[Chris Devers]

I work for EditShare, so I can’t comment on Isilon one way or the other, but I do know a bit about DAVE.

DAVE is an implementation of the SMB/CIFS (“Samba”) standard for Macs. While it’s true that Apple has included their own implementation of Samba in Mac OS X since 10.0, DAVE actually predates this — it goes back to the 1990s, and Thursby claims they helped write the SMB/CIFS standard in conjunction with Microsoft — and Thursby’s implementation continues to be more compliant with the spec than Apple’s. And it tends to be faster, too.

Thus, DAVE functions like a protocol handler, much like a web browser. By default, Macs ship with Safari, which handles all attempts to access https:// or https:// URLs. However, if for whatever reason you don’t like Safari, you can install Chrome or Firefox or Opera, and make it the default browser instead. Safari is still installed, and you can launch it manually, but if you just follow a link from Apple Mail or what have you, then the system-wide default browser will be launched. That’s what DAVE does: it doesn’t replace Apple’s SMB software (e.g. /sbin/mount_smbfs etc), but rather it installs its own software (e.g. /sbin/mount_cifs etc) and configures the system to launch that when smb:// or cifs:// URLs are being accessed.

On the EditShare side of things, there’s a laundry list of reasons that we’ve generally recommended DAVE, depending on the workflow you’re trying to implement. It improves the performance of both Avid and Final Cut Pro in varying ways, and there are certain video codecs that will not work reliably unless DAVE is installed. While there are exceptions — for example, using uncompressed HD in FCP will only work via AFP — for most workflows, DAVE just seems to work more reliably than Apple’s SMB or AFP options.

That said, Jonathan Abrams is correct that EditShare has been working on improving support for AFP, which historically has always had much better performance than Samba, but has also had some annoying & possibly show-stopping bugs. These can be overcome though, and an AFP workflow can be a compelling alternative in many scenarios.

For the Isilon scenario at this school, again, I cannot comment on what else may be going on there, but it sounds like DAVE is smoothing over some of the same eccentricities we see in EditShare environments. You’re noticing so far that installing DAVE suppresses errors about saving project files, but it may also be that, for example, the workstations with DAVE installed are less prone to see things like stuttering playback when scrubbing in timelines, dropped frames when capturing or playing out footage, etc.

—
Chris Devers
EditShare Tech Support
support ( at ) editshare • com
https://editshare.com
Twitter: @EditShare & @ESLightWorks

[Chris Devers]

[Tim Wilson] “Note that Flow is alive and well and living at EditShare. Lots of new stuff about it this week at NAB. It’s currently more focused on asset management, with some nifty new features like ingest and logging…but there are indeed a number of project tracking and management tools too.”

Actually, EditShare Flow has nothing to do with Gridiron Flow — I hadn’t even heard of the latter until now.

“Our” Flow product is a production media asset manager, whereas Gridiron’s appears to be filling (or was once filling?) a somewhat different niche.

I’m not aware of anyone using EditShare Flow for the kind of project & management tracking tasks being described here, but it’s an interesting idea, and certainly something we could consider looking at, if there’s demand for it. Feel free to get in touch with us (contact info is available at editshare.com/contact) and we can discuss this in more detail.

—
Chris Devers
EditShare Tech Support
support ( at ) editshare • com
https://editshare.com
Twitter: @EditShare & @ESLightWorks

[Chris Devers]

If you’re still stuck with this, and it does seem like it could be a server issue, please get in touch with us at EditShare and we can try to offer advice. (We cannot provide tech support on Creative Cow, Twitter, Facebook, etc, but we’re happy to help with issues like this if you get in touch with us directly.)

—
Chris Devers
EditShare Tech Support
support ( at ) editshare • com
https://editshare.com
Twitter: @EditShare & @ESLightWorks

[Chris Devers]

If you are trying out Lightworks, we encourage you to take a look at the new 11.1 version that EditShare released this week. Please see Lightworks Windows 11.1 release for Windows for a brief overview, as well as this video overview we posted on YouTube:

Lightworks v11.1 – New Features Overview

There’s a lot of new stuff in 11.1 — see the Lightworks Forum for more details & discussion.

We’re also making progress on the public beta of the Linux version, and the version for Mac OS X will be available in the near future as well. Once the software is available for all three major operating systems, the next goal will be to relaunch Lightworks as an open source project. Stay tuned to LWKS.com (or our Twitter, Facebook, etc pages) for news as it becomes available.

