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Sharing
Okay so I get Libraries can be shared now on SANs.
But only by one user at a time. I work alone often and do not often need to share stuff but have a project coming up where there may be a couple of people on different workstations.
Can somebody tell me whether Avid or Premier have the capacity for editors to have access to Media at the same time?
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49 Replies
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If your media is external to the Library, multiple editors can access the same media with FCP X. That’s essentially how FCP 7 and Premiere Pro both works. If you have Media Composer, AMA-linked media files are external and can be accessed, as long as the volumes are READ-ONLY. To have true media sharing (with internally managed media) and Avid project sharing, you need a Unity/ISIS system. EditShare also offers a workaround solution.
In the scenario you describe, FCP X would be perfectly functional. Look through this:
https://ww.10dot1.co.uk/content/FCPXInASharedEnvironment_FINAL.pdf– Oliver
Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com -
And then two editors can access the same “library” (for want of a better word) and also access the sae individual files?
Does that mean this step with 10.1 from Apple will not satisfy the Avid users?
So what systems do most of the large broadcasters (news sports etc) use? Is Avid their only solution?
Thanks
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News and sports editing don’t really rely on project sharing. At most, they only need media sharing which FCPX can provide. Project sharing is more the workflow of series/reality TV. For this reason, most of those facilities which work on that kind of show use Avid which offers the best project sharing workflow.
However, FCP7 made serious inroads into production facilities (at least here in LA) despite the fact that it never had the ability to project share. It looks like there may be a roadmap to providing better project sharing in X, but as of now it’s not any better than FCP7 or Premiere’s solutions.
Andy
https://www.timesavertutorials.com
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And then two editors access the same individual files?
Yes, this could be done in earlier versions of FCPX as well.
Does that mean this step with 10.1 from Apple will not satisfy the Avid users?
It certainly seems to satisfy the FCPX users (-:
So what systems do most of the large broadcasters (news sports etc) use? Is Avid their only solution?
Not at all. There are many different options for large-scale media sharing (Quantel, EVS, Signiant just to name a few). In our part of the world Quantel is far more popular among the large broadcasters than Avid.
What you want is much easier: just make sure your media is on a shared storage system that is fast enough to deliver multiple simultaneous video streams in the format you are working with, make sure the media is external to your Library (i.e. using simlinks), and multiple FCPX editors will be able to access these media simultaneously. Nothing really difficult about this.
– Ronny
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James –
I can give you some firsthand experience with the AVID/ISIS/Unity system. I worked for 14 years at an ABC affiliate. When I started out, we were still tape and A/B roll systems (1″, 3/4″, BetaSP). We transitioned to Edit* systems – four of them – for News, Promotions, Creative Services, and a daily half-hour magazine format news show. When content had to be shared, Edit* allowed packaging the content as .zip files. It worked ok, plus we had a network with shared media, but only one user could access it at a time. It wasn’t great, mostly for News and Promotions, who regularly shared content, and should have been able to work concurrently on projects.
The people actually using the systems pushed to get some demos of the first Adobe CS packages (we were already using AE, Photoshop, and Illustrator), but engineering and the corporate owners pushed for AVID, who had given them a convincing dog and pony show.
They purchased four AVID/ISIS/Unity systems, and from that point on the problems began. What was touted as a system on which users could share projects, turned into a nightmare. Regular crashes locked editors out, and days were spent relinking media, on systems we were told would not work this way. Thousands of dollars were spent bringing AVID engineers in to troubleshoot, production efficiency tanked, and way too much time was spent fixing problems.
After a couple of years of this, we finally convinced the corporate powers to bring in a test workstation running the Adobe CS (I think in was CS3 at the time) suite. It ran circles around the AVID systems, although the multi-user capability (which never really worked well) was gone. But the 30 to 40 percent increase in production efficiency with the Adobe Creative Suites took away the constant fear of crashes at deadlines, and other nightmares inherent with the AVID system. I was in charge of organizing all of our facility media, and I had set up a system (using Adobe Bridge) by which anyone could find any media in a very short space of time, so the loss of multi-tasking was not missed.
