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Sharing
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Don’t get caught up on the 200 editors thing. No one has 200 editors working on the same show. What Mark is describing is a facility that cuts dozens of shows with thousands of media clips being accessed by not only editors, but story producers, logging PAs, and other people who don’t actually edit with the clips but sometimes need to view them.
The most important logging info that is added to clips in these shops by the AEs is right there in the name of the clip. That’s why most shops use some kind of logical naming convention like Mark said. Avid has numerous other ways that individual editors organize their clips. They copy clips into separate bins, they color label, the assign markers and type comments into the markers, they create sub-clips and store the sub-clips in their personal bins.
Andy
https://www.timesavertutorials.com
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Jeremy,
True – back in the old days of FCP 7 and previous versions there were tiny little files as well. At our site we badly needed a central storage of media files and these included render files (so that each sequence could be opened rendered on any of the edit stations). But also cache files (especially waveform cache) were needed – these had to be common as well so that every editor could see them correctly. These – as you sure remember – were kept in a flat structure (single folder), there were lots of them and they were small in size. Stored on xSan volume they tended to slow the entire system down dramatically, so we learned to use another drive (just HFS+ formatted) and everything worked fine.
Such choices are not possible in FCPX anymore. Of course you can use media files that are external to your event folder, but proxies must be kept along with the rest of event. And we badly need proxies, typically using 9 angles multiclips, sound recorded as multiple separate files that must play in sync etc. We typically have way more than a 100 hours of video within a single episode we make and what we actually need is a common pool of over a 1000 hours of video. It’s not only a matter of bandwidth but also the fact that some 40 different files are being read on playback at a time. So we have the same volume for everything, the same block size parameter, while in fact this is an either-or choice. Our events tend to swell and beyond some level the system slows (I don’t know what really matters here and can only guess – the overall size of the media, the complexity, the sheer number of clips). It takes forever to get an event open and you have to wait quite a while before your playback starts. Pretty annoying when you try to edit to the music so that people dance to it or something. I can’t be sure what really causes these performance issues but my bet is that file sizes and inappropriate block sizes are one of the reasons.
You’re right – San can be and in fact is a bottleneck for our production, but avoiding San storage solves only a half of the problems we face. We still need RAIDs (even though local) and the formatting optimization remains a problem.
Plus the database mantra as someone pointed this out here – it’s a sheer absurd. I myself love the way keywords collections are organized (still some bugs in it though). But what’s the use of the database only single user can read at a time?
I am now in charge of another major production here which we chose to do with FCPX and we are having hard time here. Adobe and Premiere Pro is still an option for us. I don’t have to generate proxy files – if my San network proves a bottleneck (well it should easily allow for the transfers required, even though it involves 9 streams of HD video plus numerous audio tracks) we can always switch to half or quarter resolution and everything works just fine. It’s way faster than switching to proxy playback in FCPX plus I don’t need to render and store those files. Adobe’s Prelude solution for metadata works fine as well – only the metadata coming with the file that’s currently being edited is not accessible (to write – not to read) by other users. The only reason we actually went for FCPX now is that it offers kewords for multiclips and compound clips. I’m now not sure if it was really worthy as several overlapping ranges in keywords (and that’s what we need) cause errors.
After years spent with FCP we find it easier to switch to Adobe as it is simply more similar to old FCP. The advantages of FCPX are clear, but I feel it’s still a promise rather than a fact.
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[Pawel Kasprzak] “if my San network proves a bottleneck (well it should easily allow for the transfers required, even though it involves 9 streams of HD video plus numerous audio tracks) we can always switch to half or quarter resolution and everything works just fine. It’s way faster than switching to proxy playback in FCPX plus I don’t need to render and store those files. “
I don’t think lowering the resolution will save you any disk bandwidth. Frame data is usually compressed and always encoded. Any application has to read the entire compressed frame from disk before it can decompress it for processing.
Even with bayered or wavelet-encoded media, you still have to read the frame data and reducing resolution usually just saves on processing time.
Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events -
[Pawel Kasprzak] “Such choices are not possible in FCPX anymore. “
Yes, the separation of render files from the Event has been a long standing feature request.
And now the ability to separate Generated media out of the Library would also be welcome for all the reasons you state.
For now, you have to do this manually, or generate proxies at every station, locally. Each of these is not ideal, of course.
I am finding that performance with 10.1 seems to be markedly improved. Events/Libraries load much faster, thumbnails load much faster and don’t seem to slow things down as much. All in all, I think this is a very significant update.
[Pawel Kasprzak] “Plus the database mantra as someone pointed this out here – it’s a sheer absurd. I myself love the way keywords collections are organized (still some bugs in it though). But what’s the use of the database only single user can read at a time?”
Yes. I don’t know why you can’t load a read only Library in FCPX. It seems odd, and it would only seem to add capability in sharing.
FCPX allows a user to change playback quality as well, not as many options as Adobe, but it is an option.
Have you done much testing with Pr on your SAN?
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[Walter Soyka] “I don’t think lowering the resolution will save you any disk bandwidth. Frame data is usually compressed and always encoded. Any application has to read the entire compressed frame from disk before it can decompress it for processing.”
This is what makes me wonder. I haven’t got the slightest idea how this is done, but I saw disk transfers on playback and it decreased when playback got switched to lowered resolution. As if Premiere was reading every other pixel – amazing considering what you wrote, true for sure. As if they got their way into the codec’s compression algorithms being able to still read sort of half the data required. Just give it a test – you get dropped frames on full res playback (clearly due to transfer issues), you switch and dropped frames vanish plus you see decreased network / disk transfers.
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Jeremy,
No – I’m pretty new to Premiere, but so far I love what I see. I will for sure test it more. And our tests are really going to be crash tests – considering this lots of media we use, concurrent video streams we play etc.
It’s interesting what you mention about manually moving the proxies outside the event folder. I tried this – the proxies were stored on our xSan volume and took some tricks to fool FCPX into reading it from there. It didn’t work though – I got dropped frames which made editing impossible.
Looking at the transfers I thought FCPX reads San data some other way FCP 7 did. Reading multiclips from San under FCP7 you see pretty much constant transfer rate, under FCPX it gets jumpy.
The only configuration I find working is to store everything locally. New iMacs plus one of those LaCie 20TB thunderbolt arrays seem really great solution, OpenCL acceleration works great etc. Still – as our events swell we are in trouble. Pretty annoying to wait half a day for your events to get updated when your deadline is coming up…
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[Jeremy Garchow] “Even with Avid, you can’t have two people writing to th”
What Avid offers is still not really a database. In a database system only a single record in the database gets blocked and only for editing when some (authorized) user keeps working on it. Others can still read it seeing this record with data prior to last changes. The rest of the bin, folder or table remains accessible (according to privileges) to others in the network. Adobe did it pretty much this way.
You edit files metadata with the soft called Prelude there. What it does is it adds a text file that shares the same file name with your media. This file stores subclip information for use in Premiere and is saved in the same location as media file. Each time you import media to Premiere, the data from this file gets loaded as well. Even more – Premiere uploads current versions of metadata files on configurable time intervals, so from within your Premiere project you see current updates showing up as your loggers add new data. Certainly this all works in the network and only the file corresponding to a single media file that’s being edited gets blocked for editing, being readable for others.
I think the car analogy doesn’t really apply here. It’s not just car – it’s a spaceship or something 🙂 It’s being steered by a crew of people.
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And of course, you can’t wipe your friends on your lapel…
Joe Bourke
Owner/Creative Director
Bourke Media
http://www.bourkemedia.com -
You can create your own column (e.g. “comment 2”)that will travel with the clips.
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