AES EBU card Macpro

[Ty Ford]

Hello Rodrigo and welcome to the Cow Audio Forum.

I know someone who runs PTLE on a PC laptop and uses the internal drive for sessions, but offloads to an external drive. That makes me nervous. I’m from the “one drive for system and apps, one for the media” club.

My suggestion would be to read and heed the advice given by Digidesign on their site as to what configuration is advisable.

Regards,

Ty Ford

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[Peter Groom]

Pro Tools will “work” in thwe way you describe, but it flies against the advice of Digidesign (AVID this week) AND most experienced users.
Running the OS and programme from the Mac HD is fine, but any audio and video should be on different drives. Its a risky business to try otherwise and you may pay a heavy price one day if you lost a lot of work. There is little reason to try these days with drives being ever smaller (size0 bigger (capacity) and cheaper by the minute.

Peter

Peter

[Ruy Fajardo]

Hi guys thanks for your help, the one think that makes me nervous is that is going to be installed in 40 computers in a University and having external drives will need a safe box for each one to prevent thieving. anyone know a trusted way to attach an external drive to an imac?

regards

KB

[Peter Groom]

Well that put a new twist on it. In that case id be strongly advising that you contact your nearest AVID digidesign dealer for some specialist advice on the topic.
ie
1) With such a big installation is Le really the product to go for. Id think there would be a real carrott to dangle there and possibly get a better version of PT to run. Thats a LOT of people youre locking in / exposing / educating on their platform and theyll want to do it as best as possible.

2) Would some sort of gigabit lan with shared drive space at a central location not be more feasible. NONE of our edit suites have storage (or even a mac) in the room. its all across network infrastructure. The specialists should be able to advise non this too.
advantages. 1 central secure area. Massive storage amounts. high speed. fewer individual stations to maintain etc
Disadvantage. Higher initial outlay for some extra hardware.

id get specialist advice. Dont freestyle a big decision like this.

Peter

Peter

[Ty Ford]

Rodrigo,

I think Peter’s got good advice for you. I tapped a good friend who has some experience in this and his reply follows.

“In the radio station they are iMacs and we have an Apple Xserve which as user accounts for each staffer and dj. In the big lab they are MacPro machines all linked to an EditShare (https://www.editshare.com) SAN server system which has ‘slices’ for each user on a very large RAID system.

Keep in mind if this is ProTools, it will NOT write across a network, unless you run fibrechannel to the central system – hence the expensive EditShare solution and need for MacPro machines. IMacs will not allow fibrechannel interface and you cannot add the cards to the machines. In the radio station we pull all the audio file to a local external drive for editing.

There are solutions for NAS/SAN for audio and video from lots of other places, but you need to be sitting down when you talk about pricing.”

Regards,

Ty Ford

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[Mickey Houlihan]

Hi Guys,
All good advice and good practice to keep the apps and media on separate drives. I have however supplied several schools with similar such set ups and it can work. With the installs that we did the emphasis was on learning the software. The students projects were individually backed up to DVD’s and at the end of the semester the Hard drives were completely wiped clean and all the software reinstalled.
Obviously, if creating and saving precious work is the priority this approach is very risky.

All the best,
Mickey

[Peter Groom]

HI
Surely if youre teaching the students, its better that they learn the best practice by example. Is this not “do as I say not as i do”.
They probably go off into the commercial world thinking its not really important to use sep drives for data and media, as “we never did at school / college / Uni.???
Peter

Peter

[Ty Ford]

That’s also why most people who have been in schools for this think a Sennheiser ME66 is the only mic to put on the end of a boom.

Anyway, let’s close this one out. Best practices are, in fact, that.

Creative Cow is a forum for the advancement of crafts. We have informed the poster that having it all on one drive is not a good idea. That may not solve his problem, but there are problems that are not solvable.

Regards,

Ty Ford

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[Ruy Fajardo]

Hi, thanks to all for the valuable inputs, surely we will have external HDD for each unit, its a shame that the room wont look as “clean” as we wanted and we will also have to lock external units in some way.

PT LE is going to be used in a push pull basis, students will work locally and then they will save their works using their account. we think that having a fibre channel network (or xsan) just for that low bandwidth is a waste of resources.

By the way the ME66 is in our list but is not the only one 😉

regards

KB

[Ty Ford]

[rodrigo fajardo] “By the way the ME66 is in our list but is not the only one ;”

Of course it is. 🙂

Try to get under a Schoeps CMIT somewhere along the line. And a cmc641 as well.

You won’t believe me now, but, really, do it.

Regards.

Ty

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