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Make a RAID invisible to the machine it is attached to but visible and mountable through AVID over the network
Hi,
I’m using avid media composer 6.5 and have a situation where I need to start a project which references media on a RAID attached to a different machine than my own but which will be visible over the network.
Basically, a project was started using multiple external hard drives, however this workflow was very problematic and cumbersome especially because of the ever-growing size of the project. I have upgraded the infrastructure and there are now machines linked peer to peer each with internal RAID as storage. One machine will be a master machine, operating a master copy of all the media on the different drives in the one place and I will then copy that to all the other machine on the network so everyone is working off mirrors of one another. Trouble is, the time it would take to sort duplicate media from each drive was too long when the editors needed to work, so I just copied the entire contents of their external drives wholesale to my RAID on my machine (machine 1) and then set all that media to copy over the network to another of the new empty RAIDs attached to (machine 2). By copying all of it at once, there were windows dialogues mentioning that files already existed, so I skipped them thus theoretically meaning duplicates should be eliminated.
My next step is to test that theory by making a project which has all the bins from everyone’s version of the project and seeing if all the media is online when linking to machine 2. There’s problems here though. Number 1 is that I need to be able to see the network drive in Avid, which at the moment it seems I can’t, even though it’s a mapped drive. Problem number 2 is that even if I eventually see it, the editor using machine 2 is still working, using his external drive. Currently he had no issues with Avid scanning his RAID while I copied to machine 2 because the folder I copied to was not named Avid MediaFiles but I’ll have to rename it for my test, this means that it will become another potential target drive to machine 2’s editor while he works and if he does anything during his work that affects the database files it might cause corruptions.
What’s needed is to keep machine 2’s internal RAID invisible to it’s editor (who’s still working off his external drive) but visible to me (machine 1) over the network.
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1 Reply
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For what it’s worth, I was still composing this message when the editors and I hit upon a solution which has worked remarkably well so far.
I posted the last message anyway so that anybody in this situation should it ever arise again can read the solution.
We created a directory named something other than Avid MediaFiles on machine 2’s RAID let’s say ‘consolidated_material’ for example’s sake. We then placed the Avid MediaFiles folder in to this as a subdirectory. Then we mapped the ‘consolidated_material’ folder as a network drive in it’s own right which meant that for windows, it was a drive containing nothing but Avid MediaFiles on it’s root directory.
Then I opened Avid, copied bins from other versions of the project in to the new master project version I was making and then switched enabled Avid to see network mapped drives as media drives in order for it find the newly mapped network drive (X:) and scan the Avid MediaFiles folder within, which it did.
This worked but would have been very difficult if the network were more complex than the 4 machines ours consists of and if anybody were actually using the RAID to work from at the time, in our case we’re still moving to the RAID and so everyone is still using their external drives so everything I do has no effect on everyone else’s ability to work.
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