Hi all,

I'm wasn't entirely sure where to post this and as we work with Adobe.........

I have a videography company which has grown a bit in the last 12 months. We are now 3 editors working pretty much at the same time and possibly a producer using office, etc...We're looking for ways to optimize our workflows, backup, etc....It's a bit of a nightmare at the moment with plenty of drives, backups. Our standalone systems are full of redundancies so i thought that probably the best way ahead is to work with a server. This way everything will be centralized avoiding redundancies, duplications, etc....
However my technical knowledge stops there so i dont know what we need in terms of hardware, software, etc.....we use CS6(Premiere, AFX, Encore, Audition) with big fat HD files so i guess the reading and writing from and to the server needs to be fast.
would something like this work?
HP ProLiant Turion II N40L MicroServer - 110.. | Ebuyer.com (http://www.ebuyer.com/281915-hp-proliant-turion-ii-n40l-microserver-100-cashback-658553-421)
HP ProLiant ML110 G7 E3-1220 Tower Server | Ebuyer.com (http://www.ebuyer.com/269297-hp-proliant-ml110-g7-e3-1220-tower-server-639260-035)

would that be enough? or would i need something faster? i have no idea!! budget is quite limited so we're looking to buy something basic that might be upgraded in 1 or 2 years

thanks in advance

Sorry to disappoint you, but that will not work. Adobe is not network friendly and the best way to avoid redundancy is to store everything on a SAN or NAS, have everyone download the files from the SAN/NAS before starting to edit, then make their edits and upload again to the SAN/NAS, but be careful that nobody tries to edit files that are in use by another editor at the same time. That will give you huge headaches.

A SAN solution is very expensive and a NAS way too slow for effective editing. The servers you linked to are fine for storage in combination with a NAS/SAN, but will not solve your problem. You will need a much faster backbone ($$$) for avoiding redundancy at the various machines.

thanks for your reply.

I don't really understand what would be the problem. Is that those servers are not fast enough to read/write? or that simply Adobe doesn't work within networks?

thanks

To make a video editing system work in a network environment where assets are shared it takes specialized servers and software to keep everything from becoming a tangled mess.

It is possible but it is NOT a DIY project. Expect to spend $20-50k for the solution.

If you want to set up a online/offline system you can do that with conventional servers. That will cost much less and reduce the overall storage requirements since you will have fewer copies of the master full rez files floating around.

ok that's fine i understand......but i would still need a system so what's the online/offline system? i guess it would just be one of those servers with drives where to store the raw files? so then editors copy the footage when they need it and send it back when finished......it's not perfect but that would work, so what do i need for that? could i just install large drives on one of those servers?

thanks

You can get some basic info here - Offline editing - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Offline_editing)

The gist is you leave the "master" copy of the media on the server and create a "proxy" copy on the edit system doing the work. When you are done and you are ready to do a final render you link the sequences to the "master" copy and render.

You use your server to store the "master" media and backup/share any project info between edit systems. Each editor still works as an individual.

I have 3 seats of Avid Media Composer and that is how I do it when a project is being worked on by multiple people. Each person works on their own segment and in the end all the sequences are brought together in one master timeline and rendered. They don't work on things together an the media is not truly shared. They are each working on their own copy of everything.

Depending on what kind of material you working with, normal networks may just be to slow.
We have tons of uncompressed material that needs speed up to 250 MB/sec.
We ended up with good ole sneaker net.

We bought little RAID enclosures that hold four 2TB drives each.
Just plug it in on the workstation and start working without any waiting time.
If - for example - an editor got picture lock, he caries the RAID over to the colorist, and he can start working on the project immediately.

That might not be a workflow for everyone, but for us it works just perfect and it's a great time saver.
The projects stay on the RAIDs and get backed up every night to the server.

Frank