Re: Avid Media Composer and sharing media on a SAN

Just chiming in to say "ditto" to everything David Parker has said as I'm looking for a similar solution for exactly the same reasons.

I'm in an educational facility and we do a mix of quick turnaround news pieces as well as longer promotional type pieces. Most the news/quick turn around stuff is shot on XDCAM and edited in Final Cut, but for the "higher end" stuff we can tap into the resources of our parent organization and shoot on formats like HDCAM/HDCAM SR, RED, etc. We'll edit proxies in house on Composer and take our projects to their editing facility for finishing on Symphony.

So a handful of Avid projects, with Final Cut being our current bread and butter.

So we might be moving more towards Avid in the future, but we're still very much a Final Cut shop...and this makes it hard to invest big bucks in a system like Isis or even Edit Share when our Avid usage is so modest.

Like David mentioned, I've read a lot on the Cow on this subject, including many informative postings by Mr.Zelin.

I recognize that a $5,000 solution will have different limitations from a $15,000+ solution. What I'm still unclear on, even after all this time, is the advantages, disadvantages, benefits, and shortcomings of a Volume-based sharing system. I don't feel like I fully understand what it makes possible compared to, say, moving a firewire drive around and what is still impossible compared to Isis. I don't really understand the full workflow from start to finish.

In Final Cut we have all three of our workstations working off a single network volume. Editors rarely work in the same exact project at the same time, but the network makes it possible for editors to use common media across multiple projects and brings some mobility to our editors as well (So Editor A might prefer Workstation A, but they can work at Workstation B or C should the need arise). Also, FOR US it's proven to be a lot easier and more reliable to keep a networked RAID array online and backed-up than managing an army of portable drives.