Gigabit Ethernet Workflow

Prairieboy

Prairieboy

Veteran
Hello Folks

I am thinking about setting up gigabit ethernet and two servers for five work stations. I would love to have not only all video files, but project and render files on the servers. It would make life easier if all work stations had access to the files, along with eliminating redundancy by having these files on a bunch of internal drives. Has any body given this a try, or have any deep feelings on the topic.
Costs as usual are the reason I am thinking of going this route.

Thanks folks.
 
Gigabit ethernet isn't going to keep up enough for editing a project with render and media files across a network. That's what XSan is for. You'll have playback problems, rendering will take forever, it'll be a can of worms. Been there, done that.

I use external firewire drives, then I can easily move a project to a workstation easily and quickly.
 
The biggest issue is having access to the same media files for all work stations, instead of having five computer with the same 1T of files. It is a redundancy that is a bit anoying, and Xsan is just not in the budget at the moment. So it looks like individaul drives for each station.
 
Check out Editshare

These guys have some of the best NLE shared storage products out their. They support Avid and FCP as well as most other systems. The servers can be configured to suit the NLE you use and also be used for graphics files etc like an ordinary server.

They have File level sharing which is very good (not enough of a boffin to explain that one :-). They even have Avid project sharing which no other product has outside of Avid's Unity / Lanshare systems.

The whole setup works over Gig-E and is platform agnostic, so you can use PC's and Mac's together. This Gig-E connection is certified for DVCPRO HD on their products:

"For customers working in broadcast-quality compressed HD formats like DNxHD, DVCPro 100, and Matrox Axio MPEG-2 codecs, EditShare over standard 1 Gigabit Ethernet is still a great solution."

It will even support uncompressed SD, but if you need to work with uncompressed HD then there is a 10 Gig-E card option which is certifies with the Kona cards and FCP.

I used one of these all last year on a feature with 3 Avid Xpress Pro systems all sharing the same media as well as 2 to 3 desktops and laptops accessing the system for graphics and production files. We were cutting with DV media, but the performance was excellent and the system was rock solid. The support guys were also fantastic and we were always able to either talk to the reps in London, or with the developers in the US when ever we needed.

We used a much older version of their software (v2.0), but they are now up to v4.0 with a ton of new features.

Price wise its very competitive and its an all in package - it sounds like you're budget is tight, but we had the exact same concern and in the end going to this system saved us so much messing about it was more than worth it. I must sound like an Editshare stooge writing all this, but i just can't say enough about these guys. Well worth checking them out and talking to them about what you need to do.

--Mark
 
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