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Testing something new in Premier (new for us at least)
We’re trying something new in Premiere CS6 – well new for us anyways… LIke many, our facility is a recent convert from FCP7 with three workstations. About a year ago we started to dabble with Premiere after the FCPX fiasco. So far, we’re really liking Premiere. Soooo, we thought we’d try something new and for the purpose of discussion would love to get some feedback, potential pitfalls or success stories.
Where are you Bob Zelin?
We’ve got a project with a bunch of media. We don’t have any kind of dedicated shared media solution (i.e small tree, etc…) but would like to try to have 2 different people working on it at the same time.
We have a Mac Mini with a Pegasus Thunderbolt Raid system on our standard gigabit network. It generally serves as a repository for all the raw footage we shoot and is backed up to another external drive. There are two other machines in this test. A MacPro (circa 2010) running 10.8.3 and a Windows 7 machine both running Adobe CS6.
All the media resides on the TB raid and is a mix of AVC-Intra and AVCHD. So far, (and it’s still early in this test) everything seems to be playing very nicely. Both machines seem to be accessing and playing back the “shared” media very well across the network. We even made sure to play back the same file at the same time without issue. One machine played, while the other scrubbed and visa vera – also without issue.
The two machines are working on separate “project files” as for now we just want to test to see if the “shared media” idea would work without any additional software/hardware. Has anyone had any issues with this approach? What problems (technical, logistical or otherwise) might arise? We’ll continue to test, play and generally try to “break” things and will report back with findings… wish us luck!
Oh, and if anyone has any thoughts or success stories on two workstations working on the same project (timelines, etc…), that would be interesting to learn about as well.
Steve Martin
Omni Productions
Orlando, FLProduction is fun – but lets not forget: Nobody ever died on the video table!
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9 Replies
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[Steve Martin] “Where are you Bob Zelin?”
He looked great in Las Vegas last week. Still the “same ol’ Bob!” He’s really concentrating more on infrastructure these days than just software anymore.
[Steve Martin] “The two machines are working on separate “project files” as for now we just want to test to see if the “shared media” idea would work without any additional software/hardware. Has anyone had any issues with this approach? What problems (technical, logistical or otherwise) might arise? We’ll continue to test, play and generally try to “break” things and will report back with findings… wish us luck!
“This is precisely how we do the shared projects at the moment. One editor has the main project, the other editor cuts on a “B” project and we merge them together manually. Adobe Anywhere is supposed to now allow us to share the exact same project at the exact same time, though we have not tried it yet.
However, at NAB I discovered Mint by FlavourSys. They were in the Small Tree Booth demonstrating Avid project sharing, but then I came to find out, they also do Adobe Premiere Pro project sharing. I’m going to be getting a demo of this in the next few weeks and will definitely be testing this thoroughly and post my findings either in this forum or as an article. I want to compare and contrast Adobe Anywhere vs. Mint to see how they work and which seems to be better.
By the way, have you looked at the Small Tree Titanium 5? The “SAN in a lunchbox” solution allows up to 6 people to be connected directly to the system. 2 to 4 TB drives for 10 to 20 TB of shared storage. Very reasonably priced. If you add 10gig to the box, you can improve your speeds.
For a smaller project, your connections will probably work, but if the project starts getting big with lots and longer timelines, I’ll be curious how well that holds up.
Good luck on the project!
Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Editor, Colorist, Director, Writer, Consultant, Author, Chef.
HD Post and Production
Biscardi Creative MediaFoul Water Fiery Serpent, an original documentary featuring Sigourney Weaver. US & European distribution by American Public Television
MTWD Entertainment – Developing original content for all media.
“This American Land” – our new PBS Series.
“Science Nation” – Three years and counting of Science for the People. -
Thanks Walter! I’ll check out the Small Tree product you mentioned and will look forward to your article/post on Anywhere and Mint.
In the meantime, I’ll continue to play with the shared media. This is something that I could never try in FCP7 because of the need to transcode everything to big QT files. Now that we’re working with native files in Premier Pro, it really shrinks the footprint of the media files (not to mention the time savings from the Log & Transfer process). In those cases where we need uncompressed or ProResHQ, I’ll still need to run the media locally on the workstation raid. But for many projects – this looks promising!
Also, on an unrelated note, after my visit to your facility last year, I stopped by the FSI office close to you and loved the monitors. We ended up getting one and love it!
Production is fun – but lets not forget: Nobody ever died on the video table!
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[Steve Martin] “Also, on an unrelated note, after my visit to your facility last year, I stopped by the FSI office close to you and loved the monitors. We ended up getting one and love it!”
So happy to hear that! I have to say that new 32″ model is absolutely positively droolworthy. Patrick Inhofer and I were about to duke it out over who gets the first one when Bram told us they already had an order for it…. 🙂
Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Editor, Colorist, Director, Writer, Consultant, Author, Chef.
HD Post and Production
Biscardi Creative MediaFoul Water Fiery Serpent, an original documentary featuring Sigourney Weaver. US & European distribution by American Public Television
MTWD Entertainment – Developing original content for all media.
“This American Land” – our new PBS Series.
“Science Nation” – Three years and counting of Science for the People. -
In Premiere Pro CS Next you will have the ability for the editor to import individual items from Project B into Project A via the Media Browser. Pretty slick.
Kevin Monahan
Social Support Lead
Adobe After Effects
Adobe Premiere Pro
Adobe Systems, Inc.
Follow Me on Twitter! -
[Kevin Monahan] “In Premiere Pro CS Next you will have the ability for the editor to import individual items from Project B into Project A via the Media Browser. Pretty slick.”
Totally forgot about that. No more importing entire projects just to get a single sequence. Yay!
Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Editor, Colorist, Director, Writer, Consultant, Author, Chef.
HD Post and Production
Biscardi Creative MediaFoul Water Fiery Serpent, an original documentary featuring Sigourney Weaver. US & European distribution by American Public Television
MTWD Entertainment – Developing original content for all media.
“This American Land” – our new PBS Series.
“Science Nation” – Three years and counting of Science for the People. -
And we will attach to the original media instead of duplicating masters…
Cheers
Dave
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David McGavran, Adobe Systems Incorporated
Senior Engineering Manager Adobe Premiere Pro
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[David McGavran] “And we will attach to the original media instead of duplicating masters…”
Dave…..that is the BEST news for PPro in workgroups I have heard all NAB….
THANK YOU!!!!!!
Alex Udell
Editing, Motion Graphics, and Visual FX -
Hi Walter,
thanks for pointing out Mint. We had a lot of great feedback at the NAB show and will roll it out as soon as we can! The product is so new, that we haven’t anything on our website yet but we are working on it. However, here is a flyer that we gave away at the NAB show.https://piturtle.com/load/mint_flyer_web.pdf
Mint will be available as a 4 seat and 8 seat package and provides project sharing for the major editing tools. It is a software-only product and can be installed onto existing NAS (Linux based) or SAN storage devices (StorNext, HyperFS & (soon) XSan). In the US it is distributed via Avnet.Best regards – Marco
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Just saw this thread…
If you’ll be using shared assets in Premiere Pro, I would think you might want to go to your preferences-media tab to make sure all the XML Metadata linking and writing is off. With two instances of PPro accessing one media file and both are trying to write media cache files next to original files and writing IDs and linking, etc, etc…it could get strange.
I don’t know how Walter does it…I’m a single user shop, but I do save projects to my NAS and access it later from other machines occasionally.
TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,Adobe Certified Instructor
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