2 systems editing over gigbit LAN
 

Hello everyone,

I recently built a raid box for a company I work for so they can copy HD footage from P2 cards to FCP while on location using a MBP and it would be redundant in case the worst happens - so far works great!

While back in the office the editing suites consist of 2 G5 towers using FCP6. Both systems have to have access to this footage at the same time; simple enough we just copied it. I don't want to have to do this EVERY TIME I come back to the office, I was wondering if I could build a server to host the footage and have the 2 systems networked to it over a gigabit LAN.

I know 1 system over a gigabit LAN can edit HD footage but what do you guys think about 2? Is there enough bandwidth?

Thanks!
-Joe

What you're talking about is a SAN environment where multiple editors can share the same assets and work on the same project. Gigabit ethernet won't have enough bandwidth to allow real assets to be shared unless it's in an offline edit scenario, but for online SAN environment editing there's only one way to go, and that's a Fiber network, requiring a switch and SAN software such as XSAN from Apple and a few others.

Try contacting one of the forum sponsors such as Omega Broadcast who has experience with this or, Kenny Martin @ DVServe who is a SAN specialist in the film and video industry.

Thats what I was afraid of. . . they will never spend the money to put a fiber channel network in.

The other I could build at minimal cost. . . Oh well.

Thanks!
-Joe

Gigabit NIC teaming
 

Caveat: I've only done this in XP & Server 2003

here's a tip if you'd like to gain speed using Gig-E networking. We do this in our b'cast environment. It saves dough and works great. It's called Gig-E Teaming/Link aggregation, otherwise known as 802.3ad.

Several of our non-fiber servers employ this method. Essentially you are joining two physical gig-e ports together and creating a virtual adapter, or team. Together the ports deliver much more bandwidth than a single gig-e port. While still not as much bandwidth as fiber, it's a good compromise thats far cheaper.

Intel does a good job in the software arena along with Broadcom. It's pretty much standard on our on-air machines.

Here's the wikipedia entry
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Link_aggregation

Mac OSX supports this feature also.

-gb-

Gig-e will push reliably 80mbytes/sec. so a couple of DV streams is no big deal. even HD prores or DVCpro100 can be handled for _playback_. capture can be another thing because of weird network pings & resets. try it, if it works, it works. You'll know within a couple of minutes of continuos capture.

you can connect 2,3, or 4 Gig-E lines to a switch for increased bandwidth to the network if

1. you set you port aggregation on your server to spread the bandwidth, OS X and Linux support this out of the box. however, OS X seems to use link fail safe mode and require a config file change to use sharing mode vs one of the fail safe modes. just never had the time to fully debug this.

AND

2. you have a managed switch which can be setup to also support the shared connection. the switch needs to be setup to use several ports as one.

if you can, then your main limitation will be how fast your storage can spit the bits out.