Can two projects have the same name?

[Bill Davis]

[Craig Alan] “So is there a way to do it easily on a LAN? I’m worried that setting permissions on all mounted images could be difficult? Plus what if the server goes down? Would LAN management work pretty much the same as external hard drive/raid management? As you can tell I have no experience with setting up net- work. And I know from labs I’ve seen throughout the school that they are often a mess. IT sets things up and teachers have no idea how to maintain them and then they are on a waiting list for them to fix something. Further they do not come from an editing background. And FC has its own set of rules.”

This is precistly why I think that centralized storage of student work via FCP-X will always be a tricky deal.

In a more perfect world, it would be nice you could just give each student a thumb drive on a lanyard and have them store their individual “in progress” project and even on that. The teacher could have the kids mirror a copy to the server at the end of class so there would be a backup if the lanyard got lost or taken home for additional work, and disappeared there – but X doesn’t like thumb drives so that’s out.

You could do similar with cheap FW800 hard drives for each class member, but that’s a capital budget mess in a school setting.

It’s a challenge.

I can see the X software residing on the school server, and each students project/event work on an individual external source – but without a runtime version of X, the kids couldn’t do homework without buying the program.

Actually, now that I think about it, if they ever do succeed in making X “cloud based” that would ROCK for eduction, since the school could probably give registered students limited access to the software via the cloud and have their projects be transportable.

That would maybe be ideal for a classroom situation.

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[Andreas Kiel]

Craig,

I think I understand better now.
Tell me if I’m wrong with my thoughts.

You want to have several computers with finally two users (there is always the admin).
The “student account” will have limited access.
With FCPX (and other apps) you will run into some kind of problems. The “whatever student” will always have access to his account and can change things there, so many students can change many things in the “student account” since the is only one “student account”.

The way FCPX works you can create events/projects in this “student account” and you can create “private” password protected sparse bundles. BUT that won’t prevent those users to mess up the ~/Movies folder.
I haven’t tried to set parental controls to that folder — so I’m not really sure.

The way FCPX works will make things really complicated if you want to have a “unified user” in a kind of classroom network and leaving both freedom and privacy to all of them.
Look at the ~/Library everybody can change the settings with his account. The action to prevent that will be complicated. Same with the material and templates which might be used.

Finally you need a user organization — which obviously is not that thing you want.

– Andreas

Spherico
https://www.spherico.com/filmtools

“He who fights with monsters should be careful lest he thereby
become a monster. And if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will
also gaze into thee.” – Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

[Craig Alan]

Andreas

All true. But take a look at ‘simple finder’. This is an option when setting up a new user account. In simple finder you do not have the ability to mess with the system. You can open apps that are assigned to the account. You can certainly open any documents that you can see with an app’s File>open window. But you cannot mount sparse images. Therefore if all media and projects and files and other student documents are kept in a sparse image (one per user) and if I mount and unmount these sparse images, I think it does the trick. FC projects will auto be saved to the open sparse image. A final draft or word doc would have to be manually saved to the user’s sparse image or be open to anyone one using that account. So they need to save their work properly outside of FC. But so far I think its the best option. But I could be overlooking something.

Mac Pro, macbook pro, Imacs (i7); Camcorders: Panasonic AG-HPX170/AG-HPX250P, Canon HV30/40, Sony Z7U, VX2000, PD170; FCP 6 certified; write professionally for a variety of media; teach video production in L.A.

[Andreas Kiel]

Craig,

I just gave it a try with “Simple Finder”.
One thing you should take care of is to have the “master system” as simple and clean as possible. One machine I tried had a lot of apps installed which are doing stuff in the background. That caused an endless loop of error messages at log in.

Anyway – It somehow works and probably meets your needs best.
But as you said there is the need for a lot of discipline from the students.
An option could be to create a “public” app with allows to create sparse bundles with limited size, a fixed path to the Documents folder and password protection – this bundle also could have a default folder/file setup**.
This way every student can have a “personal virtual disk” for even several projects (in the old sense of word). But it still needs a lot of discipline from the students since they all use the same account.

-Andreas

**)
P.S.

About this non existing app: it would create a sparse bundle with name and password, it won’t allow to overwrite existing ones (that’s good and a problem same time). When the bundle is created it will create a base folder structure once the user have entered an Event/Project name. A new empty Event with a unique ID will be created and a Project with unique ID linked to this Event as well (as said earlier you can have thousands of projects with the same name — but they need a different ID).
Again — it still needs a lot of discipline from the students since they all use the same account.

Spherico
https://www.spherico.com/filmtools

“He who fights with monsters should be careful lest he thereby
become a monster. And if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will
also gaze into thee.” – Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

[Craig Alan]

[Andreas Kiel] “But as you said there is the need for a lot of discipline from the students”

Thanks Andreas. Not sure what you mean here. The whole idea is to make it more or less bullet proof.
Otherwise sure enough some of them will mess things up deliberately or by being careless.

The only discipline I see this needing is for them to save non-FCP document files to their personal sparse image “document folder”. If they save elsewhere and in simple finder that means the account’s document folder then their files are open to all other users.

For FC I will be saving the first event and project to the sparse image for each student which should set this as the default.

Do you see any other path they could take that would screw things up?

Really appreciate your help.

I could of course not only use simple finder but multiple use accounts as well. That way anything they save will be within that account. Just not sure how well OS X handles permissions on external drives. In the past its been spotty at best. I’ve visited many computer labs at schools using far less demanding software and they are all messed up. The more motivated students carry flash drives and that works for word files but will not cut it for projects events and gigs of media.

Mac Pro, macbook pro, Imacs (i7); Camcorders: Panasonic AG-HPX170/AG-HPX250P, Canon HV30/40, Sony Z7U, VX2000, PD170; FCP 6 certified; write professionally for a variety of media; teach video production in L.A.