Since the inception of a plan to build Sumsound, two technologies have always been at the forefront of my mind…
The Satellite technology from Avid Audio foremost, which led me to invest in the video satellite rig, running both Media composer and PTLE with a decklink card. IMHO, any way we can both save time and improve picture quality on the mix screen is a good thing for everyone. It saves having “that discussion” with directors/producers about “pixels/image quality/why???”.
Secondly, I was always aware that the video editing house above my room, Cutting Edge, ran Avid Media Composers and centrally stored all their media on an EditShare system. I’d hoped to collaborate with them once the business started and in turn hoped having a Media Composer video satellite rig might come in handy…Sure enough, on a picture we are about to work together on, the SFX editor will be based in my room and need regular picture updates from editorial upstairs, so this past week, Rob Peru the Tech Manager from Cutting Edge Sydney and myself got the Editshare connection in place and tested it out.
Worked like a charm! They are cutting with the Avid HD video codec DNxHD36 for their offline upstairs, so that’s what I wanted to open on the video satellite rig, and stream via the 1000bT connection from their editshare. It turns out it was a straightforward affair.
Editshare have a snow leopard client, its free to install, as you pay for the storage unit, not for client seats on it, unlike some other companies…So since they had a spare port, it didn’t cost anyone a cent to add my room to their existing network.
The Editshare client software is simple to use, and once you’ve mounted the volumes you want, you can save that as a preset and it loads them automatically next time you log on.
So my vid sat mac pro has two ethernet ports, one is connected full time to the Editshare directly, and the second goes to my 1000bT switch that connects to my PTHD rig, ICON and local network for the audio team.
The one issue we are left with is that the rest of the audio team are not connected to the editshare, so they will need DV Pal QT movies to work to. I’m curious to test if I can open the sequence in MC, export a QT Ref movie for PTLE to open on my deckink card, open THAT, then start rendering the QT movies in the background while running PTLE in the foreground as my video VTR…Hoping to test that this week coming. Hopefully the 8 core Xeon and the bandwidth from the Editshare will cope with the demands of both tasks simulaneously, which would be awesome. I think this will have benefits when it comes to consistency of the materials that we need.
The only trick we needed to configure on the Editshare, was that I wasnt streaming picture from my Media composer onto my projector, rather I was using a QT ref pointing at the media and opening that on my Decklink card. To make that work, we needed to turn on “QT Reference mode” on those volumes on the Editshare. Seemed logical, we didnt even bother to test it without that mode switched on. It just worked, looked fantastic on the 3.5m projection screen and scrubbed and updated smooth as all get out, just like local SD video, but looking far, far sexier. 
A happy engineer here – love it when a good plan comes together!
