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FCP Project sharing
Hi,
I’ve got two edit bays with two editor’s that work on the same project at different stages from their respective machines. I’m trying to come up with a way to manage this, from both a network standpoint ie. all media on the same drive, file permissions etc. and trying to keep all of the different versions straight and ways to merge them if needed.
Does anyone know of any books, forums, or other places I could find info on this?
Thanks in advance,
Steve
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4 Replies
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Are you working from firewire drives?
Is it a huge project spread out over many drives?
Are both editors working on the same project at the same time or is only one working on it at a time?Our set up is simple and it may not be of help but we keep all the media for one episode on one or two drives and don’t mix the media with any other episode. That is, they’re dedicated to just that episode for the duration of offline.
We save the project to the Episode media drive and they’re backed up by the assistants every evening to an FTP server offsite. The project is ingested on any of two systems by two assistants and not always by the same person for the whole episode.Make sure you have “ignore permissions” set for all your media drives. I think this is default on firewire drives but our process when new drives arrive is to format the drives writing Zeros to the whole drive, journaling off.
I guess you probably have more complex needs then that but it’s a baseline to start from.
There are other tricks like naming any immovable media drives the same name on both systems and keeping the capture scratch and render folders synced between the two systems so that moving the project doesn’t require a ton of relinking.
andrew k.
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Two options.
1) Get a SAN system and fibrechannel drives. This way the editors can have both their machines attached to the media drives and accessing the same media from one location. However, the same project file cannot be opened on two systems. You’ll need to have two separate projects, both copies of the main project that has all the footage in it. Then, if they want to share cuts, they simply export an XML of the cut for that sequence and the other editor imports that.
2) Store the media on separate drives. Two complete sets of drives with all the media. And it would be wise to have both sets of drive to have the exact same names as the other set. Two DRIVE 1s, two Drive 2s…ect. So that the editors don’t have to relink the footage everytime the import the XML.
Both options require separate projects and XML swapping.
Shane
Littlefrog Post
http://www.lfhd.net -
Shane,
Slight correction to your information. XML’s aren’t necessarily needed. We operate a large SAN with multiple editors frequently working on the same episode. As such, they often will open the same project at the same time. Here’s how we do it. Let’s say there’s a “master project” for epsiode # 1800 which lives on the SAN. Editor “A” goes to the SAN, finds the project and copies it to her local drive. Editor “B” does the same thing. They’re now both working on the exact same project at the same time (But from their local drives). When it comes time to save, both editors have their own folder on the SAN, and they will save the project there, with a name and date increment system: for example, “1800cut1.29-20-06MarkR”. The latest date is always the most recent project.
In our case we use X-SAN. We regard the entire X-SAN as “the project”. How we organize and save the media is much more important than any one individual project. FCP can have multiple projects open simultaneously (Unlike AVID), so that’s where we focus our effort. We NEVER use XML to swap info. We just create a separate, small project with only the ‘current” timeline, and send that back and forth.
mark
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I was waiting for you to chime in Mark…When it comes to this, YOU are da man.
Shane
Littlefrog Post
http://www.lfhd.net
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