Avid Server?

[Shootblue]

For those of you who keep up with this kind of thing...got a question.

Where I work currently has three workstations...one is express pro, one is express, and another is media composer. The problem is that station A captures all the A-roll and sets it in at 15:1...then station b has to reingest all that stuff PLUS the B-Roll at 15:1. Then station C has to spend all this time over again...but they capture at 1:1 for final output. We work in half hour formats...so it gets pretty time consuming.

Is there an Avid product that can act as a server for all of this content...and even play it all back to all three computers at the same time if need be? What about HD?

[mknisely]

Avid Unity ISIS is a server to hold media. Airspead to play media. Hope that helps. They do HD.

[Shootblue]

So you would have to have both for this to work correctly...right? They both can do multiple streams of playback without issues?

Do you have a ballpark figure on cost?

[mknisely]

Yes you need both. Airspeeds will give you 2 Channels of Playout we have 6 Airspeeds for air. Not sure on cost anymore, but would ballpark it 400K +

[Shootblue]

Continuing this ongoing discussion....producer today said he was told that the same server can't play back the same clip of video to two different computers at the same time...is this a problem with these products?

[Run 'n' Get 'em]

Producer was told wrong... These things are made so that entire newsrooms can get to the files... Two different systems can't /edit/ the same file at the same time but both can play...

[pre-set]

I don't know, but ours has crashed 3 times in 6 days.......

[mknisely]

pre-set seems strange. we have been running ours for a year and only had one problem with license issues which caused the crash - and that was a one time deal. you at the fox? have erik give me a call and i'll see if i can help.

but what i do and think you need to do is keep up with software revs, daily deletions, monthly deletions of special stuff, and actively keep up on system and NLE maintenance to avoid those issues. We found it is almost if not a fulltime job.

Shootblue. These systems allow similtaneous users to view, edit, play, log, ingest, and whatever else you can think of.

[amp]

We have had our Airspeeds crash several times. BUT, we've never lot what we were editing when it comes back. The bad part is that the times it has crashed was 15-20 minutes before a show. It hasn't crashed on its own in a few months. The last 2 times was a construction worker at our station tripping over the plug!!

[Geezer.1]

We have an Avid system that is a few years old but I imagine the latest stuff works about the same.
Our set up consists of eight Newscutter XP rooms with a 5.6TB unity server. The edit rooms connect to the server via gigabit ethernet.
We have two Airspeeds for ingest and they are used to bring in NBC Bitcentral material, Pathfire and occasionally, long feeds off the stations routing switcher. An example of a long feed would be when the prez comes to town we might route a live truck into Airspeed ingest to pick up his speech.
There are also baseball switches in the editors which allow you to bypass the tape decks and send the output of the router directly into a Newscutter but this ties up an editor so Airspeed is generally the better choice.
The avids are also on the staions network so if you need a graphic you can directly export a frame of video to the graphics department from the edit bay. We generally use Targas for this. After the graphic is finished the file shows up in a folder on the Newscutter desktop and you can drag it straight into a bin. This is very handy and not dropping graphics to tape keeps the process very clean.
The newsroom is running iNews and they can browse the Unity via Media Manager which allows reporters to log their tape at their desks. We have 15 seats for Media Manager and this is plenty for our shop. Media Manager is also the tool the editors use to pull material from Unity to their bins in Newscutter. We have yet to hit a time when all the Media Manager seats were in use so nobody gets left out in the cold.
That means you can have 15 people looking at the same piece of video while eight editors are cutting on it all at the same time.
For playback we use two more Airspeeds which are controlled by iNews.
Overall the system has been a good one. We do have a station wide IT guy and once a week he shuts down the Unity system for maintenance. This takes about 45 minutes so it happens on Saturday morning.
In three years we have had to replace two of the hard drives on the Unity. This takes about three hours so we schedule it for midnight. Even with a blown drive the server still works fine. Because all the video, audio and metadata are mirrored the loss of a hard drive is a pain for the IT guy but it does not cause any problems for news.
As far as routine service is concerned we clean off material from Airspeed playback each day, leaving two days worth of playback material on the system to cover re-cues along with some opens and stingers that are write protected and stay there all the time. As for Unity we keep a months worth of raw footage on it and have an Hold for Release project for long term stuff.
I try to take some time and restart the Newscutters at the start of my shift and this seems keep the workstations from becoming cranky.
No system this complex is perfect but our Avid system has been reliable so long as we keep up on the routine service.
I think this is a pretty standard Avid setup so there shouldn't be any surprises here for NLE veterans.
Sorry this is so long but I thought it might be useful for folks considering making the jump to digital production.