Avid workflow: Networking 2 PC’s question

[David Broadbent]

Wow – Congrats if you can get that to work. Under normal circumstances, the Avid assumes you can not use network drives for media (and doesn’t look there to find any). Unity and LanShare change that – but only for Unity/LanShare drives (not all network drives).

The media is “Offline” on the assistant’s workstation becuase (it seems) the network drives are not recognized media drives. The avid doesn’t care where the projects/users are stored, but media has to be on a local drive or a Unity/LanShare network media partition. So, the assistant’s workstation will have no trouble seeing the project, but the media will be offline.

However, even though you can see the project files on both machines, you need to be carefull accessing the files from both machines. If you’ve ever used Unity, then you’ll be aware of the different file structure in the OMFI Media files folder, as well as the green and red bin “Lock” indicator icons (and the .lck files in the project folders) and the bold text in the project window. I don’t know if ANY of those features are supported by non-unity sytems, but the issues they relate to are still ones you’ll need to be careful with (assuming you can bridge the network divide).

I guess that wasn’t much help – but just a list of things to think about and be aware of. Good luck, though my gut response – on reading your post was, “You can’t do that.” Even so – you’re definitely on to something if you get it to work. Lots of people would love to have cheap, non-Unity, shared-media-systems.

dave

[Dave Schweitzer]

open the console and type:

alldrives 1

This will tell the avid to allow network drives to be seen as local drives and the avid will attempt to write/read media with the networked drive. Your mileage may vary.
Be careful when accessing the same media pool simultaneously. In a day’s testing last year I found some level of simultaneous access is possible, but as soon as one machine tried to write the database files, the other one had issues.

[Martin Kraut]

EditShare is a cost effective alternative for this workflow.

https://www.editshare.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=46&Itemid=59

[Mike Salerno]

Thanks for the advice dave.

When you say “Console” what are you referring to? The console within Avid?

[Michael Hancock]

Yes, he means the console within Avid (Ctrl+6 on a PC). I’ve heard horror stories about people trying to create networked media for an Avid–if a person makes one change in their system that changes anything in the media folder (like rending something as simple as a dissolve), the other station will stop working and start rebuilding the database. It has crippled systems with the constant refreshing of the databases. Your mileage may vary, and if you get it work successfully I hope you’ll post your solution here, the results you’ve achieved, and how it’s set up. There are many who would be interested to know, including me.

Best of luck!!!

Mike.

[Don Logan]

Where is your project folder? on your C:/ or on your raid?

you would probably be better off working from an external project that lives on your raid and using seperate bins for ingest, sequences, render etc.

my 2 cents.

[Jeff Sengpiehl]

Console diving.. how cool. Purchase some firewire drives, and spend the extra time and effort to move the media between the two systems. Your facility was too cheap to buy shared storage, so you need to bill your clients for the time needed for foolish work-arounds.

BILL THEM, and you’ll get enough $$ to maybe get a real storage setup for christmas…

JDS