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Wanting to setup SAN network for church production
Hey everyone,
I am quite new to SANs, but very interested in their potential, so i need some help thinking through our idea.We want to get an xserve raid, probably the 10TB one for data storage, mainly media that is being or has been created.
It would be awesome if multiple people could be working on files from this server simultaneously. We have 5 Mac Pros that we would want to do this from primarily, but possibly a few extra Macbook Pros.Now, how do we go about this?
-We have thought about having one of the single Mac Pros as the controller for the Xserve raid connected through fiber, but i dont really think using the xserve as a networked drive through a highly used computer is a very good idea. also, i think speed would be an issue.
-what if we got a xserve to control the xserve raid, and then hook up all our macpros through gigabit ethernet to the xserve, or even better, use fiber from all the macpros, but i have no idea how to accomplish that.
-do we need a seperate san controller?
obviously, we really need some help. so, if you happen to know anything more than we do… please.. help.
THANKS!
Erik Mitchell -
3 Replies
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Hi Erik,
There are many viable options for building a shared storage solution for video editing. Please provide more information so people here can help:
1- What is the video format you are editing? Is it DV, DVCPro HD, uncompress SD, etc.
2- What kind of editing do you do? Are you pulling more than 2 video streams on each stations, or are you essentially doing A/B roll + titles?
3- What video application are you using? FCP, Avid, Adobe?
4- How sensitive are you to drop frames?
5- Do you have a reasonable budget to do this?
An Ethernet network might be sufficient for DV editing, but it will be more difficult to ensure there are no drop frames. If you primarely output to DVD, or encode for web, this might be just fine. But if you need to edit HD or capture and print to tape reliably while everyone else is working, you will definitely be better off with a Fibre-Channel based SAN… Of course, the two budgets are very different.
Cheers,
Bernard Lamborelle
Tiger Technology
+1 514 667 2015 -
Wow, Bernard, thanks for jumping in to help. I had asked this question and then we got extremely busy. I somehow completely missed your reply to my question until I was thinking about SANs again today and wanted to read the cow for some tips… Anyway, thanks!
Now, the answers…
Right now, we primarily edit DV and uncompressed SD. We have cameras for and will eventually edit DVCProHD.
Most of the editing we do uses FCPs multicam sequencing, so we’re pulling multiple feeds. At least to this point, we never have more than 4 cameras per sequence.
That also answers the next question, we use FCP.
If we drop a few frames.. eh, who will notice?
5 – um, define reasonable. reasonable to a tv exec could be 200k+. reasonable to a small church would be 5k. reasonable to us.. maybe 60k for the whole package. we could definitely afford to go higher if we can communicate the need.the most important thing to us is that the san would split up rendering from fcp, everyone can evenly use the storage, and as a plus, the computers connected could help render AE files. is that too much to ask?
Thanks again. I look forward to some changes in the way we work here!
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Hi Erik,
This is certainly very doable. In fact, there are a number of ways you could go. I would be happy to discuss these with you and offer some advice. We don’t sell direct, but if interrested I can connect you with one of our resellers that will gladly provide a detailed proposal for your setup.
Please feel free to drop me a personal email with contact or give me a ring.
Bernard Lamborelle
Tiger Technology
bernard at tiger-technology dot com
+1 514 667 2015
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