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One Capture, Multiple Simultaneous Editors / Alternatives to LANShare
Hi,
I work on a media school here in Madrid, an Avid Education Partner, we have around 5 classroom with anywhere between 6 to 20 students.
Our students learn Avid here, mostly with the same material (a movie, rushes from featurettes, or their own material). For a while, we have been following this workflow:
– Capturing all rushes in the theacher’s site.
– Mediatooling / Locating all mediafiles, and copying them by LAN to the student’s /OMFiMediafiles.
– Copying the teacher’s project to the student’s computer.With this workflow, everything goes ok, but I’ve seen some teachers to directly import the omf they have just captured into the student’ project.
It is my understanding that this method (no export to omf, but directly import from the capture directory)turns the avid a bit unstable, offlining files and loosing links, and negating recapture. I supposse this is because of the own OMF architecture, am I mistaken, or this is an acceptable workflow?.
Apart from this, we are looking for a speedier way to get the students editing directly, instead of wasting a class or two, first dapturing, then copying via ethernet (and with 20 people, obivouslly not at once, copying gig’ files things get a bit slow). My idea was to get some kind of SAN or NAS, even inter classrooms, but after having a look at Avid Lanshare (or well, it’s price) I simply don’t believe they gonna bought it so…
My question is: what would be the cheaper way to sharing video storage between several (20-50) editors at the same time. My ideal is having the teacher capturing at one station and the students editing it in their seats. Is that economically viable?
Thanks!
Jose Luis
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6 Replies
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Avid’s networked storage (Unity and the like) can be very expensive.
If you can’t afford to go this route, consider capturing at one station (the teacher’s) directly to an external firewire drive (how well this works will depend on what resolution you’re capturing at–1:1 won’t capture directly to a firewire drive, DV25 will). If you’re capturing at a low enough resolution that you can go straight to the drive, you can then copy the project folder to this drive, take it to the first system, plug it in, consolidate clips to that system or copy them from the desktop level. Repeat. If you’re capturing at a higher resolution, capture first, then consolidate to the external drive. Transfer that drive to another system, consolidate the clips from the external to the local media drives (copy the project file too). Repeat on the next system, etc…
Transferring files this way will likely be faster than over a network. Plus, once you transfer the files to one system, you can have that system send them over the network to the next one as the drive moves to another. As soon as one system has all the files, it copies them to another while the drive continues to make the rounds. In theory, you could have multiple computers using the network to transfer files to edit stations while another student/teacher uses the external drive to copy them to other edit stations.
Off the top of my head, that’s the best I can come up with.
Michael.
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Thanks for your reply, the consolidate is another option I considered, and we also use a pair of lacie to speed things up, but I suppose there’s no better workflow to avoid the physical copy.
So I’ll be handling a 60,000 +
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Well, I just imported an OMF that I had captured yesterday. It actually creates another OMF file.
If you have a teacher who takes everything they captured (I assume on an external drive) and imports these OMFs into the student’s project, they’re basically wasting their time. It seems to do the exact same thing as consolidating would (copying the media to the local drive, from the external), but I’m betting importing is slower. Why don’t they just copy the OMFs and open the original project? It will relink and you won’t have to worry about importing anything.
It seems like they might not know about consolidating, or transferring files at the desktop level? Maybe they know it but they’re just not comfortable? The only time I can think to import an OMF is if you’re given one as media that you don’t already have–say, rendering a composition out of After Effects.
I’d be interested to know their reasoning behind the OMF imports. If they give you a good reason, please share it here, and good luck with your request for some lanshares.
Michael.
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For a cheaper LANshare alternative, have a look at EditShare ( http://www.editshare.com ). It’s the only non-avid storage that is Avid aware. Basic versions can handle 10 DV25 streams
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Facilis Technology’s TerraBlock is another option. You cannot share Avid project files from a common volume like Unity. You have to copy the project files to each system, but you have volume sharing and can share Avid mediafiles. There are many successful Avid installations using TerraBlock. It also will have great performance with DV25 streams.
There’s also a newer (somewhat cheaper) version of Avid Unity, so you might want to check back with them, if you can swing a good price through negotiation.
Sincerely,
OliverOliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com -
Thanks to all for your answers. We are in negotiation with avid, thay have some interesting offers in education.
Cheers,
Jose
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