semester's over: BIG questions remain re: Vegas institutional settings
 

Howdy group-- my first semester teaching NLE has ended very sucessfully: around 20 students working in 3 Vegas 7 editing bays on brand-new Dell XPS workstations (installed by me in April). Very few 'new-PC' crashes, conflicts, hiccups etc. The final projects were quite good-- i even had FCP folks do crash-courses in Vegas that were astounding, given the amount of savvy they were able to pick up in a matter of hours. Vegas is now a household word in this dept, and word-of-mouth about how easy it is to use is spreading quickly (already have new students clammoring for the class this Fall!) Good times.

BUT. There was in fact a significant wrinkle with V7 and Architect 4 that i simply did not have time to resolve, and i'd like to share it here and get some user feedback, expert/programmer/guru suggestions etc. DSE and the Madison folks, i'm looking in your direction.

Issue: as soon as i had the new Vegas bays up and running i had students reporting error screens re: "You need Administrator access priveleges to do this" whenever they tried to either burn DVD's in Architect or rip CDs in Vegas. My knee-jerk reaction was that we simply had too-high security access settings in XP. I sussed that out and found nothing.

I then (of course) did a search on that topic here, and found an old post with Edward replying to someone a year or so ago with the suggestion that Vegas/Arch require computer admin-level access to use some features that involve read/write drive access.

Disbelieving, i emailed Sony/Madison and was shocked to find that yes, any user on a given machine has to be admin level to burn or rip. "WTF?", i said. I'd never encountered this on my home machines b/c i am of course the 'admin' on those. And i never experienced it on these new school machines b/c as the instructor, i am the administrator who set them up. But it was true: i sat in on the bays and observed as the students captured, edited, rendered to mpg2, opened Architect, built their disc profiles, and then tried to burn. On *their* student-level logons they without-fail got the "admin access needed" notice.

Sony's help was quite good and solid-- they sent me a small utility file that would work around this, but the deal-breaking caveat was that i would have to go into XP and set up a separate 'Users' list *solely* for DVD read/write drive access for the utility file to work. With the time crunch of the semester this was not possible. I can deal with this over the summer now that the machines will be idle for several months, but...

So how are you souls who have Vegas running in multi-user school/work environments working with this?? All of my students have to logon to the PC's with their school logon (the machines are fulltime connected to the school's LAN), just as they would at any computer on this campus. The university's IT chief has programmed a master access-list of all students who are in film classes, and *only* those logons can boot these Vegas PC's; this is in fact a 'user group' w/in XP on these Vegas Dells. So having to manually enter a new "reader/writer drive access user group" of 35-ish students on each of the 3 machines was the time-crunch deal-buster. As i explained to the Sony tech (who was awesomely persistent-- tops), giving our students full admin-level priveleges just so they can burn DVDs and rip wavs off CDs is not going to happen. We're wanting the students to have full edit-app utility, but NOT have the ability to change PC settings, install/delete apps, screw w/ reg's, etc. Giving them full admin status would make the machines extremely vulnerable, IMO.

As it happened, the students were not able to use Architect at all, due to the write-drive restriction that i did'nt have time to fix. They ended up using the bundled Roxio authoring app that came stock on the Dells. For ripping they used Media Player and just imported the wavs into Vegas. These workarounds worked fine, but i felt more than a little stupid having praised Architect to the skies only to have it essentially locked-out for them.

So what are you multi-user Vegas workstation folks doing!?!? Do you just give all users full admin access??

Make no mistake, Vegas has made a huge splash with these kids. I'm a perfectionist and want them to experience the Vegas-to-Architect streamlined workflow from now on though.

Suggestions please!

Best,

MRP

I haven't done editing in a multi-user environment. I did help administer over 150 machines at a university and I can tell you that you need to backup your systems as soon as they are working smoothly. The only defense against software tampering is to have a perfect image backup that you can re-load in minutes. I suggest Ghost, because that is what I am familiar, but there are others.

You are only talking about three machines which shouldn't be very hard to administer assuming they are identical. If they all work on the same image because their drivers are the same, it is a simple task to just re-image the OS partition at the first sign of trouble.

Michael, I work at the local community college and I'm in the identical situation (3 Vegas suites).

That's where we differ. I made a deal with my IT guys that they wouldn't hook my edit suites to the LAN and I wouldn't ask them for help if I had problems.
4 years later and it's been working fine :-)

All I have on each machine is Vegas, DVD Architect, Sound Forge, Photoshop, Media Player Classic and RecordNow. That's it!!
MS Office products are banned from the edit suites :-)

All students are restricted (for obvious reasons) to the generic student profile.
They have no problems creating DVDs.

Like you though, I can't rip CDs in Vegas.
No big deal though as we teach them to do it with Media Player Classic.

BTW, Marcus is right about the importance of doing an image.
Once all software is installed, an image is created, burned and filed.
This procedure is repeated every summer after blowing out the previous year's work and doing any necessary software upgrades.