FCP-X and 20 bays..question

[Oliver Peters]

Keep your FCP X Projects/Events on the local machines and link to the media on the Xsan.

– Oliver

Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com

[Eric Rainey]

If you work in a 20 bay environment that is step backwards. At the end of the day or when someone leaves they have to make sure their FCP X Projects/Events are on the network and EVERYBODY forgets and things get messy.

[Oliver Peters]

[Eric Rainey] “If you work in a 20 bay environment that is step backwards”

That’s entirely dependent on your workflow. Is this 20 editors working collaboratively, concurrently or consecutively? These variables each have different pros and cons. With X, there are two schemes people favor – sparse disk images and “add SAN location”. From my own person experience with only two editors working on the same production back and forth, FCP X is less than ideal. I would recommend Premiere Pro CC for your operation. Or Avid Media Composer if you want it to be bullet-proof, but then you need to address your storage set-up, too.

– Oliver

Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com

[Eric Rainey]

Thanks for the post. I am thinking Premiere as well. If someone has knows of anybody/company that is working with that many bays and is happy with FCP X. Please let me know and I will call them.

Thanks
Eric

[Charlie Austin]

[Eric Rainey] “If you work in a 20 bay environment that is step backwards. At the end of the day or when someone leaves they have to make sure their FCP X Projects/Events are on the network and EVERYBODY forgets and things get messy.”

So, since multiple users cant concurrently edit the same FCP 7 project, how does this work now? Just one project per “job”? I’m not an expert here, but I think to do this in X… just creat a SAN location for each job, (or each bay depending on how you want it organized) and put the Event(s) and Projects in there. Reference the media for your events/projects from wherever it’s currently located. EZ. 🙂 If you put jobs in their own location, any bay can work on any job (one at a time for now) by just mounting the proper SAN location. More or less the same if you have locations for each bay… any bay can open what’s been worked on in another bay by just opening that SAN location (assuming it’s not mounted in another bay)

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~”It is a poor craftsman who blames his tools.”~
~”The function you just attempted is not yet implemented”~

[James Cude]

Where are you located Eric? Is this a post house, a training facility, a TV station, etc? Are 20 bays going full time with staff living in their own specific bay or do freelancers rotate in and out of different bays?

[John Davidson]

Hey Eric,

Did you see the FCPX On Air series I made back in December? I walk you through exactly how we do what you’re asking about using Sparse Disk images. We’re about a year into this workflow and it’s been pretty great. One thing I’d throw out there is that there are pretty substantial rumors to a hefty FCPX Update coming in or around the time of the new Mac Pro. If the sparse disk workflow doesn’t interest you, I would still hold out for 2-3 more months just to see what comes out from Apple before I jumped into such a massive subscription plan with Adobe.

Here’s the series:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLFL2mNWwki8fpFzlmFDDBVaAVBqrFxG6c
“https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLFL2mNWwki8fpFzlmFDDBVaAVBqrFxG6c”

I’ve researched working in an XSan system, but instead have chosen to stick with our Sparse Disk image format because it’s stupid easy to understand and you can always tell what project you have mounted just by looking at a finder window. Since the vid was made we chose to upgrade to a Netgear 10GbE switch with Thunderlinks for the iMacs and an ATTO 10GbE card for one of the mac pros. We also got a 60TB ProAvio RAID. Very happy with these purchases. The speeds are impressive on multiple systems. We are only feeding 10GbE to 3 systems and regular GbE to 3 more.

I’m happy to answer any questions you have.

John Davidson | President / Creative Director | Magic Feather Inc.

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[Eric Rainey]

There are a few staff editors and freelancers mostly. We cut commercials, promos, corp vids mostly. Our workflow deals with mostly one editor working on a project, but assistant editors open projects, add to projects. Sometimes we view cuts in other bay(from other editors) and sometimes other editors open projects while someone else is working on them, not to work in(or save them), but to get media and sequences out of.

I have very limited experience with FCP X and want to really see if other people have worked the bugs out in a big facility. I can’t have us experimenting with a workflow on the job. That is why I would like to get the names of other people actually using FCP X in a big environment. It is hard to find companies doing that.

As I am writing this I see your response John….Thanks!!!! I will watch your videos and hope to bug you tomorrow.

Thanks for the replies everybody!!!
Eric

[John Davidson]

Yeah, ask my anything you’d like. Happy to help.

One other interesting thing I’m doing that is still in the experimental phase is setting up a Mac Mini running OS X Server. Right now it’s hosting a website, messaging service, corporate wiki, intranet, calendars, contacts, FTP, software update storage and caching (so you only download programs once from the App store) etc. The coolest part of it is that we’ve created network user accounts that allow anyone in any room to log in to any machine and voila, there’s their desktop. This is super awesome because if you want to add an iMac for editing you just plug it in, log into the intranet, download a profile for local users, and you’re pretty much working.

Obviously this takes some annoying setup time and I’m still learning how to do it, but we’re already realizing the potential. Today we swapped machines so that a new designer could use a more powerful mac pro for 3D rendering and our editor could leverage the FCPX Optimized power of an iMac. We had outgrown iCloud and I’m not in love with Google Apps, plus this is a pretty painless way to swap systems.

John Davidson | President / Creative Director | Magic Feather Inc.

[Jeremy Garchow]

We don’t have 20 bays. We do have a SAN, though, although its metaSAN and not Xsan.

MetaSAN has controls (called ProjectStore) that is available to any machine connected to the SAN. Each ProjectStore mounts similar to a sparse image, in that it looks like a separate volume. One person has read/write, anyone else can mount read only. Fcpx will not mount read only SAN Locations, but anyone has access to the media contained within them (if you need it).

If you need to mount a Store in any room, you can, as FCPX’s file structure makes this hyper easy if you know what you’re doing. All media can be referenced in each Event, and not physically duplicated as long as it is .mov before importing. You could always use fcpx to transcode camera original files from MXF and others, and drag those movies out to a common location on the SAN and relink.

The ProjectStore interface (via web browser) allows for many things including force ejecting of stores in case someone forgot to remove their SAN location before leaving. You can also tell which Store is mounted on what machine and serves as a check out system that everyone can see. It’s very convenient.

From what I understand XSan is more of a user based permission set so that you would lock individuals user based San Locations. Or not.

This may help you: https://images.apple.com/finalcutpro/docs/Final_Cut_Pro_X_Xsan_Best_Practices.pdf

In my experience, Premiere can be weird on SANs due to the tremendous amount of caching that happens. It does work, but it takes a long time to open bigger projects, and you have to delete the cache and start that process over every once in a while. You should certainly not pass it up, though, as it is certainly more like fcp7 than X.

Even though FCPX’s structure is nothing like what fcp7 is, there are some conveniences. I know it sounds cliche at this point, but you have to go in knowing X does not operate like fcp7 as the file and database structure are very different.