Re: fcp studio 2 lab setup

Gloria,

From my experience with high schoolers (my first job out of school was teaching FCP in a high school), I've found that, just like any other subject, you need to focus on the fundamentals. With media that can be hard because they see something on MTV and they want to do that, but if you can't even get the video into the computer, you're a few steps short. All of this to say that their minds and schedules may not tolerate a complicated workflow with different steps happening in different places.

Since you have G5s rather than iMacs, you have the option to put in firewire PCI cards to add a second bus. I haven't had any trouble capturing with a drive and camera on the same bus, but the card would give you some peace of mind.

In terms of setting scratch disks, a student would only need to set the scratch disk when they sat down at a computer... not during a session. Once it's set, they are capturing and rendering to their drive. Teach them how to quit FCP (as opposed to closing all of the windows) and unmount their drive when they're done. This way they take their files with them. If they later sit down at that machine, or any other, they set their scratch disk and they're working just like before.

I'm starting to think that Final Cut Server has a misleading name... it isn't a server for sharing media so much as it's an application for cataloging and searching assets which are already shared over a SAN. As such, you might consider deploying it if/when you get some other kind of shared solution in place, but it won't really help you achieve your immediate goal.

Talk to you District-level people about what storage they use. The server you described is only for playback. You could probably FTP your finished programs to it if that's what they want you to do, but there's no real way to use that machine to share assets with them. Depending on your district's IT infrastructure, it may be possible for them to tap into any shared storage you set up (which could help justify the cost).

The ultimate hurdle you're going to run into will be budgetary. The entry-level ethernet shared storage supports around 20 streams of DV/HDV. If you have 40 machines and district has 5, then you're 25 short of everyone being able to playback at the same time. So while the entry-level system is s stretch to pay for, it won't even do what you need.

I have a soft spot for video at the high-school level since that's when I started and hat was my first job. Feel free to e-mail me zakmussig [at] gmail [dot] com if you have any more questions. I've sorta become a specialist at workflow and curriculum for high school video.

Zak