[Eugeny Korkhin]

Alvaro,
glad to hear you’ve got it solved.

[Eugeny Korkhin]

Alvaro,
I was a little bit confused with the way you’ve put your question, cause from your post it seemed like you now what exactly you need to do (you described the steps just the way they should be done), but want someone else to check whether it works or not. My apologies to you for that misunderstanding)

[Eugeny Korkhin]

With all the respect, I wonder, why would anyone ask questions like that? It takes about two minutes to try it yourself. It is even faster than typing all those CAPS words… Why waste your time? And others.

[Eugeny Korkhin]

One more thing:

To make it all even easier, there’s Media Creation preference (orange box) in the settings list in Avid. Different tabs where you can specify the target drive (red box) for different types of possible media (green box). This way, you can automate the process at some extent and also exclude the chance of creating media on a shared volume. By the way, if it is a network drive that is shared (I mean, it is not a local drive of one machine, shared to another), then you don’t even need to partition it. Here’s how I see it:

SAN is the place “The Ingest” captures to. Editors have their personal folders (Editor_01, i.e.). Make them shared folders, then “The Editor 01” connects to his pesonal folder: Command+K, enter SAN IP Address/Editor_01 and he has that folder mapped as a network drive (green boxes). Therefore, Avid can use that “drive” to capture and etc (orange box). That is briefly.
And Bob, anticipating what you may say, I certainly understand that this is still a volume-based system, just put another way.

[Eugeny Korkhin]

[Bob Zelin] Are you saying that if you let the second and third MC client system scan the shared volume, once the scan is complete, you will be able to read all the media without giving anyone “Media Offline ” ?

That is exactly what I am saying. No offline media.

[Bob Zelin] And are you saying that if I create separate volumes for rendering for each editor (easy to accomplish), while multiple editors use this media from the common shared volume to edit with, I will be able to work without issue ?

You will be able to work without scanning. Unless you add something to the shared volume.

[Bob Zelin] As you can imagine, when multiple editors work, they need to ingest (or import) because they are on different jobs. But if they are on the SAME shared volume, this is unavoidable. So how would you get around this (without creating a volume based system – one volume per editor) ?

That’s the point to argue. All of that depends on a workflow. I used to work at the company (companies) with a special “ingest team” who would ingest all the material prior to the editing (usually at night). Editors had no right to do that. They even had no possibility to do that as the editor’s place was a keyboard, a mouse and a couple of monitors. And no access to the ingest room. Need to capture something – call “specialist”, give him a tape or whatever you have and wait for your time in his “ingest table”. Some kind of distribution of duties. A bit silly. But that’s not a solitary instance, so I think we may call it a workflow. As a side note, all that took place in an ISIS environment. Thus, there are certain situations, when it is possible to avoid ingesting during the editing session.
But in case the editor ingests to the shared volume while he works, that’s not gonna work. You gonna be watching Avid scanning the drive all day long. And that’s not what an editor expected to do, I think))

Let’s get back to [David Parker]:
The way we work now is generally with one station for ingest and a few edit stations…
…the ingest creates “bins” of new material, and the edits can all read those same bins?

Yes, they can read those same bins or if you don’t want to open the same bin from different stations for safety reasons the ingest distributes that bin to editors’ project folders (on a Finder level).

Can the ingest update those bins and the edit stations do some sort of refresh to see the new stuff?

Yes, you can either update those bins, but, at first, editors should close them if they have them opened (not so comfortable), or you can distribute additional bins to editors as mentioned above, or use the MediaTool in Avid.
But beware of scanning))

How can the edit stations pass back and forth the projects or timelines (in fcp terminology)? Like if we are working on a long form doc, and have two edits working on separate parts of the film, how do they eventually come together?

Simply by copying bins, containing the sequences and combinig those separate sequences into one.

Again, everything depends on a workflow. The possible solution here I think could be:
– Ingesting most of the media in advance;
– Each editor has a local (or mapped) drive for rendering, titles (they also generate files in Avid Mediafiles folder);
– In case the editor needs to ingest or import something – use that local (or mapped) drive as a temporary storage and consolidate to the shared volume at the end of a day (when there’s no one “on the other side of a network” with the Avid launched) and “plan” scanning for the night time.

Of course, that’s a work-around, but finally it works. For free.

[Eugeny Korkhin]

[Bob Zelin] “AVID writes a .msm and a .mdb file whenever you launch Media Composer, and if you are on one common volume or partition with two or more systems, the second (or third) Media Composer will overwrite the first guys .msm and .mdb file, and you will see MEDIA OFFLINE on your AVID on your edit 1 system.”

False. Not gonna happen.
Avid updates .pmr file when you quit, and both .pmr and .mdb if you add or delete media files. (There’s no .msm file at all) But that doesn’t matter. Updating and overwriting doesn’t result Media Offline. If .mdb file changes, another system starts scanning (which I must say may last forever depending on how much media you have in Avid MediaFiles folder). But after the scan is complete, that newly ingested or imporetd media becomes online for the second editing station. But .mdb changes also if you render(which means creating media) to the volume it resides on. And that makes collaborative work an endless scanning.
That’s what gonna happen.
Or you need to render to the separate volume and avoid ingesting (or importing) during the editing session.