SAN editing with multiple suites

[David Roth weiss]

Rick,

As I also posted on the Disreet Edit Forum… Xsan is Apple’s SAN solution, which is the concept you’ve asked about.

See the following link for an explanation of Xsan: https://searchstorage.techtarget.com/originalContent/0,289142,sid5_gci996860,00.html

DRW

[Editshare]

Hi Rick,

Not sure if you’ve heard of EditShare… it actually provides a lot more functionality than Xsan in terms of true media sharing at File Level. Unity will not work for FCP and Xsan is not the most user friendly of systems. Check out the website which has plenty more information on it… http://www.editshare.co.uk

Hope this helps, let me know if you need more information. A lot of our cutomers are now looking at FCP (current Avid users… including large broadcasters) and EditShare as a solution.

James

[Kevin Monahan]

I operated a 10 seat Xsan in the Spring at, shall we say, a large computer company–and it’s not that bad to operate. You just have to be aware of all the IP addresses of the nodes. A little UNIX helps, but I had all the relevant commands in Apple’s Xsan Pro Training Book. It’s slim, but has all the info you’d need to keep your SAN up and running. It’s so cool to be able to pull media from one souce. It makes for a very smooth workflow with ProApps. Most cool is distributed encoding for DVDSP and rendering for Shake.

That being said, I’ll take a look at EditShare. I’m curious.

Kevin Monahan
Take My FCP Master’s Seminar!
fcpworld.com

[Mark Raudonis]

Rick,

We operate a 100 seat x-SAN/FCP system.

Sharing common media is NO PROBLEM! If you’re smart about how you organize your media, you can actually take advantage of the fact that FCP uses QT files accessible by anyone with just a quick time player.

Feel free to contact me off-list if you’d like my “Real World” impressions of X-SAN.

Mark

[Editshare]

Xsan does do a good job, but if you’re looking for a system that will manage all the file permissions for you without having to think about it, then it’s not so good. It really comes down to what you want to do, how you want to work and how much effort you want to put into managing the system. With a product like EditShare, or Unity for Avids, all of the media management is done in the background, so you don’t get read – write issues if multiple editors are using the same media files.

As mark says, sharing common media is no problem… but you have to really know what you’re doing in order to do that. With EditShare, you capture your media and then click on ‘share’. Anyone else who has been given permission to use that media space will then be able to use that media… all at the same time, and without affecting any other editor.

James

[Torrey Loomis]

Rick,

We love to talk with you more about Xsan for your facility.

Torrey Loomis
President – Silverado Systems
Apple Pro Video VAR
Apple Xsan for Pro Video Certified
1108 Sandwick Way
Folsom, CA 95630
(916) 806-7189
tloomis@silverado.cc
https://www.Silverado.cc

We have Panasonic DVCPRO HD and Sony HDCAM

Check out our rates at https://www.silverado.cc/rentals.html

[Scnyc]

Rick,

Torrey helped us add an additional 14 TBs of storage (30 TBs total) to our shared Xsans system with 9 seats. I would definately recommend Torrey and his company to help you navigate the potential missteps one might make setting up or adding to their Xsans sytem.