[Nathaniel Cooper]

Keith,

As long as your sticking with a ProRes workflow, all of the solutions you mentioned will work.

One thing to consider is cost vs future growth, specifically this, if you think you’ll move to FCP X or Premiere Pro in the future any of these solutions will grow with you. If you think you will move to Avid in the future, none of these solutions will work.

It’s a very important factor in shared storage now that facilities have to be aware of.

That being said to get into anything that supports Avid, you’re looking at spending a bit more.

If you don’t want to spend over $10k you may want to reconsider shared storage, $10k to $15k, look at the options you talked about, $15k or more look at Facilis and Editshare.

It’s end of year so all of these companies are hungry to sell, that puts you in the drivers seat which is nice. However, with the flooding in Thailand still affecting drive prices buying sooner than later is better for the next few months.

Good luck and feel free to reach out to me if you have any more questions.

Nate Cooper
nate.cooper@promax.com
949.375.2738

Scuba Dive? https://www.postproductiondivers.com/

[Nathaniel Cooper]

Faster? Yes. Inexpensive? Define inexpensive.

The home brew systems (ShareMAX, Final Share, etc.) are pretty basic set ups and will give you shared storage starting around $10k. Will it be amazing, no, but it will get the job done… if the job is not to heavy.

That’s about all you’ll really get into for under $15-20k. Once you get past $20k you have some higher end options that are more feature heavy and are higher quality. Facilis, EVO, Editshare, etc.

Keep in mind Avid support, with everyone fearing the future of FCP in a “pro” environment, you may want to factor this in if you can afford it and might move to Avid later on.

Nate Cooper
nate.cooper@promax.com
949.375.2738

[Nathaniel Cooper]

Sarah,

Bob is right, I would love to fly to the UK, unfortunately my dog daisy get’s rather upset when I’m gone for too long.

You should give the guys over at Academia a call, Tony Dickie is over there (he used to own 1080p, really knows his stuff).

All 4 of those options I mentioned earlier are good ones to look at. Performance wise since you’re doing DVC Pro HD fibre channel or GigE will both work fine, unless you’re doing crazy multicam workflows… then you’ll need fibre.

Xsan might be push-pull to the SAN, unless you’re using Pro Tools 9, they just recently started opening up to file-locking SANs as valid audio drives. I’m not sure if Pro Tools 9 will work direct with Xsan, if anyone else knows this, please chime in.

Nate

[Nathaniel Cooper]

Hey Sarah,

There are lots of great options out there:

https://www.getactivestorage.com/ using https://www.apple.com/xsan/ $$$
https://www.facilis.com/ $$
https://www.studionetworksolutions.com/ $$
https://www.promax.com/Solutions/ShareMAXOverview/ $

Generally, you’re best off finding a good local reseller to help guide you through the Pro’s and Con’s. There are TON’s of options out there, these are the options I’ve seen the happiest clients with.

If you want to get into more details on recommendations the following info helps:

– What resolutions are you working with?
– How much storage do you need?
– What is your budget range?
– Are there other applications that will need to be used by this SAN (Avid, AE, Scratch, etc. etc.)
– Do you value simplicity or features more?

Best,

Nate Cooper
nate.cooper@promax.com
949.375.2738

Scuba Dive? https://www.postproductiondivers.com/

[Nathaniel Cooper]

To mix cheap and Avid, volume locking is your best option.

Cheap FC RAID = $8k
2 Seats of SANmp with FC cards = $3k
Cables = $200

Throw in shipping and or tax and your looking at the $12k range.

Nate Cooper
nate.cooper@promax.com
949.375.2738

Scuba Dive? https://www.postproductiondivers.com/

[Nathaniel Cooper]

As much as I love AFP and 10GbE, I have yet to see a client sucessfully impletement this type of set up for Smoke/Symphony running uncompressed resolutions. If anyone has any real world clients doing this please correct me. Yeah yeah yeah, I know it can be tested and might ‘work’ in a tested enviornment, but actual end users is a different story.

As far as what fits the criteria of volumes larger than 20TB in a shared enviornment that can handle these resolutions.

