XSAN and Premiere Pro

[Alex Udell]

I have used PPro on a SAN.

We had some volumes on the SAN set up as Libraries for common elements of video and audio. These were typically set up as “READ ONLY” so that people wouldn’t accidentally delete things that other were dependent on in the library.

Our workflow was project based.
So a producer would create a project and offline the edit and then the online editor would pick up the volume and complete the edit. In this instance we decided that the Projects would live on the SAN and we set Premiere up to create the media caches “Same as Project.”

We were doing this on the PC so we had the a minor issue of driver letter path assignments not always matching up when we moved a volume from one workstation to another. The mac shouldn’t have that issue at all.

So I guess the best way to look at it is as how to organize the Media Data as the center and how the various projects interact with that data. We worked in a serial fashion. Project Specific media was paired with the projects, common media was externally referenced.

You could, for example, make general libraries for common media elements.

then you could have media by project or by format.

then you could create volumes per project, set the media caches pref, per project, but the project files would import media from the other two volumes into that project.

All of the above living on the SAN so it’s always accessible from any station you choose to work at.

Of course, some of the lower level concern is about how robust the SAN is, how you set up your spindle groups so you don’t drop frames, things like that.

Happy to chat more about it if I can be of some assistance.

Alex

[Max Kaiser]

Thanks, Alex,

We’ve got the common/project system worked out pretty well from our FCP stuff. We do it pretty much like that. The new element is all of the media cacheing etc. Do most people do “keep metadata with source”? One problem, it appears, is that preferences are set on a Premiere Pro application basis, rather than a project basis. Is there a way around this?

Mainly, my problems seem a lot like the gent in the previous thread regarding san stuff. We get a bunch of issues with spinning balls, long reconnects, etc. My guess is that, for me at least, this is related to the metadata traveling over the ethernet as opposed to the fibre. On FCP, this is not a problem, but we’ve had a lot of lagging on PP.

Mostly, PP just feels like I’m walking on eggshells all of the time and about to crash. Zooming through the edit sequence, or popping quickly between window panes of the project always generates a slight hang and has occasionally taken down the whole computer – something we’ve not seen from FCP in some time. I absolutely love the render engine, but the extra amount of time dedicated to just general UI activities sort of cancels the speed gains out from that…We work really quickly on this stuff all day and it just doesn’t seem like PP wants to keep up…I’m sure there might be better codecs to be working with than dSLR h.264, but native editing of that was the MAJOR selling point for us since we’ve wasted oodles of disk space and time converting all to PRORES in FCP.

Any further thoughts on this specific media management issues for a san would be great:

1) Aside from the clearly project based ancillary files (the ones that come up at the beginning of the project) how should I have my media cache stuff set in the PP preferences panel for use on SAN?

Oh – and any system improvements would be welcome – I’m currently running an 8core with 12gb of RAM and the stock video card. Any mac people out there have a better setup for hDSLR editing?

Thanks,
Max

Max Kaiser
Director
Hand Crank Films
https://www.handcrankfilms.com

Various Intel
FCP 7, PP 7.03
OS 10.6
RED/XDCAM/7D

[Alex Udell]

Max…

I could suggest two ways of thinking then. In either case the media caches live on the SAN.

Project specific: Set it to “Same as Project” where projects live on the SAN and will move with you when you access the project from station to station.

or

Per Editor folders: Set up folder “per editor” on the SAN so no matter what project they open they are writing cache files to the same place. This I like a bit less, because with PPro I think it’s project specific, and when you move a project from one station to another, you’d need to reset it to that “editors folder” but it makes for easy cleanup because you can clear it all out in once go.

As far as the Metadata Controller being a contributing culprit in this….I’m curious…are the h264 files your editing single files, or dependent on a folder structure? And as a tesdt have you tried any other standard .mov codecs in PPro from the SAN?

Alex

[Max Kaiser]

Alex,

I think I’ll go with the first suggestion and give that a whirl.

I’m guessing that when we archive the project we can lose the media caches and then just rebuild them in the event we need to un-archive.

As for the dSLR footage – it is single files, but yes, they are within a fairly substantial folder hierarchy.

Last thing – I’m still not sure if I should be clicking the main preference in PP that asks if you want to keep media cache files with their source files?? This really creates a mess in the footage folders that’s is a pain to deal with in Bridge when looking for footage, etc.

Thanks again for all of your help on this!
Max

Max Kaiser
Director
Hand Crank Films
https://www.handcrankfilms.com

Various Intel
FCP 7
OS 10.5
RED/XDCAM/7D

[Alex Udell]

Hmmm….

I’d say if it’s making it messy…then opt out of that.

it might mean that caches get created redundantly per station….but at least it won’t gunk up the footage folders….

don’t know that either typically makes a difference in terms of performance…

Alex