Avid Project Sharing on Editshare? No problem!

Digistor is doing an awesome deal on an ex-demo Editshare Xstream chassis.  What do i love about Editshare? 

1/ Local support!
2/ Competitively priced!
3/ Great Product!

What if you're an Avid house?  No problemo.  Editshare supports Avid Media Composer in a couple of ways that other storage vendors of gernal NAS or SAN (such as GB Labs and Space and Rorke Data) do not.

The big issue for supporting Avid MC is being able to handle the Avid media databases. Each drive has two database files, the .mdb and the .pmr.  If more than one editor is using files from the same share/drive/mount  they will conflict. As soon as someone imports, captures, or renders to the drive the other user's Avid MC app will stop to re-scan the media databases to update the application. This scanning stops other editors dead in their tracks until it has finished. 

So Avid (and EditShare) do some tricky stuff to stop this happening.  It's the Editshare software that allows all editors to share the same drive without the interruptions associated with changes to the databases. Most other vendors of IT storage "bolt-ons" cannot do this and therefore can only support Avid MC as a "one workstation per share" environment. That is basically useless for collaboration, let alone storage management.

EditShare adds many more features to support apps like Avid Media Composer. They support it as if the storage is a Unity/Isis, so to the editor it works and acts the same way as Avid's own storage offerings. 

In addition, they have an "Isis Emulation" built-in which also supports the Avid project sharing methodology- the green and red bin locks you see within a project.  This is the method of sharing that protects the content from being changed while you are working on it. So, the first editor to open a bin in Avid MC gets a green bin lock menaing they have exclusive write access to the bin at that time. Other editors get a read only access and see a red bin lock to remind them, amongst other reasons,  to save changes elsewhere. The editor does nothing to make this work except save a project and mediafiles to an EditShare "Avid Style" share.  Pretty awesome, eh?

EditShare also has a second method of sharing Avid Projects and mediafiles. In this method, bins are placed within a username folder that appears within the Avid project. The issue for some users, particularly education facilities, is that in the "Avid Style" of sharing, the first person to open a bin can make changes, and in fact delete the bin's content accidentally or maliciously. So the Editshare method for users that want added protection allows and editor to keep bins in their user folder and only give write access to other editors if they so wish and when they wish. Other editors see the bins in read-only mode until the editor that "owns" the bin moves it to another user's folder. In read only mode others can still use the content in their own sequences, and they cannot re-name or delete the read only clips, bins, or sequences. Once they are given write access, they do have full control.  It just keeps getting better doesn't it?

So, EditShare supports the same project and media sharing as Avid, plus offers a second more robust way to protect editors from each other. It's basically one of many such bundled special features for the main NLE or graphics apps that people use. 

In addition, they now support the use of AFP shares for Avid Mac systems - no more DAVE!!! :). This gives exceptional network performance and simple connectivity. Editors can use 1 GigE or 10GigE connectivity and simply mount the shares using standard Mac protocols.  Avid Windows users can of course still collaborate with the Mac users and mount the shares using standard SMB protocols. Editshare systems also have a feature to export any share created as an NFS mount and provides a cut and paste script to use for mounting these shares by command line on a Linux system. This is very handy if you are using a Baselight Media Composer plugin and a Linux Baselight system. It will work of course with Linux based Resolve or Smoke too- things that are pretty hard to do with Isis. 

Editshare storage servers are all bundled with a limited number of Flow licenses. They also have some great integration between the Flow database and Avid projects, sequences, clips, and subclips. So you get a MAM that supports Avid included.  Not many storage vendors can offer that all in the one chassis!

Want to know more?  Let us know we can organise a demo :)  And there are awesome deals to be had this financial year!