Editing over Gigabit Ethernet

[Jeff Carpenter]

I’m not technical enough to give you a real answer, but here’s my 2 experiences:

1) At my job we have an Avid unity hooked up to 5 workstations with gigabit ethernet. We edit DVCAM/DV and have had all 5 stations working at once without problems.

2) At home I have a MacPro with a Firewire 800 G-Raid as my media drive. (This is also DV editing.) I also have an iMac hooked up over gigabit ethernet through a consumer-grade gigabit router. My wife and I can access the same media and edit at the same time without any problem. I’ve also been compressing on one computer while editing on the other without issue. I’ve done split-screen stuff where it’s pulling 3 or 4 clips and once and that works ok too.

IMX50 is what, twice the size of DV? I’m not exactly sure, but given my experiences I’d have to guess that it would still work to some extent.

Again, I really can’t say if it will work for you and your format, but I just wanted to share my own (DV) experiences.

[Aaron Neitz]

In a crunch I’ve gotten full 8bit uncompressed media from the SAN over the Gigabit network in the studio. Seemed to work fine – no reports of dropped frames

[Sean Oneil]

Do some research on iSCSI. Check out Studio Network Solutions.

[Devin Crane]

I’ve checked it out a little bit, have you worked with much? Not quite sure how to set it up and I havn’t found a good tutorial yet on it.

[Sean Oneil]

Studio Network Solutions, among others, provide turnkey iSCSI SAN solutions. SNS specializes in marketing their products for post production people like us – rather than the typical IT market. There isn’t much to set up on your end. They provide everyhing.

There are other solutions to do it yourself. iSCSI requires 3 things.

1. An iSCSI storage target (the server with all the disk drives in it and the software to make it an iSCSI target)
2. An iSCSI initator for each client (software that connects you to a target via TCP/IP).
3. SAN management software. This software makes sure that all hell doesn’t break loose by having multiple clients accessing the same “local” disk with write privileges. Examples are Apple’s Xsan, Tiger Tech’s MetaSAN, and Studio Network Solutions’ SANmp.

One thing to note. SNS’s SANmp is not as good as MetaSAN or Xsan. Do a search here for “volume level sharing” and “file level sharing” to see what the difference is.

I built my own server using Open-E iSCSI target software. While I saved an incredible fortune doing it myself, I don’t recommend it for anyone who isn’t me :).

Sean

[Sean Oneil]

One other thing. A really good resource is SmallTree Communications (google it). They sell multi-port gigabit Nic cards for the Mac. They are experts in setting up an Ethernet based SAN.

Sean