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Large project set up Advice please
Hello,
Myself and another editor are about to take on a very large project. We are editing on PPRO CS3, we will be loading up to 80 Sony XDCAM disks (MXF), along with other formats (most DV). We will be completing about 80 short videos for a DVD set of instructional videos.
We would like to go into this as prepared as possible. But this is larger than the typical corporate videos we are accustomed to. Typically we work off of external harddrives that we buy at costco (USB2.0 or Firewire400), and all of our assets, project files, etc are located on one drive. However, now that we will be working with potentially TBs of footage, i think we need a better system to be able to media share between our 2 (10 feet apart) work stations. I wondered if it were possible to connect both PCs to mutual 1TB drives without running into bandwidth issues, etc. Or should we look at an affordable local-server of some sort?
Please advise if you have experience with similar projects. And also, any other advice on issues we may not have considered is greatly appreciated!
Thanks!
-Derek
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1 Reply
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Well, first of all, PPro can’t tolerate large projects. I’ve had medium sized projects (15 hours of source video and some other stuff) and the projects take literally 20 minutes to load. So the first thing I would do is find a way to keep the video files separated into smaller projects – if possible. It will be worth the extra effort to keep it a bunch of small projects.
Secondly, obviously XDCAM will not play off of USB drive. I have SATAII drives that just managed them at draft quality.
Third – I don’t know about sharing the footage on two systems – you might be better off with some duplication. I have my systems set up with External SATA Hard Drive Docs. If I need to move the project, I can pop the drive and move it. The Media Preferences matter here – I target the files to the same drive but the database to the c: drive. When a project is moved, it has to build a new media cache database but not the audio files or index files – usually. I am on CS4 so the media preferences are likely different in CS3 – can’t remember anymore.
Otherwise, a fiberchannel network drive…???
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