—
Chris Devers
EditShare Tech Support
support ( at ) editshare • com
https://editshare.com
Twitter: @EditShare & @ESLightWorks

[Chris Devers]

To fill in some other detail, at a guess, the media is being stored in AvidMXF media spaces, which have the property that MXF files (in the “Avid MediaFiles -> MXF -> #num” folders) are visible to all, but it is specifically not possible to share media in the OMFI MediaFiles folder. You can write files there, because Avid doesn’t work properly if it doesn’t have read/write access to that folder, but we specifically recommend that all media in AvidMXF spaces needs to be in MXF files, not OMF.

EditShare 6 also offers AvidStyle spaces, which do allow for hybrid MXF/OMF workflows, and also allow for project files to be stored in the same volume as media files. This emulates many aspects of the Avid Unity workflow that you may already be familiar with.

For the other questions, it sounds like you’re finding help here, but if the server has a support contract, we’d be happy to chat about it as well. Our contact information is at https://www.editshare.com/support

—
Chris Devers
EditShare Tech Support
support ( at ) editshare • com
https://editshare.com
Twitter: @EditShare & @ESLightWorks

[Chris Devers]

[David Traube] “I’m running into this issue intermittently as well. Sometimes the previews reload fine but usually only portions do… then I have to re-render which on a 15 minute piece featuring lots of Magic Bullet can be really time consuming.

I suspect the issue is related to my Editshare storage system. I created a share just for previews and render cache that shows up to the system as drive R: Now obviously if I were to change that drive letter (or not have the share mounted) I’d expect to lose the previews but I haven’t done so in weeks.”

Have you been in touch with EditShare tech support about this? I work in the support group here (and have emailed you in the past), and I don’t see anything about this problem in our records. If you think that the Premiere behavior you’re seeing is EditShare-related, feel free to get in touch with us and we can help you.

—
Chris Devers
EditShare Tech Support
support ( at ) editshare • com
https://editshare.com
Twitter: @EditShare & @ESLightWorks

[Chris Devers]

Hello, and sorry for the delay in responding to this. We don’t normally monitor CreativeCow for tech support requests, and can’t really get into detail about troubleshooting things here.

If you haven’t already gotten in touch with EditShare tech support about this, please do so. Our contact info is available at https://editshare.com/contact

I have a hunch I know what’s going on here, but I’d need to get more details about your setup (server version, client operating system & version, type of media spaces, etc) before getting into specifics. Get in touch with us and either I or one of my colleagues here at EditShare can try to work through this with you.

—
Chris Devers
EditShare Tech Support
support ( at ) editshare • com
https://editshare.com
Twitter: @EditShare & @ESLightWorks

[Chris Devers]

[Job ter Burg] “From what I have been told, if you want to share the media, you’re sort of OK with all of them, but if you want true, easy, transparent project / bin sharing, you need Avid’s systems. They are completely built for several people working within the same project at the same time. For all others, you can sort of get the same result, but you need everyone to work very disciplined.
“

This isn’t accurate: EditShare also offers “true, easy, transparent project / bin sharing”, very similar to how Avid NLEs operate when working with Unity storage.

And we also offer full compatibility for both media & project sharing with other leading NLEs, including Final Cut & Premiere. We have lots of customers that run a mix of Avid & Final Cut workstations, for example.

Feel free to get in touch with us at sales ( at ) editshare • com or support ( at ) editshare • com and we can chat about it if you’d like to learn more.

—
Chris Devers
EditShare Tech Support
support ( at ) editshare • com
https://editshare.com
Twitter: @EditShare & @ESLightWorks

[Chris Devers]

[Alison Huckett] “It’s time to update our archive and back up system from DLT to LTO and I’ve been considering either EditShares Ark (as we have an EditShare server already) or Cache-A.”

Hello, Alison — we’re just seeing your question now. We don’t normally use Creative Cow as a forum for incoming questions, so unfortunately things can slip through the cracks if posted here. If you haven’t already done so, I suggest getting in touch with us so that we can discuss your needs.

I can say that we have people using Cache-A as well as Ark, and while we think that Ark has a lot of strong advantages that make it worth considering, we’re willing to come up with a tailored solution for each customer that we work with that can, if necessary, involve working with third-party products as well.

I’ve passed along your question to others here at EditShare and they should follow up with you shortly, but like I say, I also encourage you to get in touch with us so that we can go over backup & archival options for your server.

—
Chris Devers
EditShare Tech Support
support ( at ) editshare • com
https://editshare.com
Twitter: @EditShare & @ESLightWorks