Final Cut Express

[LukeC]

How do people use final Cut express?

 

We have a suite of 20 imacs and the media students have begun producing the final projects. The macs are joined to ad and they logon on with their ad credentials. We were getting them to save them directly to the home directorys on the windows network, but this presented issues of the videos stuttering due to the capcity of the network (we assume). We then decided to get them to save to the local mac for that lesson and upload the whole projects to the XServe at the end of the lesson. This means that they are downloading the work from the Xserve and uploading there work every lesson. This is becoming a long process they have had two lessons on it now and taking between 20 - 30 mins at the satrt and the end of the lesson. Do people have any suggestions as we need this work backed up.

 

We would like to know what everyone else does for students saving work for final cut.

 

Thanks

[Chris_Cook]

We used to let them save to their home folder on the mac, but had regular issues with large videos using all the space. We now have portable hard drives attached to each mac. They are secured to the mac with a kensington-type laptop cable. its not ideal as they arn't backed up, but its the best we can do at the moment.

 

I think part of the solution is educating users about file sizes and project lengths. But thats a lot easier said than done.

[Sean-OC04]

As a reseller the first thing I would ask is;

 

"how fast is your network, is it Gigabit ?"

 

"Have you got more than one Gigabit Port on the Xserve and are they aggregated to the switch"

 

"Are your switches using proper stacking kits and not just a uplink ethernet cable"

 

Although you can address the above and educate users you have to remember that with only Gigabit Ethernet ports on the iMac you will always have a bottleneck at the desktop

[LukeC]

thanks for responses so far, had been doing abit of probing around yesterday morning and relised the macs were only egtting 100 meg, so lunch time came old switch came out new switch went in now were getting gigabit for the macs. Will look at aggregating the network ports on the xserve. Thanks so far.

[rh91uk]

If network capacity was an issue, I would always save to an external hdd. We use this on 6 now ancient quad core machines that run premiere. With the 13 macs which we have got which will be used for video editing, they save to their home directory located on our nice EMC san!