FCP on Avid Unity?

[Cee Dee]

man.. all that money on a unity and you want to use fcp???? project sharing is what makes a unity a unity… fcp/xraid cant touch that (yet). sorry no answer

[Vidray]

I did this on four short (12 – 17 minutes) HD (DVCPro HD 720 30P) projects this past summer and didn’t have very good luck. We only had two FCP workstations running via fiber to a LanShare system. Had all sorts of issues with random media and render files going off-line both at start-up and in the middle of edits. And of course we couldn’t really be working on the same project on both workstations at the same time.
As our projects grew and got more complex it would sometime take 20 mintes to boot FCP! We survived were able to finish these projects but ultimately it was more work than being on direct attached storage. Our VAR worked really hard to try to make this work for us but we never got beyond these issues. I think Avid still has a way to go with respect to their open storage innitiative.

Systems works great with Avid seats!

[Mark Raudonis]

Investigate Apple’s “X-SAN”. This is Apple’s answer to “Unity”.

As for the “same project” several people concept…. please note that with FCP (as compared to Avid), it’s NOT the project that is important, it’s how you organize your media.

We have almost one hundred editors using FCP and X-SAN working on mulitple episodes for network delivery everyday. They regularly share projects, media and outputs. It’s all about the workflow.

X-SAN is NOT a cheap solution. Neither is Unity. You get what you payfor. Don’t expect to achieve networked workflow for a buck ninety eight.

Mark

[Liam Lawyer]

Gotcha, but I left out the detail that the facilty also uses Avid and wants to have both in house.. THUS I think it makes sense for the Avid side to have Unity…and then be able to use the shared storage of Unityt for FCP as well.

Any thoughts/experience on this from anyone?

Liam Lawyer
-editor-
Wee Beastie

[Cee Dee]

“They regularly share projects, media and outputs. It’s all about the workflow.”

How do you share projects? sharing media i think is obvious, its all in the same place. But projects? What does sharing outputs mean? Thanks, Do share 🙂

[Reg Wrench]

Hi,
Have you looked at Editshare, it’s relatively cheap and can work with Avid and FCP. It’s more like lan share than Unity and uses ethernet to distribute the media. I recently worked on it with four FCP suites and three digitising stations making two one hour music shows for CH4 in the UK.( You can have more seats than that without extra licence fees). We were running multicam with 6 – 7 cameras at DV quality in all the suites and had no problems at all. The project management is the trick to make it like unity, each suite has it’s work space and you have a central workspace to keep the main projects. If you treat FCP projects like avid bins and just move the project from the main workspace to your suite’s workspace to work on it and put it back when you’re done, then anyone else can grab that project (bin) from the main workspace when they want to work/take something from it. Like unity but using humans to do the management, and those humans are tired editors so you have to be careful, but what do you expect for 10 grand!
As for sharing media with Avid, I was told by the Editshare technician that avid could use the FCP QT movies as Quicktime reference files and work with them but I’d like to see it work!
Hope that helps…

Reg
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