a UniFi 10GB switch to I could be 10GB end to end from my editing rig. I still do not get the super smooth time line performance you were showing...and I'm not even working in 4K
29 FPS Full HD 1920 x 1080 and the sequence is configured with those same settings.
I use App ProRes Proxies as well
media cache on a different share on the NAS then my project
GPU Acceleration is enabled
Not using LUTS of color correction until the end of the project, performance is still slow
I have 64GB RAM total, 52 is for Premiere
Any thoughts on how I could have Premiere misconfigured?
thanks!
I had the same issue but it had to do with turning the setup to jumbo packets and IP address needed to compliment each other. Look up how to manually setup your ip address so that you get the most out of your NAS
@@JavierMercedes I have set jumbo packets on the NAS and windows already…I was thinking more about the premiere side…any thoughts there?
Hey, awesome stuff. What's your read speeds? I have four 18 TB drives and I'm thinking of upgrading to 10 gbit.
This was really useful, thanks Javier! out of curiosity, have you covered your scratch disk/ media cache set up when working from a Macbook Pro in another video? It's easy enough to have multiple drives for my PC but I haven't quite worked out a solid workflow for the Macbook yet.
Not yet! But sounds like a good idea Daniel!
Sor can you make videp tutorial for premiere pro.. about hate me fire transition
Please help, but you cant import/ link footage from on demand synology to premiere...
cool! Did you just use the DS923+ including the two 4TB drives and 10GBe connection? Or did you have nvme SSD´s installed for bigger cache? Or any other further components?
No other components, just what you saw.
Thanks for the quick answer :)@@JavierMercedes
Hey Javier! Is the 4GB RAM with that NAS what you used while editing on your Macbook Pro or did you upgrade the RAM on the NAS too?
Helpful video, would have been nice to see speed tests
To be honest I would have done this but I just didn’t know how to test the speed on the NAS. What app can I use to do this?
@@JavierMercedes Blackmagic speed test software, free to download
Hey Javier, might sound like a foolish question but do you have your NAS connected to your router, and then from the NAS to the adapter then to the computer? My router is nowhere near where my laptop will be. I just want to set it up to my computer first and then maybe down the road, hook it up to my network. Also, with working off a laptop, I’m assuming if you want to disconnect your computer, you just go in a do it like you do a normal external hard drive?
ive been wanting a NAS for a while...but ended up just getting an 18TB external HDD because it wasnt going to cost like $2k and it takes up less space, but it frequently disconnects and reconnects and takes a while to spin up and load when i havent accessed it in a while...so it worries me that i dont have that redundancy lol, also, theoretically, if you just get a NAS with a 10Gbps USB connection....that should yield the same results as the 10Gbps ethernet, but with less adapters right?
I’m not sure about the exact speeds with the 10 GbE connection but I didn’t see a drop in efficiency from when I would normally edit off of an ssd if that helps.
Did you set up M2 NVe SSD for caching? Or just the Hard drives? thanks in advance.
No SSD for Cache, just hard drives
@@JavierMercedes thank you
Hey Javier! I've got your exact same setup. Did you have any trouble connecting your OWC directly to your synology? Are you using a switch? Thanks!
No switch, and connecting the owc took some trial and error but I was able to figure it out eventually.
Nice! Any advice on what ended up working for you? Otherwise I'm gonna have to return mine I think. Thanks!@@JavierMercedes
I think I’m going to buy a NAS. This is exactly what I need. My question is why is a NAS quicker than a simple SSD?
Wish I was more well versed in this subject so someone else could probably answer better than me but you can put ssd drives in there instead hdd. And depending on how you setup your raid, when you add more drives it actually gets faster because you’re drives work together. Hope that makes sense.
@@JavierMercedes ahh okay, no worries!!
It's not necessarily quicker (that depends on the system and setup), but there there are a ton more options with the NAS. Plus the AI built in to many of the new ones makes searching for older content easier etc... (versus having to dig through those old SSD's).
Would to love to hear from anyone that is aware of the high chance of rebuild failure with Raid setups on high TB drives. I'd love to get 16tb drives but if the point of Raid becomes too risky with those might have to go for something smaller!
I too would like to know this 🙋♂️
@@JavierMercedes I am the defacto IT person at our small production company. We have a 12-bay Synology unit that backs up every night to our old Synology unit that now has an expansion. We have 10 or 16 TB drives in pretty much all the bays, and two main storage pools we work from, each with different RAID setups. We also have snapshot protection turned on with different retention rules for different shared folders. All that to say (which you're right Javier, the learning curve of the industry vernacular is a little steep....but so is video production, so it's not insurmountable ;), drive failure is just cost of doing business. I don't lose any sleep about waking up to an email from the server saying a drive died. We have at least one spare 16TB drive on hand at all times, so when a drive dies (only had one give us the warning it was 'prone to failure' once in ~4 years) we just replace it with our spare and the RAID rebuilds itself. You lose a little speed while it's doing that, which with a ~40TB data pool takes about a day or so, but that speed loss is worth the peace of mind knowing we can either just A) pop in the spare drive B) restore from a snapshot if it's recent enough or to recover from a ransomware attack, or C) we have our separate backup NAS to pull from, so we're at most 1 day delayed from any data loss in a worst case scenario. (I haven't touched on offsite backups, since I"m paranoid about security and don't want to list out on a public forum what our offsite backup strategy is).
Have you tested the speed?
I’m not sure how to rest the exact speed but I was content to see that my editing workflow was the same speed as if I were editing an external ssd.
which macbook is it?
2021 M1 MacBook Pro with all the speed upgrades.
Anyone mastered sharing Premiere projects across Mac and Windows? Share the same NAS but they give them totally different location names
I made a video about how to edit 4k vids without getting all that 10 gig stuff! It's very doable!
Those disk drives i wouldnt work from, they fail I would never trust them. I have a system raid but use it surely for storage
Good to know! I do plan on having a second Synology NAS to backup to so hopefully I’ll have a good experience.
I have a 2017 Mac Book Pro.... A bit slower.
Welcome to YEARS ago..
Back to the Future for me bg!
I have two dead Nas Raids collecting dust. Hopefully the new ones are legit
Maybe you could have put a sticker on the outside of your backup drive listing the contents.. or maybe you could have a spreadsheet on your computer listing the contents of everything so you can search and find it immediately. Did this really not occur to you as you were randomly picking up blank drives looking for old projects? I get that you're selling Synology and I'm not saying a NAS isn't useful but it's a disingenuous comparison if you're going to do the traditional backups in such an illogical fashion.
To be honest those methods never occurred to me but make complete sense now, I just started a new backup drive every year. There are other software’s out there I’ve heard of now that store destinations on them without the drive connected, I think carbon copy cloner? But I didn’t know about those until now.
🤩 Promo sm