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Terabyte NAS for Premiere Pro?
I was looking in a magazine recently and ran across Buffalo’s Terabyte Network Attached Storage box. It got me to thinking, would that work as a small-scale video server? We have 4 Premiere Pro boxes that we’re running and doing day-to-day commercial and promo work for the TV station. More often than not, only 2 are running at any one time. But something we’ve always struggled with is sharing video, and sharing projects. Would something like this work in realtime? I’d be interested to know, because at under $1000 for a 1.0 Terabyte system, the pricepoint is right if it works. Thanks
Chris Kelly
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4 Replies
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I doubt if this would be a solution for anything other than storing your media and projects.
Although a simple single DV stream requires 25Mbits, a realtime dissolve between two clips will up that rate to 50Mbits during the transition and that’s just for a simple effect on one machine.
You would need a 1000-baseT network, with a maximum of one switch to distribute the video without network interruption. The NAS would also have to supply un-interrupted streams for realtime use and I very much doubt if it would be up to the task, bearing in mind the drives in NAS boxes aren’t that fast and they aren’t designed for video use.
Anything more than DV25 is out of the running. There’s a reason why Avid Unity and LANShare servers cost so much.
The Avid solution would do what you want in realtime with many formats fully supported including graphics files etc.
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I am setting up a 4 seat PP network, but instead of a NAS I am using a SAN(storage area network). This allows each computer on the network to look at the central storage as if it were a local drive, so you can share video files and projects(although you can’t work on the same project).
These solutions are more expensive than NAS because of the software required for the SAN. This could run approximately $1000 a seat or more depending on the software. also, you will need a switch. Then there is what kind of pipes are you going to put the data through. There’s been talk of using ISCSI over ethernet. Also editshare has a solution. They are less expensive than the althernative– fibre channel. Again costs here are high. Right now it ain’t just the cost of the storage.Hope this is helpful.
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I’ve thought about doing the same. Most of our long form footage is DvCPro and could be stored centrally, but keep all the uncompressed renders etc locally on each computer.
I guess one could test the throughput by putting your media files on one of your existing computers and peer sharing it out to another and see what the throughput is like.
Shane
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I just bumped into a PC Magazine review of NAS s . The cheaper ones didn’t have great thoughput. Sorry I lost the link.
Shane
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