Portent of things to come – huge downloads

[Craig Seeman]

[walter biscardi] “You might be right on the VAR thing. They download it for their clients and then ship them on discs.”

It’s going to be a nightmare for bigger facilities too. Of course with a release like this I’d recommend doing one workstation which might be heavily used but on less demanding tests, to see how buggy the software is. Then they can stagger installs to their other seats.

I can imagine a VAR being able to setup some kind of “facility” account where they can do one download for a “facility” based iTunes account and then install from a disc on location.

The strange thing if there’s any way to manage this through VARs they aren’t talking and I can’t see something like how such things are handled being served by an NDA at this. This really requires some advance facility management and scheduling.

[Walter Biscardi]

[Craig Seeman] “It’s going to be a nightmare for bigger facilities too. Of course with a release like this I’d recommend doing one workstation which might be heavily used but on less demanding tests, to see how buggy the software is. Then they can stagger installs to their other seats.”

I think we’re finally going to move forward with an idea I’ve toyed with in the past. Install the new OS, all our software to a single brand new 1TB Drive. Then clone that to 6 other drives for all our multiple workstations. On each clone, simply throw away the serial number information and re-enter the correct serial number for each workstation. Pop the cloned hard drive inside the Mac Pro, re-set the Startup disk and away we go.

I’ve talked to a few engineers and they say this concept does work and has been used by some other facilities in the past. Seems simple enough.

Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Editor, Colorist, Director, Writer, Consultant, Author, Chef.
HD Post and Production
Biscardi Creative Media

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[Michael Kammes]

Walter, what you do is 100% awesome, and all the VARs I’ve worked at in the past 6 years have done this.

Master Build on a HDD with a clean OS and base apps installed, like FCS 3/ FCP7. Enter in master SN, perform updates. This drive is then cloned to every system that needs it. When FCP launches, it realizes that the CPU has changed, and you enter serial number. Viola. Shaves hours off system builds. Also allows for swapping of drives if you suddenly need a CPU to work as if it were another machine.

To streamline this even more, we have a hardware cloner, that clones drives bit by bit via a physical hard drive duplicator. Rock Solid. In a pinch, I’ve used Carbon Copy Cloner as well.

~Michael

.: michael kammes mpse
.: senior applications editor . post workflow consultant
.: audio specialist . act fcp . acsr
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