2 PCs must have access to the same Videos..
 

hello all, this is my first post in the forum..
I have two computers that I use for Video Editing. What I want is both users to be able to access the videos simultaneously, not only for copying to their computers individually, but I was thinking of having them input the videos directly from the central location, but save the file on their computer.

Has anyone done this before? I'm looking at a NAS solution with RAID5, 3 disks for speed and the fourth for backup.. It will obviously have Gbit connection, but I don't know if the PCs support Gigabit Ethernet.

Do you think that it will still be ok in that case?
Also, what solutions do you propose, for example what should I look for in a NAS system?

Thanks for your time!

George,

Let me see if I'm understanding you correctly

When you say "simultaneously" do you really mean that both users will be synchronized and loading the exact same thing to each PC at exactly the same time?

Or do you mean that if somebody is using a file and someone else wants to reference the same file, then at time X each person might be accessing some part of the file?

I use a NAS box and store stuff on it thatI can use from multiple computers. But typically these NAS boxes over ethernet are pretty slow compared to directly attached disk drive. It isn't just that the data rate of the ehternet is fairly low, but the fact that ethernet protocol requires handshaking after each block of data and the standard block size is around 1500 bytes. This adds a lot of overhead and slows things down considerably.

Some NAS boxes support so called "jumbo" frames which helps quite a lot, but there is still a lot of handshaking and protocol delay and if more than one PC is accessing the same NAS box, things can bog down, particularly cconsidering the size of the files used for video.

It also depends on whether you'd be working with short clips or long clips. Moving an hour of video from a NAS box to a hard drive for editing can be slow - you might not want to sit around waiting for it, but rather stage the files ahead of time. - maybe the night before.

Anyhow, I think if you explain a little more about what you really want to accomplish, and what kinds of workflows you anticipate, you might get more responses.