Cheapest – Fast FC storage with SANmp, $30k range if you cheap out on storage.
Mid Range – EVO, uses SANmp propably $50k range
High end – Xsan $80k+

Since it’s only 3 workstations volume locking with SANmp is pretty solid and easy to use, especially nice with Avid since there aren’t database worries.

I’m trying to get ahold of the facilis guys to, that does surprise me about the volume size limit.

Nate Cooper
nate.cooper@promax.com
949.375.2738

Scuba Dive? https://www.postproductiondivers.com/

[Nathaniel Cooper]

Drew,

Here are the solutions pretty much everyone looks at and generic price levels:

Complete Solutions
– Facilis $$
– Studio Network Solutions $$
– EditShare $$
– Isilon $$$$

Resellers with solutions
– Promax ShareMAX $
– Maxx Digital Final Share $

Software solutions sold/support with 3rd party hardware
– Xsan (with Active or Promise storage)$$$
– MetaSAN (with any Fibre Channel storage)$$

There are a few others out there, but this is what I run into the most and what I’ve seen the most success with. All of these can scale to 100TB and all of the companies can support you remotely.

Resellers near Erie… not 100% sure, Tekserve is in NYC and is likely the best reseller in the region.

Performance. If you’re doing a GigE solution you should be able to push about 3 streams of ProRes to every client. If you’re going fibre, you should be able to handle uncompressed HD to every client.

Lastly, as far as Asset Management goes, I love CatDV. For what we do it’s generally CatDV of FCServer. CatDV does a bit more out of the box and you don’t have to worry about Apple discontinuing it.

Nate Cooper
nate.cooper@promax.com
949.375.2738

Scuba Dive? https://www.postproductiondivers.com/

[Nathaniel Cooper]

Hey Jonathan,

There are lots of options out there that will work for you. 3 Streams of ProRes HQ on 4 or 5 workstations would really be pushing the limits of what you can do if you go with a Apple Server hooked up to some fast storage. You might wind up doing some pushing pulling with this system. Also if you go this route, you’re in it to save money so don’t both with the Promise storage, it’s great for Xsan but for this type of installation get a cheap fibre array. It’ll work just as well.

EVO will definitely handle it performance-wise and is a great option, I’ve had many clients be very happy with EVO. It’s pretty nice in it’s scalability, mixing topologies, etc.

There’s several other options out there ShareMAX, Facilis, Final Share. If you can make it to NAB it might be worth while just for this. Tell everyone at the booths you’re a student and ask for a demo on their shared storage solution.

As far as LTO5, if you can pay the extra go for it, if you’re budget tight LTO4 is still 800GB, not bad.

If you want more specifics feel free to hit me up outside of the cow.

Nate Cooper
nate.cooper@promax.com
949.375.2738

Scuba Dive? https://www.postproductiondivers.com/

I support:
Xsan
MXFserver
ShareMAX
EVO/SANmp
Facilis
MetaSAN

[Nathaniel Cooper]

Hey David,

It sounds like you just need a couple fast RAIDs. Lot’s of companies out there have good ones. I just saw some mini-sas RAIDs push over 1000MB/s (no there is not an extra 0 in there, that was 1000) insane stuff.

You should be able to find that amount of storage in the $5 to $8k range.

If you want specifics feel free to call me, I’m happy to help.

Nate Cooper
nate.cooper@promax.com
949.375.2738

Scuba Dive? https://www.postproductiondivers.com/

[Nathaniel Cooper]

I’ve worked with Sonnet stuff before, but never OWC. If you’re really concerned with reliability between those two devices I’d go with Sonnet. Here’s why…

The most likely thing to fail in either enclosure is the drives. With OWC selling dirt cheap, and I mean CHEAP you can pretty much guaruntee they are not testing their drives. Buy, pack, ship. Usually, with companies like Sonnet you are paying extra for someone who knows what they are doing to test drives and give you a much higher success rate, when it comes to lot getting a lemon.

Nate Cooper
nate.cooper@promax.com
949.375.2738

Scuba Dive? https://www.postproductiondivers.com/

I support:
Xsan
MXFserver
ShareMAX
EVO/SANmp
Facilis
MetaSAN