Best Alternative to ISIS or Unity for Small AVID Production House

[Bob Zelin]

You can use a Facilis Terrablock 8D or an AVID Nexis.

Unity ? Are you kidding me ? That product has been discontinued for countless years now. And the AVID and Facilis are both CHEAP.

Bob Zelin

Bob Zelin
Rescue 1, Inc.
bobzelin@icloud.com

[Rainer Wirth]

Hi,

I would go for the sonnet with xsan server.
But for 200 TB you need a sonnet 1600 extension (with the sonnet fibre together)

cheers

Rainer

factstory
Rainer Wirth
phone_0049-177-2156086
Mac pro 8core
Adobe,FCP,Avid
several raid systems

[Tim Ward]

Studio Network Solutions EVO shared storage provides native Avid Media Composer project and bin sharing at an affordable price. This is a very simple set up that does not require any other servers or software. To an editor it looks just like they are accessing an ISIS.

[Bob Zelin]

Rainer –
exactly what kind of incorrect advice are you giving here.
Apple XSAN server cannot support AVID shared storage support, or AVID Bin locking.
Exactly where do you get your information from.

You can use the new AVID Nexis (which has replaced ISIS), or a Facilis Terrablock 8D if you want to spend very little money, or solutions from Studio Network Solutions, Tiger Technologies, Small Tree, ProMax, EditShare, Archion. Please don’t give out incorrect information. I love Sonnet – I use their products all the time, in almost every installation, but this product with XSAN cannot support multiple seats of
AVID Media Composer. It is the wrong product for this application.

Bob Zelin

Bob Zelin
Rescue 1, Inc.
bobzelin@icloud.com

[Alex Gardiner]

There are lots of solutions to AVID bin locking, even some software only like Quadrus.

This is our offering, which is pretty new and works with any generic SMB/CIFS/AFP based drive (win & mac compatible):

https://indiestor.com/product/mimiq/

alex@indiestor.com
Open Source Shared Storage

[Neil Sadwelkar]

I’ve seen a few old Avid Unity setups where the editors are simply not using the Avid bin and project sharing facilities that only unity provides. Instead there are different editors working on different projects seldom sharing any sequences. If that is your workflow, then a Unity/ISIS is overkill. Any shared storage will work fine.

ISIS or Nexis, or some other Avid capable solution will always be costlier than a standard shared storage. At the moment a Nexis Pro with 16 TB shared storage runs £ 10,000 (US$ 14,000). Plus about £ 1000 ($1400) for the switch. If you’re in a country with import duties, these will run up the price by another 25-30% in some countries.

So, examine the editing workflow, check out the extent of sequence sharing. If all 8 can work off separate partitions with the occasional copying of media from one to the other, then just a shared storage will do fine. And for the same price as a Nexis you’ll get two to three times the disk storage. Alternately, you could even do a ‘hybrid’ with critical shared media off a Nexis Pro with only 32 TB storage, and the remaining 170 TB of standard shared storage partitioned one per user with only unshared media on it.

———————————–
Neil Sadwelkar
neilsadwelkar.blogspot.com
twitter: fcpguru
FCP Editor, Edit systems consultant
Mumbai India

[Brennan Mcbride]

Alex was kind enough to let me demo Mimiq and it was spot on. I was using it in a very simple shared storage environment and preformed better than expected. All in all a great product. While I certainly could have benefited from 10Gb, the two systems sharing media and the project with prores 422HQ clips AMA did well enough on a 1Gb network.

[Andrew Proude]

Why not just setup a 200TB NAS as nearline (for hires media),
then use your ISIS for offline (DNxHD36), when you’re edit is locked, upres/conform to your originals.

[Trevor Cable]

I’ve had a fair amount of experience with Unity and Terrablock and just this week purchased the new Nexis E4 with 120TB. It was nice to see the cost for 120TB from Avid finally be at a price that I think is fair (approx. $60K without without switch). However, I did have an opportunity to test San fusions product and was really blown away. If you have someone on staff that is tech savvy with Unix you could build a system for far less than any other system. I had a 24TB retired server sitting on a shelf so we put FreeBSD on it and within an hour I had a multi seat Avid bin locking system using San Fusion. They don’t put any software on the server itself, it’s all done through the client software. I was very impressed. The product worked well and when I had a recommendation for the client software the support staff took interest and I believe it’s now part of the software. The only reason I chose to go with the Nexis over San Fusion is that our company requires 24/7 uptime. This means for support I only want to call one company and not have anyone suggest it’s not their problem (switch, server, OS, etc).

Anyway, my 2 cents.

-Cablet

[Trevor Cable]

Oh, and as a side note my previous thread, if your company depends financially on your edit bays working then seriously consider spending the money the Nexis. You really do get what you pay for when everything is considered.