Film schools, what do your editing labs look like?

[James McLellan]

I have run a seriese of narrative production courses out of a mac lab for about 12 years. My labs have always been stand alone machines. I have chosen to spend money on other things than networking the computers.

I have 17 stand alone imacs and we edit in final cut and now premiere pro with wireless access to internet.

How many of you are running networked editing labs? Besides the loading of software and updating machines what are the benefits?

Is anyone editing files that are not saved either locally or on an external hard disk?

On a tight budget I have always chosen to spend money on software or hardware instead of networking. Am I wrong to think this way?

 

[Zach Gray]

We've been networked from the start. There are many benefits to this, even if your primary footage isn't on a central mount point. You can share schedules, audio files, move vfx in and out, etc.

We use the networked environment primarily to allow students to customize their machines around their login, and then those settings and prefs follow them to any machine. Many projects edit with external portable drives. Larger group projects are connected to an Isilon NAS for offline, and we have a 5 station caldigit supershare for online/cc.

It's a challenge to keep running smoothly, and we have a full time IT support tech.

For your situation, I'd just put in a decent gig switch and something like a NetGear ReadyNAS for a common file repository.

 

[Jaakko Rinne]

The only times I've ever been in an edit lab was as a student, but where I studied the networking was setup like this: Your personal settings would follow your personal login. Students had a few gigs of personal network storage and there was a large network share for "temporary" files (essentially for sharing and moving stuff). Online media was stored locally or on external drives).

 

[James McLellan]

These are helpful posts. I will look at a Netgear solution.

One of my questions is where do you see the benefits in terms of priority? Would you take network over production gear? For those who have it how high up the chain is it?

Example: wireless follow focus or networked lab?

 

[ERIC PECK]

You always want to be networked in an environment like that.

ALWAYS!

A wireless network is just not fast enough, and in all honesty, running a wired network is not that expensive either.

17 computers? Any 24 port switch will do it. Even a 10/100 switch will do, its better to have a 100 Mb connection than a wireless crappy whatever speed you can get connection.

If you are running a mac environment, the remote desktop tool from Apple makes great sense. From a single computer you can see what your students are doing, and if a single student comes over and says "I can't apply this dissolve I want", you can just pop open their screen and look and help them without leaving your desk.

You want to be able to do things like pushing updates to the machines from a centralized server. Example, the latest java security update so you don't get malware. You want to do that over the wire so it doesn't take forever.

Wireless follow focus vs. Networked lab? There is no contest, get both! Running a networked lab is cheap as heck. You buy the 1000' roll of Cat 6e cable, a bag of connectors, and a crimping tool so you can crimp your own connectors. The rest is a 24 port switch, and you move on.

Should not be 200 dollars for the entire ordeal if you know where to look. The rest is elbow grease.

 

[James McLellan]

Thanks for the response Eric! I'm a DIY guy so I will start to piece it together.

Cheers.

 

[James McLellan]

So I have my lab networked now and am having a lot of issues with students sharing Premiere Pro projects. Is this just not done or do I have my permissions set up wrong? Does anyone have this working smoothly?

 

[dillont]

Another vote FOR networked environments.

The ease of managing user accounts on a server is a breeze as opposed to managing user accounts on a local machine. One login per student, and the user desktop follows them wherever they go. Add to that, the benefit of AFP/FTP access anywhere in the world. Not so easy without open directory (Apple Xserve) to manage accounts and access points.

I co manage 2 labs at UC Berkeley currently. The lab I have complete control over has a server in a networked environment and I use Apple Remote Desktop to manage machines and peep my head onto a computer if a student comes in asking about a problem they're having. Managing software upgrades for 20 machines is a few button clicks most of the time. VERY convenient.

The other lab, which I don't have daily control over, is managed by a coworker. It does not have a server to host user accounts. He constantly complains about how much time he has to invest in managing the computers, hard drive space, user accounts, etc. It's a HUGE time sink.

Once I have the system set up, it is a breeze to manage, and I can concentrate more on assisting students, researching new technologies to invest in, and making upgrades to production gear.

I like my job.

Dillon