Re: REALLY TOO BAD

I work in a production house who produces five television shows per season and has just made the switch from an Avid/Unity world to a FCP/XSAN world. We made the switch because we felt the FCP system and workflow would enhance our productions rather than hinder them. As with any switch, we have our share of bugs to get worked out, but we have finally got all systems setup and running smooth and have found the change to be a good one.

Regarding the lock project/bins, you have to retrain your brain when making the switch. In Avid, a project contains bins where media, sequences and assets exist. If you delete or modify a bin you delete or modify your assets. Your sequences are contained in the bins and when you edit a sequence you lock the bin from other editors overwriting your work. Its a nice and safe setup to allow multiple editors working on a single project.

The FCP system works VERY differently. To use Avid concepts, think of the HDD or storage location of your project as the "project" and your FCP project as an Avid bin. This is more consistent with the media management and workflow.

For a given show, we have several editors working on various parts of the show. They create a project and work on their portion. When all the parts are completed we combine them into a single project and begin nesting the sequences into a finished episode. This allows multiple editors without having to worry about someone deleting or overwriting your work.

The beauty of Fina Cut Server is that you will have the ability to "check in/out" projects to make them read only so that other editors can view the project sequences, but cannot write to them. We are excited about getting it in and setup. We believe it is going to enhance our workflow even more.