Macbooks -wireless and media studies

[DaveM]

Evening all

I have no experience of Macs, but will have to gain some pretty soon, but our media studies teachers are asking whether we can purchase Macbooks for use wirelessly in our new 6F centre. Whilst I have no objections, yet! will the likes of adobe premiere, Photoshop elements, photo shop and other media software run ok on Macbooks over a wireless network?

Any one have experience of this type of setup?

 

Cheers

Dave

[webman]

Media-intensive software will not work reliably, if it all, over a wireless network if users' work is stored centrally.

[mac_shinobi]

Id agree with webman and say for multimedia purposes normal wired Ethernet would be better

[crc-ict]

Don't fear the coming of the MacBooks - they're great machines apart from a few annoying niggles.

 

One of my schools got some, and within 3 months, I had bought one for myself! They really cool.

 

Just be aware that they don't stay looking 'Apple-cool' for long once kids get their hands on them, ours are only about 6 months old, but they're scratched and marked to hell. And we've had bad problems with batteries going kaput on us, but Apple released an update just last week which is meant to deal with that issue. Make sure they're 100% updated before they're put into service!

 

A final suggestion is to use the option in Power Settings to make them shut down at some time each night - that stops the problem of them getting left on sleep and completely draining the batteries to the extent that they don't charge anymore!

[Halfmad]

Also if the batteries drain completely you lose the date and time as they have no internal batteries!

 

MacBooks are OK, I can't really see any advantage over a PC though and plenty of disadvantages from a support point of view.

[GrumbleDook]

The main issue with using any wireless device for media based work (audio, video, graphics) is that students (and staff) will often 'forget' that the file they are working on is on a server somewhere and they are working over a *shared* wireless connection.

 

If you educate them right to work of the local drive or on an external drive it should be fine.

 

Also consider how you use the mapping of home directories. Generally when a SysAdmin binds the device to the AD then the home directory (and the subsequent 'Movies', 'Music', 'Pictures', 'Documents' and 'Library' folders) are basically soft-linked to the home area specified in the AD.

 

By default iMovie wants to use the 'Movies' folder, iTunes wants to use 'Music', and so on ... a bit annoying really.

 

The more professional apps (Final Cut, Photoshop, etc) actually give you the option to specify where you want things ... and this you can save as plists which you can load by default on machines (or users via login hooks).

 

I would strongly recommend that you speak with your nearest Apple Solutions Expert to get help and advice ... and even see what deals you can get on training.

 

HTH

[Rozzer]

Hi,

 

I will also that that anything like iMovie and shared drives just do not mix. What we had to do at my school was make a scratch drive and then students could drop their work onto a media drive. I had loads of problems with kids trying to use iSight and it would just not record. After speaking with apple they said it just cannot be done.

 

Hope that helps.

 

Ross

[kingswood]

Hi,

 

I will also that that anything like iMovie and shared drives just do not mix. What we had to do at my school was make a scratch drive and then students could drop their work onto a media drive. I had loads of problems with kids trying to use iSight and it would just not record. After speaking with apple they said it just cannot be done.

 

Hope that helps.

 

Ross

 

We decided to authenticate using integrated AD information, storing movie files locally until finalised whereupon the student/teacher can save finalised projects to the RAID for backup. Teachers can use ARD to remote in and save the projects and/or backup to an external hard drive or burn files to disk. I think this is an area that Apple really need to address- but even if they did "fix" it, shunting huge unfinished movie projects across a network is a *BAD (Inc)* thing to do. You really need to build your infrastructure from the ground up just for this or keep your servers (XServe and RAID) on the local subnet of the Macs doing the movie work. Something we are considering for our new build (with more servers and storage and many more Macs to worry about).

 

Paul

[DaveM]

Many thanks for all these replies, they make interesting reading and have given me info I can utilise.

Kind regards

Dave M