New media suite

[fafster]

We're looking to build a new computer suite intended to be used for multimedia.

The ideas so far are large widescreen monitors, beefy workstations to handle editing of video, and a HD projector and interactive whiteboard.

I'm not looking for advice on the specifications of the devices, per se, but more along the lines of:

Has anyone else done something like this already?
If so, what issues were faced and how were they dealt with?
Would we be better off with a projector and whiteboard, or a large LCD display?

Cheers all.

(not quite sure if this is the right section, to be honest...)

[Mandy]

Hi Fafster,

I have provided many similar solutions to other educational customers - some of whom are edugeek members.

I will be more than happy to quote pricing on a variety of solutions and possibly put you in touch with some customers of mine who have already had similar solutions.

Let me know if this is of interest?!

[dhicks]

The ideas so far are large widescreen monitors, beefy workstations to handle editing of video, and a HD projector and interactive whiteboard.

Ignore the sales talk about needing masses of extra processing power / RAM / disk space especially to do video editing. For the video editing your pupils are likely to be doing then most any new PC should be more than adequate (say a standard dual-core machine with 2GB of RAM, 160GB harddrive). The difficult bit is going to be providing suitable shared storage for all the pupils - saving video footage on a network drive just isn't going to work, but locally stored files are tricky to keep track of. We went for a system whereby we had an extra harddrive and network card in each machine - each machine is connected to a dedicated storage network, with the plan being that each of the spare harddrives will be shared out as a network-available block device of some kind and aggregated into a large storage pool, i.e. each PC acts as part of a distributed RAID array. The next tricky part is getting this idea across to sales people - it can takle a fair bit of explanation to get the idea through that you want two harddrives per machine.

--
David Hicks

[CPLTD]

Hi Fafster

Be sure to give us a shout for any of your IT hardware and software supplies, We also can offer you benching design and installation ,
As a long time official supplier and sponsor on these forums we have some great feedback on our services if you take a look in the recommened suppliers you will be sure to see plenty about us ,

We will glady quote and look to beat any price offered to you by our competitors,

I look forward to hearing from you,

[DrPerceptron]

We call our beefy workstations iMac's

They work really well, we set them dual booting XP and OSX and the kids are free to pick which one they want. They also use extended desktops too which the kids and staff find very useful. As for storage, we went down the expensive route of getting a dedicated EditShare box for them to connect to.

Could be worth waiting until January to see if there are any new iMac's planned.