Media Studies setup

[dezt]

I have just been asked to price up a media studies solution that will have 30 laptops. The media studies teacher also wants to use wireless, but i'm a bit worried that the files that are being worked on will be too big for wireless, especially if there are 30 kids all using it at the same time.

 

What sort of setup would be ideal, we are very short of space here so laptops would be ideal, but i'm starting to think that we might have to purpose build a media studies room for the laptops, which has not been planned for.

 

Has anyone got any ideas on what i can do?

[iSteve]

If the kids are working in DV video, that consumes 13GB per hour. Personally, I would steer clear of any media work or video editing taking place over the network and force people to work locally. I would expect wireless to be a big big problem for you when doing media work.

[dezt]

That's what i was thinking, what the teacher has told me is they want to be able to access the internet and print wirelessly. Could I get them to work locally but still access the net wirelessly? I'm assuming i can but want to make sure.

[Hightower]

Yeah, that would be do-able - you just need to enforce the fact that any video files are saved locally.

 

EDIT: We did a video editing class across wireless on brand new laptops (about 10 kids) and it took half an hour just to load the source file for everybody. Once it was loaded it was fine but then took another half an hour to re-save the file when finished editing.

[dhicks]

What sort of setup would be ideal, we are very short of space here

 

We got all-in-one machines from SCL to solve this exact problem. Nice and compact and very capable of video editing and so on. You could try a combination of the two - all-in-one machines around the walls, with maybe half-a-dozen laptops available to let the whole class work at once.

 

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David Hicks

[rad]

We have 25 HP laptops set up for the students to use all built as stand alones with CS3 installed and office.

 

The students access the internet using the wireless.

 

They are all aware that the laptops are not backed up and everything is standalone, I did have issues with a laptop constantly coming my way, probably kids deleting the system files, not had one for 2 months, must be they realise the deadlines are approaching fast!

[rh91uk]

We were thinking exactly the same when we were setting up the media suite here in the summer last year. We brought lacie 500gb external hard drives so they were backed up to an external hard drive and there was enough space for the kids to do some decent video editing without transferring gigs of video files over the network.

[dhicks]

We brought lacie 500gb external hard drives

 

I'd add that, if you're buying new machines anyway, get them with eSATA ports and a hot-swap capable SATA disk controller, then you can use eSATA external drives rather than USB (sorry, might well be what you meant in the first place, just thought it worth pointing out for future reference).

 

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David Hicks