Splice Now

Shared media was a very big thing when it became available in the mid-90s. Back then 67 gigs cost $20,000 and fit into a case the size of a suitcase. Sharing your media could save a lot of money.

But today, with 500 gig drives becoming common, storage costs peanuts. And that makes me wonder whether shared storage is such a big deal anymore. 300 gigs can hold a typical feature film at Avid’s 14:1 compression. With DNxHD 36, the same material would take up roughly a terabyte.

So we’re not sharing storage to save money anymore. We’re doing it for convenience, to avoid the time and trouble involved in duplicating media every day during production, and in duplicating render files as they’re created. I’m starting to wonder whether it’s worth it. The Media Composer seems to be more responsive with local storage, and local storage is smaller, lighter and quieter. You don’t have to run cables, you don’t have to buy or rent Unity, you don’t have to manage Unity.

The big loss, if you go with duplicated media, is the ability to share a project. You need Unity to do that. And that just doesn’t make sense anymore. With today’s CPUs, I can’t believe that we need a big, expensive server to share a li’l ole project. I suspect that you could easily support two users with the project hosted on one of their editing machines. But even if you had to go with a separate CPU, you ought to be able to do it for a couple of thousand bucks.

In other words, the sweet spot for a small film is shared project and duplicated media. In fact, it ought to be possible to do your media duplication automatically, with a utility that would compare media folders across a network and synchronize them.

This just isn’t rocket science anymore. Lighter is better. And Avid ought to make it possible. For a small editing environment with an editor and an assistant or two, Unity feels more and more like a sledge hammer banging in a carpet tack. Final Cut is going to add shared projects one of these days and when they do, you can be sure they’ll do it inexpensively. Avid could do it now and show independents that it understands what they need.

Technorati Tags: avid, edit, film, final cut pro, video

This entry was posted on May 24, 2007 at 4:28 pm and is filed under Avid, Avid vs. Final Cut, Avid Wish List & Bugs, Workflow. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.