Anyone using Premiere Pro in a shared/network storage environment?

[Joseph W. bourke]

You’re absolutely right, Alex. As a large broadcast station competing in both the NH and Boston DMAs, we had to manage lots of assets, and once we commited to the AVIDs running on Unity servers (which I fought against, but lost the battle with engineering), the problems began. Yes…assets could be shared, and projects worked on concurrently, but the fact that we worked in three shifts, for the most part (daybreak, day, nightside) negated any advantage of working on the same projects concurrently.

Add to that the fact that the SAN system of shared storage (not workgroup storage) worked like a charm, as long as the organizational skills were there, and there was someone riding herd on those who wanted to just use no system (the “my_files”, “Jims_stuff” people), it worked waaay better than the Unity system, which was attached to three AVIDs (Promotions, Commercial Production, and Chronicle, a daily magazine format news show), never worked as promised. There were crashes, re-linking nightmares, slow software, arcane GUI, and frequent visits from the guys in Tewksbury, who would blame everything but their system (OS, hardware, Nepture not aligned correctly…). The AVID system, as our producers figured out, cut our productivity by roughly 30 to 40 percent. But it allowed shared projects…

Joe Bourke
Owner/Creative Director
Bourke Media
http://www.bourkemedia.com

[Marvin Holdman]

We use a MaxxRaid 10t finalshare server and a Sony Petasite. We currently use it in a mixed environment of FCP and PPro/Mac and PC. We have only 5 seats, so we were able to aggregate the server on a 1 gig switch (set up for jumbo packets) and do just fine. We do our projects locally on the client machines and access the footage from the server. It is working well for us.

After completion, the projects and the footage are sent to the Petasite for archival. They are stored separately (our footage is re-used for different projects often).

It is working well for us.

Marvin Holdman
Production Manager
Tourist Network
8317 Front Beach Rd, Suite 23
Panama City Beach, Fl
phone 850-234-2773 ext. 128
cell 850-585-9667
skype username – vidmarv

[Roger Brown]

We’ve just started using Premiere Pro, AE, etc. on two Mac towers connected by gigabit ethernet. So far we can’t smoothly work from one external HD connected to one machine. We’d like to get a NAS, but have heard it doesn’t matter as Premier Pro doesn’t work well shared.

Your response and solution was from earlier iterations of the software. Any advice or intell?

thanks,

Roger Brown