[Ryan Tyssen]

Hi Bob,

I’ve been looking at things for the last few weeks trying to wrap my head around things, and I’m still a little mystified. I appreciate your offer of explaining how to best network my computers and store my data.

I’d like to know what you think is the best solution. I must tell you that I had a conversation with our IT guy and he thought we should add more storage to our existing file server. We have had a PC file server for years, There was a time that we didn’t do video here so the thought never crossed anyone’s mind to use the server for video storage. It’s being used right now to store the print work we do here. We all use Mac’s with OS X if that makes a difference.

I read a more recent post where you mentioned using a mac pro as a dedicated server. Would you suggest we get a new (or used) mac pro and set that up as a separate server, or add more storage to our existing PC server?

Also, I’d like to make this system as fail safe as possible. I’m guessing we should have some sort of RAID configuration involved with this.

Third, I’d like to make sure our footage is safely stored in the event anything happens to it. Would you say backing it up to external drives and storing them off site would be a good idea. USB drive are cheap and plentiful, and I wouldn’t be editing off of them but I thought it would give us a good option for backing up thing that we need to as We are shooting on SXS cards and can’t keep that footage stored forever. Our IT guy suggested we burn all of our footage to Blu-Ray disk? Your thoughts?

Sorry for the length, but I’m trying to find the best solution for our circumstances. Money isn’t an issue I just don’t want to spend money on something we don’t need or something that’s no good.

Thanks,

[Ryan Tyssen]

I’m not sure if it still does. I have production premium CS3, and it did back then.

[Ryan Tyssen]

If your going to be working in uncompressed HD you may need to work on a fiber optic network. I have heard that with the new 10 gig Ethernet cable you can achieve similar results but it isn’t out for a few months. If you really want to know post you questions in the SAN forum.

[Ryan Tyssen]

You could try using Adobe flash video encoder. If you have it installed

Export he video as a quicktime, open it in Flash encoder, change you preferences to suit your needs, and start encoding. its pretty easy once you get the hang of it.

[Ryan Tyssen]

Hi Bob,

Thanks for responding to my post. I’m not at all knowledgeable about this topic so any information is appreciated.

I read through a number of posts and its pointed me in the right direction. I have a few questions about things i read.

1) You have talked about 10 gig Ethernet. Is this a more cost effective solution to a fiber based system? What’s the benefit of installing a 10 gig solution?

2) You also mentioned that there are cheaper 10 gig solutions on the way. Do you have an ETA for this?

I’m asking from a research stand point, not because I read a post about 10 gig Ethernet and now I “know” that’s what I need. The truth is I don’t know very much so I’m trying to wrap my head around all this stuff so I can try and begin to understand what I need and what I don’t need.

Thanks again.

Ryan