Premiere Pro and SAN without Adobe Anywhere?

[Tim Donahue]

I talked to an Adobe rep at an event last year and expressed my interest in an intra-office version of Anywhere that allowed for project collaboration between multiple editors. He acknowledged that they were aware of this as a feature people were interested in but that’s about it. I have high hopes for Adobe at NAB, especially with larger and larger projects happening this more advanced collaboration would be super helpful.

To come closer to actually answering your question, we have multiple machines connected to an XRaid stack via fibre, but the PPro software limitations result in having to duplicate project files as to avoid opening and saving while someone else is working and potentially corrupting a file. Transferring sequences is also cumbersome, as you get duplicates of all clips in the project even if you are already connected to the media. If you aren’t using that media that’s fine, but if you already have it in the project it would be nice to be able to disable creating duplicate clips.

Overall it works ok, you just have to be careful when people are working at the same time.

[Nathan Tinsley]

Right I understand that you have to be careful about opening two projects at the same time but we would never do that. We won’t really be doing that whole “dynamic collaboration” thing. I just want 4 editors to be able to hit ONE shared media drive all at the same time. My intention for sharing media would go like this:

Editor 1 starts a project in a folder on the SAN and puts all his media in that project folder. It’s a raw camera file folder, straight from a camera media card. He copies it to the root of the project folder. Then he imports the raw into a bin and starts editing.

Editor 2 starts ANOTHER project and needs 2 shots from Editor 1’s media. Is there any penalty for him to browse to Editor1’s raw camera data folder and import 2 clips into his OWN bin. Now the two are editing from the same media.

Am I in the ball bark here? Or am I way out in left field?

Thanks

Nate

NT

[Alex Udell]

Nope….no penalty.

I have worked in facilities from 2 to 10 stations. (both of which I had a hand in architecting)

One with a dedicated fibre attached SAN. One with a Fast Raid where the 2nd machine was drive letter mapped the same array via GigE.

My experience is that PPro doesn’t much care as long as it has the path to the file, and that the topology playing back the file has the overhead necessary for all users to see it.

Because there is no “owner” or Database in control….It might be wise to set media permissions to READ ONLY once material is brought online and meta tagged to prevent inadvertent deletion when more than one person is accessing a file for work.

So bottom line….Browsing and using the same media files…no worries…project collaboration…is doable…but some workflows work better than others….

for example…serial passing of projects work fine….one editor starts and does an offline. 2nd editor in another suite picks up the project and does an online….or in some way pushes a project along.

But merging of projects split amongst multiple editors has traditionally created project bloat in PPro. This may have changed recently though….as I understand that if a sequence from another project is imported through the Media Browser Panel may not suffer the traditional redundant media object build up that was the case previously.

maybe someone else can chime in?

Alex Udell
Editing, Motion Graphics, and Visual FX