Networked collaborative video editing / DAM on the cheap
 

Hello everyone, my first post here. Done a fair bit of goggling on this topic so hopefully I haven't missed something in a sticky / FAQ.

So, I'm looking into setting up a working environment where we have the following: -

- Two or more Macs running Premiere CS6
- A Synology Diskstation NAS with a fat hard drive in it
- 100Mb/s network

Projects and all their assets would be stored locally on the Macs for performance. From time to time, each project might be worked on by the different users, which is where it usually gets messy.

The network and the NAS is too slow for us to link to video assets on the NAS however I'd like to have all project assets (include video footage) stored on the NAS (and backed up there), yet copied locally (or "checked out") to each workstation when required (e.g. Monday morning), then any changes (the project file, new images, AE comps etc) copied back up to the NAS as they are made, or at some suitable point (e.g. at the end of the day).

Each workstation should be able to see who's got which project checked out and whether they have the latest version etc etc.

All the benefits of networked collaborative editing, but none of the expense of the usual necessary hardware!

I've looked at SVN and Git but they seem best suited to projects with smaller assets, i.e. software development. File sync software seems dedicated to simply performing disc backups.

Don't really want to have to write my own system, anybody know of anything that might do what I want, or what your own solutions are. Or indeed if this is a daft idea :o) Should be very simple to use as not all users here are CLI happy.

Thanks in advance!
Stu.

Re: Networked collaborative video editing / DAM on the cheap
 

Check out what the guys at Indiestor.com has done. I'm using their setup in an Avid environment and its working really well. I'm using an old quad core desktop as a server running Ubuntu and I can have several users simultaneously editing from the same media pool.

Even though it is marketed as an Avid solution it works with other setups as well.

Re: Networked collaborative video editing / DAM on the cheap
 

Thanks Chris, will give that a look. Slightly confused by their video but will look into it.

Giving Sparkleshare a shot right now but installing Git is a bit of a pain.