Re: Major Avid Problems

[Jon Zanone]

..Which is why Avid charges so much for Unity.

Its not the hardware, so much as the software. It acts as a traffic cop – telling each machine wether or not to update their own internal media databases. Without it, you’ll have your systems constantly updating and slowing down performance. You won’t be able to use this as shared storage unless you have Unity, or somethign like EditShare (approved by Avid). Either way, you are looking at buying at least the software, if not the whole package. If a vendor told you this would work, I’d go back and ask them to make it work.

On the bright side, you’ve got a bunch of NAS drives…

Jon

“So you want to throw out the old you – but the old you is old enough to know it won’t make it better”
Del Amitri – “Make it Better”

[Bob Zelin]

who is the idiot that told you that this would work ! ?
You need a Shared Area Network (SAN), which can be AVID Unity, Facilis Terablock, EditShare, Studio Network Solution, or other SAN products that are designed to allow for file sharing of media. If you had a generic network guy set this up for you, he has no background in doing this, and has no idea of what is involved, and has screwed you.

Isn’t there something you can do, since you just spent all this money – NO YOU ARE SCREWED. NEVER ask an IT guy about AVID shared storage.

And while I am at it, large drive volumes (like your 24 500 Gig drives, split into 12 partitions) will eventually cause you to see MEDIA OFFLINE errors even on a single AVID system. Your partitions are TOO LARGE, as you can’t have more than 10,000 files per AVID volume before seeing MEDIA OFFLINE errors (and you will think that your drives are failing, when all you had to do was create smaller partitions).

bob Zelin

[Grinner Hester]

Bob, your knowledge is always enlightening.
Usually too damn late tho.
😉
I had a medea drive that use to hickup on me and throw stuff offline when I still saw it on the drive. I remember 36 hour sessions of recreation to meet deadlines.
I should put your cell number in my phone, man.

[Bouke Vahl]

Bob,
Do your homework!
He’s got an Ardis Technology RAID system.
That works, when set up properly, with Iscsi and is VERY WELL suited for Avid work. And they are DIRT CHEAP, and use generic parts instead of custom stuff, so you can get your spare parts / newer/bigger drives wherever you want.
And no, they are not SAN systems straight out of the box, but they are shared storage.

Next, I HAVE GOT AN ARDIS RAID TOO! Do you call me stupid, cheap and unexperienced? I certainly don’t feel screwed with Ardis, my RAID has been humming away nicely in the basement.

Next, Ardis Tech support is excellent. If you want to bitch about their stuff, take it up with them directly.
Mail bart@ardistech.com

Mind you, if you want to come over and raise the double barrel, this guy lives in the same city as i do.
He’ll be having more friends than you around here.

Now points about huge partitions are valid NO MATTER the system you use.

Bouke

http://www.videoToolShed.com
smart tools for video pro’s

[Bouke Vahl]

Otis,
I take it you have created NTFS drives, not Network drives.
If not, you are screwed indeed. This won’t work for media (but just fine for avid projects)

Next,
Do you have SAN software installed?
If not, there is only one way you can have mutliple avids sharing the same media, that is by making a virtual drive.
If you try to connect an already used drive to another machine, you should get a warning that this will be a copy.

You can write to it, but the files you write from second or third machines to the ‘copy’ drives will be thrown away when you exit the session. So no problem for dirty fast preview renders, but DO NOT use this if you want to make mixdowns and re-use them later! They WILL be offline after a session.

So by this, only the first machine will keep track of the media databases and will be able to write files that stay alive.

Bouke

http://www.videoToolShed.com
smart tools for video pro’s

[Bob Zelin]

Hi Bouke –
I just went thru the entire Artis tech site –
https://www.ardistech.com/main.html?id=13&lang=

The link above is for the iSCSI array. I don’t see any mention of the ability to handle AVID Media Databases, or metadata, (or destroy them on multiple systems). Do you have to use a product like MetaSAN to get this to run with multiple systems, because unless I am missing something, I don’t see how you would share AVID Media with this product.

Please point me in the right direction on the http://www.artistech.com website.

Bob Zelin

[Richard Garry]

Hello all,
Thanks for your response. Yes the drives are set up as NTFS, and we’re running MetaSan software. As far as I’m aware the Avids are connected via Cat 5 ethernet. We used to run 2 suites on a shared raid provided by Dreamtek and had all sorts of problems with that from time to time. This new Raid is supposed to work and hasn’t been set up by an IT guy.
I acknowledge what you are saying about Unity, and I did urge the powers that be to look into that route, in fact our satellite engineers have just done an Avid Certified Course and they both said it was useless as with regards to the Raid side of things, because the course dealt exclusively with Avids own Unity! The fact that they failed the course is academic, unlike them.

Thanks again guys, if anyone has anything to add to this it would be appreciated, otherwise we’ll wait for our Avid engineer and the Raid guy to fly out next week.

Cheers

Otis

[Richard Garry]

As a matter of interest, what are we talking money-wise for a Unity system, say for 5 seats and 20 terrabytes of storage?

Cheers

Otis

[Bouke Vahl]

Bob,
I can’t point you to something on their site.
What i can tell you is the following:
Tech support is good. They have experience with a lot of stuff, and they do not sell you something with false promisses. I got a system to test for a long time before buying, without even paying. Now i don’t know if a reseller tells other things, but my experience with them has been good.

Now i don’t know how MetaSan software works. The way we work is NOT using Metasan, but making ‘virtual’ copies of a drive, fooling Avid in thinking it is writing to the drive (in fact it is, but the drive does not exist).
Thus, you can generate a project, work with existing media, render etc, but only one system is able to digitize. (others are, but as they work on a virtual drive, all media generated is lost after the session)

For Otis, do contact Ardis, they will try to help you. And, use Cat6 instead of Cat5. Also (so i’m told), the quality of attaching the cable to the connectors (difficult job) can make a speed difference, but Bob will know more about this.

Bouke

http://www.videoToolShed.com
smart tools for video pro’s

[Bart Thissen]

Hi Bob,

You are right that the iSCSI server does not handle the Avid Media Database. We use the product MetaSan from Tiger Technologies for this. This has a special ‘Avid Virtialization Mode’ where it virtualy renames the OMFI Media Files directory for each Avid for it to write it’s own database, but presents the ‘merge’ of all those directories for all Avid’s to read. See the Tiger Technologies website for more information.

As about Otis problem: we think those Avid’s need to be reinstalled. I logged in remotely (over WebEx) and saw the command ‘ping’ running in a DOS box failing with an exception/illegal instruction error. AFAIK it is planned for an engeneer to do this reinstall somewhere next week(s).

Cheers,
Bart