FCP+SAN+EVS IP Director. Any experience?

[Patrice Freymond]

Hi Ben,

we’re using such a setup in house with the EVS in the studios pushing clips to our xsan which is connected via FC to 5 fcp stations.

We had problems in the past with evs clips ending mega fragmented on the san (up to 27000 fragments). This the xsan did not like one bit. As a not so quick patch we made copies of the files before using them. Then EVS had a patch for the x2 and until then the files are much less fragmented and actually usable as is.

I am more on the operating side than technical so I can’t give you more info. I guess you coud contact Mike Shore at EVS or perhaps Mike Davis for more details. NBC uses a mixture of EVS IP Director, IP Edit, Avid and FCP systems at the olympics too and it works. Not sure if it all is GigE or what.

hope this helps,

Patrice

Patrice Freymond

Senior editor
FCP Certified Trainer

patrice@monteur.tv

[Mike Footer]

Hi Ben,

If you use EditShare XStream has been done a few times.

This example is for Avid, but its similar for FCP.

https://www.editshare.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=192&Itemid=189

[Ben Holmes]

Hi Patrice

Many thanks – sorry it’s taken me so long to respond. Yes – I’ve now spoken to Mike Davis. He was concerned about the Xsan specifically (probably due to the problems you mentioned) but the spec I have is for an ethernet connected SAN, with potential for management via MetaSAN – although the ingest and logging would be handled via IPDirector. Mike seemed to think this would be ok.

Although FCP lacks the media management features of Unity systems, I seem to have come up against a good deal of well-intentioned ignorance about FCP and shared storage (ie. it just can’t be done). I regularly consult for a facility I part-specced that uses Editshare with 6 FCP suites very successfully. I was hoping to get direct experience of someone who had added IPDirector into the mix – good to hear it’s ok.

Ben

Edit Out Ltd
—————————-
FCP Editor/Trainer/System Consultant
EVS/VT Supervisor for live broadcast
RED camera transfer/post
Independent Director/Producer

https://www.blackmagic-design.com/casestudies/detail.asp?case=therydercup

[Ben Holmes]

Thanks Mike – that’s very useful. I know AVID Unity and Interplay is an option – good to see Editshare working as well. Of course, with ethernet, it’s just another piece of IP addressed storage.

Ben

Edit Out Ltd
—————————-
FCP Editor/Trainer/System Consultant
EVS/VT Supervisor for live broadcast
RED camera transfer/post
Independent Director/Producer

https://www.blackmagic-design.com/casestudies/detail.asp?case=therydercup

[Chris Smith]

Hey Ben,
I have had experience with the setup you are talking about. I recently did an OB where we had a Xt-2 connected to a GigE network with and IP director to manage it (X-File running on the IP Director machine). We then used IP to manage the labelled clips (clipped up by IP director and LSM operator) to a Small Tree STRAID that had a mac pro as the file server. I then had up to six editors working simultaneously with this footage via the gigE network from a 6port card in the back of the mac pro. Worked really well! We were using prores 1080i50, and apart from a couple of hiccups there were no major fallovers..

I am now looking at incorporating Final Cut Server into this mix to manage the media coming from the XT-2 plus a whole other bunch of sources..

Anyway let me know if you would like any more information

Thanks
Chris

[Ben Holmes]

Hi Chris

Thanks for the reply! That’s an interesting approach, glad to hear it worked well, as it looks like I’ll be doing this in a few months – I was planning on a SAN via a Gig-E switch as opposed to a Server/RAID storage setup, but I can’t see too many differences. EVS also have some new software for browsing the XT network directly from the FCP suites.

Love to talk more about this – hopefully we can get in touch.

Edit Out Ltd
—————————-
FCP Editor/Trainer/System Consultant
EVS/VT Supervisor for live broadcast
RED camera transfer/post
Independent Director/Producer

https://www.blackmagic-design.com/community/communitydetails/?UserStoryId=8757

[Charlie Tear]

Hi,

We’ve been providing EVS support and facilities in the UK for many years.

Providing IPDirector system integration since version 1 and have long been pushing Final Cut Pro for OB work, as well as Avid, Quantel and EVS CleanEdit Integration on the edit side and a variety of other Asset and Archive managements software suites.

If you have simple requirements then it really is a very straightforward system given its capabilities, and the beauty of the system is its flexibility.

On some of the larger projects we work on (50+ IPDirector seats, multiple broadcasters on different edit platforms, integration to third-party data feeds and metadata dictionarys) things can become very complicated.

For example we’ve seen wrangles with XSan file permissions etc when using StorNextFX clients to stream large numbers of high-bandwidth feeds for live editing etc and SMB services on OS X Server won’t help to make things any easier!

I would ask what you would like to achieve with Final Cut Server and what your workflow is?

Are you making sub clips from the EVS and editing from them or using IPDirector/Ingest Scheduler to stream for edit-while-ingest type applications? For long-term or temporary projects (you mentioned OB work so presumably its hosrt rather than fixed-term)

Are these needs likely to change in the future because if so this will definitely change how you should approach designing the system now.