Setting up Premiere Pro with Facilis Terrablock

[Alex Udell]

I used Terrablock and PPro CS3 at a facility.(I actually spec’d it, installed it, supported it, and then took a job there as a senior editor)…

We had a pretty simple volume per project workflow with some volumes coming from common “Library” volumes.

We set up scratch disks in the project volume.

When the next editor opened the project everything was there.

For us a key (on windows) was setting up everything thru the C:->volume mapping…

in other words..volumes showing as C:/volumes/name of volume.
it’s also important to remind editors to import assets into a project via media browser or whatever) thru that path…

I think this is pretty standard with terrablock now…it was new when we were working.

just because windows (at that time) didn’t have an easy way to always map the same letters to vloumes when mounting. so that would break media links when opening a project on different systems…so projects required relinking…

sorry for the outdated info….but that’s what I can contribute….

Alex Udell
Editing, Motion Graphics, and Visual FX

[Alex Udell]

also….check on performance with P2 mxf structures….when using facilis.

I never had an issue (we were mostly HDV)… but I was conversing on some threads here where ppl were complaining specifically and speed with that format.

Alex Udell
Editing, Motion Graphics, and Visual FX

[Peter Price]

Hi Christian,

I have a facility running a Terrablock and running Mac workstations via Fiber to the Facilis, and running Premiere Pro and Avid Media Composer. As of now, I’ve set the Cache in the media tab to be placed in the same folder as the project, or something along those lines in the settings, and we haven’t had any problems so far, however Adobe has warned me that they generally suggest keeping the cache files local to the machine because it is a very chatty connection and could hinder speed and performance on the Terrablock, but we have not run into this as of yet. But yes…in saving the files on the Terrablock, the hope is to be able to open the project from another bay without having to reimport or recache material in the project….

[Christian Simpson]

Thanks for sharing your experience Peter. I believe I am going to try and do the same and I will report back and let you all know if I am experiencing any issues.

[Chad Gilmour]

We have 2 Macs and 1 Windows connected via Fibre to our Terrablock. Having the volumes mapped through the C: drive is key for us to collaborate. We have mixed feelings about placing/sharing render files or the media cache on a Terrablock volume. It did work for us in that one editor could open up a project and inherit the render files or cache files created by another editor. However sometimes they would mysteriously go offline, sometimes render files can get “stuck” and create odd results on final outputs, and some of my editors swear it’s much slower than keeping the media cache/render on a local (non-OS) drive. All that to say, we tried it, it did technically work, but we gave up on it because of some in-frequent anomalies.