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Avid Unity v Final Cut server
Hello I am looking for some independent advice.
Final cut server vs Avid Unity.I am looking for shared storage for 6 FCP:
Using Apple prores 442HQ,
40 hrs HD material and 30 hrs of SD material per year ingested,
2 of the FCP are about 500 meters away from the other FCP and the storage.I keep getting mixed advice of what to use as my shared storage, so looking for advice.
With the following factors taken into account:
Price,
Ease of maintaining,
Searching for files with key words,
Archiving footage,
Ethernet or Fibre and whats the difference,
SAN, XSAN, NAS or SPACE. -
10 Replies
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Avid Unity and FC server aren’t really comparable products. Unity and Apple xSan are both share storage solutions but FC server is a media management tool. You might get better answers to your Q’s by posting them in Avid, xSan, or FC server areas of the COW.
-Andrew
3.2GHz 8-core, FCP 6.0.4, 10.5.5
Blackmagic Multibridge Eclipse (6.8.1) -
As Andrew already noted, Final Cut Server is a misnomer, it’s a media management tool, not a SAN.
We have a great SAN forum here on the Cow where you can probably research your query and then post again there if you don’t see what you’re looking for.
https://forums.creativecow.net/forum/sanetworks
Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Biscardi Creative Media
HD and SD Production for Broadcast and Independent Productions.STOP STARING AND START GRADING WITH APPLE COLOR Apple Color Training DVD available now!
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Thanks for the information as i say iam new to this so just finding my feet.
I know that Final cut server isnt a SAN, but keeep getting advice to use a SAN, NAS, XSAN or Space as the network storage. -
Yes, you’ll definitely want to use a SAN, but FC Server is a different beast entirely. It work with (and enhance your workflow) with a SAN, but it doesn’t require a SAN. Basically, if you have a fast enough to SAN to share media – great, FC Server acts as a media management & cataloging tool. If you don’t have a SAN, and need multiple editors to share storage, it will “push” copies of the necessary media to your local storage devices, which seems quite clunky and slow.
I would definitely recommend a SAN, and if you are using FCP, Avid Unity probably won’t work for you. They may claim it will, but – at least a year ago, it did not work for us. Maybe they’ve fixed it by now, but I would bet that it’s not truly stable. We’ve great results with EditShare, using a gig-E network, which has been fast enough to share 1080p ProRes material, or Uncompressed SD. (The 500m distance might be an issue, but there are workarounds for that – running fibrechannel instead of Gig-E, etc…) And we even run our Avids on the EditShare as well – bonus!
Check out the SAN forum, for sure, but tally up one vote for EditShare!
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[Darren Johnson] “Thanks for the information as i say iam new to this so just finding my feet.
I know that Final cut server isnt a SAN, but keeep getting advice to use a SAN, NAS, XSAN or Space as the network storage.”Yes, you want a SAN, but Final Cut Server is not a SAN. It’s just a media management software.
We just installed a sweet little SAN for 6 workstations here in our shop all running GigE ethernet and absolutely no additional software, like EditShare required. 16TB, expandable to 128TB at least, more if we run 1.5 or 2TB drives in it. It’s called Final Share from Maxx Digital. We can easily cut 720p and 1080i ProRes HQ on the system.
The money we saved on this system will go towards an HDCAM SR deck in the hopefully not too distant future.
Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Biscardi Creative Media
HD and SD Production for Broadcast and Independent Productions.STOP STARING AND START GRADING WITH APPLE COLOR Apple Color Training DVD available now!
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Got a couple of nice solutions lined up for you Darren – Editshare is a good option definitely.
As ever, the best advice is a good, independent systems integrator.
Don’t go spending all that money on Unity, for a FCP setup – it’s madness!
Speak soon,
Ben
Edit Out Ltd
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FCP Editor/Trainer/System Consultant
EVS/VT Supervisor for live broadcast
RED camera transfer/post
Independent Director/Producer -
We just installed a sweet little SAN for 6 workstations here in our shop all running GigE ethernet and absolutely no additional software, like EditShare required.
So, Walter – with no SAN management software – can you establish separate media spaces? Or is everything on one giant drive space like an XSAN, with subfolders for each project? Do you have ONE Capture Scratch folder, and one RENDERS folder?
I’m trying to imagine our EditShare without the ES server tools, and it sounds like quite a headache – especially when the SAN starts getting full and you’re trying to figure out which projects are taking up the space.
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[David Jahns] “So, Walter – with no SAN management software – can you establish separate media spaces? Or is everything on one giant drive space like an XSAN, with subfolders for each project? Do you have ONE Capture Scratch folder, and one RENDERS folder? “
Our 16TB is currently divided into two SAN Volumes. SAN1 and SAN2.
Beyond that, they just operate like any media drive. You mount it in the room you want to use that particular volume and select it as a Capture Scratch. So yes, there’s just one Capture Scratch per volume and all the systems can read / write off that volume. It’s basically just as if you had a local drive on your machine, but each volume is available to all 6 systems at any given time. Any system can capture / read from any volume, any folder, at any time.
We can run as one large volume but we split it into two for easier management.
We did a test with all three FCP systems capturing HD ProRes HQ material for about 30 minutes or so while all three iMacs were playing back HD ProRes HQ files in a loop. Then we left everything playing in a loop for about 3 hours before we stopped everything.
Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Biscardi Creative Media
HD and SD Production for Broadcast and Independent Productions.STOP STARING AND START GRADING WITH APPLE COLOR Apple Color Training DVD available now!
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Hi Darren.
There are certainly a lot of options with shared storage solutions.
CommandSoft’s FibreJet SAN solutions will work great with Final Cut, Avid and Pro Tools workflows.
FibreJet is also compatible with a wide range of storage arrays making it easy to design an elegantly simple volume level SAN with whatever hardware best suits your performance needs and budget trade-offs.
Please feel free to contact us any time if you would like to discuss your options.
Chuck McMakin
CommandSoft, Inc. /
Phone: (805)730-7772 /
Email: chuck@commandsoft.com -
This is actually exactly the reason to get something like Final Cut Server. By utilizing a Digital Asset Management system you never have to worry about complex file systems or having to think about where to save files. Everything is simply automated and organized by the asset management system and people utilize a check-in / check-out process to maintain control of whose working on which file when.
— Jason
Jason Perr
Consultant / Sr. Systems Engineer
MacHarmony
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