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XSan FCP question
Hey guys. New job, new problems. We have two Mac Pros on an XSan. On the XSan drive “media” we have, of course, our media and our projects. Strange thing, and I’m not sure this is supposed to happen, the two of us can open the same project at the same time and can, thusly, overwrite each others’ work as we go. This isn’t supposed to be happening, right? Shouldn’t we be getting a warning saying that the project is in use or something?
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6 Replies
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the XSAN is simple a harddrive. You should ALWAYS copy the project file to your local HD before working on it. end of day, export an XML of the changes and update the master project before saving and copying to the SAN for safekeeping. it’s, unfortunately, not a real “shared” enviroment…. FCP hasn’t been coded for it (yet).
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Yes, I’m aware of that. The question is whether or not the two of us should even be able to open the same project file at the same time. For example, if he opens the project, edits for three hours and I open it, make one change, and save it and he, say, crashes, I would have over written his project. Shouldn’t I not even be able to open the project if he has it open?
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You cannot open the same project file on two machines at the same time.
Shane
Littlefrog Post
http://www.lfhd.net -
You can technically do it, but no you shouldn’t. Last one to save wins. In an update to 5.0, there was a pop-up warning added for when you try to open or save, I can’t remember which, an already opened file. If you need to be in the same file at the same time, and you want to keep the project on the san, you can duplicate it, and one person can work from the copy. Best method though is stated above… export xmls from a local file back into the San “master”.
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It has happened at my facility. In older versions of xsan, it would knock media offline in the first open “instance” (for lack of better term).
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Let’s be perfectly clear about this. With FCP and X-SAN, anyone connected to the SAN can open a project, make changes and close it. As Keith says, “Last one to save wins”.
We have almost 100 editors working with shared projects, episodes, media every day. Here’s how we do it.
Editors identy their project with their names, “RW1800MarkR”, and work within that project. They work locally, but save “globally”. At the end of the day, the editor will save the project to their local drive and to the SAN in a “project back up” folder. If another editor needs that project, they will find it, pull it locally, rename it as “RW1800Editdude” then save it both locally and globally. It is this naming scheme that keeps things in order, not FCP or X-SAN.
Also.. keep in mind, that for FCP, the project is less important than the media or the “sequence”. So for sharing projects, we put the sequences only into separate, small projects and zip that around the company.
Hope this helps.
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