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Ideal AE small studio pipeline
I’m looking for suggestions as to what type of server/asset management system we should setup.
We have 5 employees. We make tons of training videos in AE and are running a gigabit network. We’ve got 5 3 ghz 1gb ram computers and 2 mac g5s. We deal with gigs and gigs of video files. Basically my question is do we go with a file server and have ea person pull from that. Or do we localize it on ea machine and deal with the copies and copies of video files?
Currently we’ve got an AE template file on the file server and we also keep all the assets (graphics, video files, AE files) on the server. We have setup the network so that the files are located on everyone’s Z: drive to keep the AE file paths consistent. However I’m just fearful that we’re gonna run into lag problems with the network. Is there a better setup? Should we localize to get all the files on our scratch disks? I dunno. Any input would be helpful.
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2 Replies
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Utilizing large files off the network is never ideal. We always copy the files we need to the local machine.
2 major benefits:
1) Fast performance
2) If you back up you AE files tot he server, you end up with a double backup – All files on both machines. If one fails, you just need to relink the files. If you keep the same structure, it’s easy to do.
In my AE projects I use this Structure in a given projects folder:
AE_Proj
Images
Artwork
Video
Audio
3D_StuffBy doing this, AE files will always look locally for the files, rathert than on a particular drive.
You can get large harddrives fairly cheap, so it’s worth getting on (internor or external) for every machine.
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Aharon Rabinowitz
aharon(AT)yahoo(DOT)com
http://www.allbetsareoff.com
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Creative Cow Master Series DVD
particleIllusion Fusion Volume 1
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If you have the money, you can get fail-safe centralized storage (SAN or NAS) that will run nearly as fast (and sometimes faster) than local storage. The fastest solutions will run on a Fibre Channel network (XSan/XRaid, etc), although there are other solutions out there that will run on GigE (look at Maximum Throughput Sledgehammer and Studio Network Solutions GlobalSAN).
Good luck, Sean
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