Other AVID system users may have a totally different experience, but ours was one in which AVID became the problem, and the Adobe Creative Suite was the solution. Ultimately, all 28 stations went over to the Adobe systems, and the AVIDs are occasionally used for tape capture stations, and are otherwise gathering dust. It was an extremely expensive experiment which didn’t work out.
Here’s a press release from the time period in which the changeover to Adobe occurred:
https://www.adobe.com/content/dam/Adobe/en/casestudies/creativesuite/production/hearst-television-inc/pdfs/hearst-television-inc-casestudy.pdfJoe Bourke
Owner/Creative Director
Bourke Media
http://www.bourkemedia.com -
Unfortunately, FCPX can’t mount read only databases.
I highly recommend you take a few minutes and read the document that Oliver links.
I do have a few quibbles as it mentions an NFS mounted NAS.
John Davidson tried it, and while libraries do work without sparse bundles, it causes other problems like failed Ae renders.
Also, read this and the very last section goes through a potential collaboration scenario: https://images.apple.com/final-cut-pro/docs/Media_Management.pdf
Don’t expect to be able to see each other’s libraries in real time, or share one library between multiple users at the same time. You can share media in real time.
Avid comes closest to real time sharing, but there are still user based lockouts that have to happen.
Jeremy
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that’s right boys – FCP X 10.1 sharing only works with an NFS network right now – not AFP, or SMB. I just went thru this with John Davidson (and both of us are upset about this). In the old days (a few days ago), this is how we got “Add SAN Location” to work too (via NFS network) – and this is also now the case with Libraries.
I would LOVE for Apple to discuss this on some forum somewhere !Bob Zelin
Bob Zelin
Rescue 1, Inc.
maxavid@cfl.rr.com -
Adobe lets you access your media file just as you’d naturally do it – simply importing them from a network (San or other) location. It’s then up to the bandwidth available how many users can really use this for editing. Pretty much the same what was available in FCP 7.
Plus Adobe has this nice solution to reduce playback resolution. The result is pretty much the same as if you used some proxy files – except you don’t need to generate them. The soft just reads every other pixel of the video (half the resolution or every fourth if you choose quarter the resolution) the result is that dropped frames vanish and you see smooth playback with frames slightly blurred (hardly visible in most cases).
Plus – Adobe’s Prelude stores metadata descriptions within test files that are stored along with media files. Any time you import such media into a PremierePro project, the metadata is loaded as well. Even more – PrepierePro refreshes media at time intervals so from within it you can see new metadata coming up as someone else in the network adds new records to the database.
Adobe’s database design is poorer than the one FCPX provides, but it’s a real multiuser accessible database. In FCP you can only have a single user connected at a time. But there’s no way to have multiclips or preedited sequencies described that way in Premiere / Prelude. FCPX allows for that which is great.
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Apple thinks of networked storage as if of could. It’s just files repository. Of course you can link your original files to several libraries owned by different users to have a multiple access to the same media files – but the metadata database is designed for single user only. Making a library or event read only would do a part of a job, but a real solution is probably of a kind Adobe has developed along with its’ Prelude. Here you have a text file that’s stored along with the media file – this is where the metadata description is being stored. So what gets blocked from multiple access is the metadata of the clip that’s being edited by someone over a network. You can still have access to everything else in the folder (which translates to event pretty much in FCPX).
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If read only Libraries were allowed in fcpx, you’d have a very similar (but not same) situation to Avid bin locking.
It’s a lot more than metadata.
Events can have clips, metadata, edited sequences with effects, multicam clips/sync, and whatever else you need and you don’t have to leave the interface for another one.
You’d then be able to merge your ‘local’ Event with the read only.
But alas, it isn’t available.
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