Back-up for your Avid?

[micaelb]

We had a bit of an incident last night that showed we were pretty unprepared for a crash of our Avid playback server.

Do any of you have a plan that gets your stories on the air when this happens? Something you do every day or tape machines that just sit there until they're needed?

We've had the Airspace for a few years now and it hasn't had many problems but it did last night and we were pretty flat-footed when it went bad. I would like to be able to have a plan and I'm looking for advice on where to start.

Thanks

 

[BrandNewChief]

What we do...

Well what we do isn't much help, but may be. We keep the old tape to tape editors in the edit bay on top of the decks, as a just in case scenario. Basically "if/when" Avid crashes, we just hook the decks back together & edit tape to tape until it's fixed. All in all this takes roughly 5 minutes and then we dump the finished product directly into the airspeed to make air. It helps, but there as to be a better solution! Good luck!

 

[shootist]

our policy is to dub packages to tape after sending them to the server. we have one tape machine set up in editing for emergency playback. VOs and VO/SOTs are not dubbed. the obvious concept is that at least our "major" stories will make air and the anchors can "bluff" through the VOs,

unfortunately...policy is rarely followed and i can't understand why.
before i send pieces to the server....i always hope to watch it at least once in real time to make sure it looks like i want it....i just dub it then. if i don't feel there's enough time....i'll send first and make the dub after. our stuff floats for breaking news all the time and you may enough time after all.

i do it cuz a.) i don't need my pee-pee whacked for "not following policy" but more importantly b.) i put the effort in....i'd like to give it every chance to air. c.) takes no effort really. d.) server crashes are ugly things that make everyone angry....least i can do is my part.

 

[Imachief]

We too have had our playback server crash. Although it's not an Avid system.

All my nonlinear editing bays have tape machines in them for ingesting video into the server. If the playback crashes, we can dump the various pieces back to the tape machines.

My playback room has tape machines in it which are routed to the control room. Now all we have to do is stack the tapes in the proper order, lead 'em, play 'em & unload 'em.

Its time consuming, and a real pain in the... But, it works.

Who said we'd ever get completely away from tape? Stupid computers.

 

[Dedline]

we have more than one playback server. at my old station we had 3, so if one failed, we could patch the control cables to another (during install we had a rs422 patch bay built), route the new channels into the switcher in the control room, and we should be good to go, fairly transparent. the hard part is you never need it and have to figure it out all over again when it does happen, because we never wrote it down.