I have a client who has a huge project including 100-200 2-3 minute clips as a tutorial. His goal is to upload raw footage and hire a few different editors in different states with their own systems to split the work up. Originally I had told him that an easy way would be to buy space on a server that we could all access via the web, but I was wrong. I did not know about this new Final Cut Server, Mac OS X Server, Xserve or Xsan. Which is better for what my client needs? I don't have any experience with either so any advice would be appreciated.
Re: Advice by Mike Jennings on May 15, 2008 at 7:52:08 pm
Final Cut Server is definitely a potential solution for your client. You can coordinate productions with different or overlapping assets, assign them to users, and users can copy the proxy files or the raw data locally for editing. They can check in or check out assets and upload the results back into the system for approval (all with email notifications). If your client and his subs are using Final Cut Pro there are a few extra features that make it a bit easier to work with, and I imagine this will keep being extended with future releases.
(XSan isn't in the cards here. That is intra-facility -- if you want to extend it to other users, well... You have to REALLY want to.)
Final Cut Server isn't a bad solution once you figure out how to get it in front of the firewall, or allow users to tunnel in via VPN. You kind of want it in a commercial data center with a big pipe so that it doesn't saturate your client's facility's upstream bandwidth.
An XServe box running Leopard Server (or Leopard, really) would be a fine piece of hardware to colocate at a data center, as it will run both Final Cut Server and Compressor (which Final Cut Server uses for transcoding).
Final Cut Server isn't too fussy about storage devices, so if you want an alternative to XServe RAID, go for it. Since no one will be editing in place (Editing directly off the server) performance isn't the big issue -- it's reliability. That said, XServe RAID is trivial to integrate, easy to administer and very well-designed. For someone who wants good performance and high availability without having to learn to be a sysadmin nerd, XServe and XServe RAID is a damn fine combo.
Final Cut Server also has excellent archiving support, so plan on adding an archive/backup device of some sort at the co-lo, even if it's just a giant slow cheap disk array.
Unfortunately FCServer doesn't seem to have a way to plug in high-speed file transfer services like Aspera or File Catalyst, though I could be wrong.
If you want to roll your own I believe the open-source Alfresco project has much of the same functionality. But it would require extensive customization. That's kind of along the lines of your initial thinking -- host the media on the Web and Alfresco would manage the traffic and workflow. What doesn't change is the fact that you want it all colocated in a data center.
You might also look at what the high-speed file transport services recommend.
Re: Advice by Will griffith on May 19, 2008 at 5:30:38 pm
I agree that an Xserve and Xserve RAID is a great combo.
However, the Xserve RAID has been discontinued, so you'll need
to find another mass storage device like this nifty box from Promise...
http://www.apple.com/server/storage/
Re: Advice by jon Rutherford on May 20, 2008 at 1:42:49 am
An Xserve is definitely recommended if you plan to use the more advanced features of FCSvr. Even simple email notifications would be difficult to setup on a system only running Mac OS X 10.5 client. Workgroup manager and other server apps really make the overall FCSvr set up and configuration easier and run better.
Storage and external access are different discussions. Local storage that is NOT SAN will have slightly better performance as long as the network is isolated. Take it out of the facility and better plan and carefully on connectivity. The other options mentioned are not out of the picture, they would just require specific scripting to make them work.
