Best practice on a SAN with Team Projects

[chapmattman-ZSGPag]

Hello all-

I am excited that Adobe has added the start of Node-based project management with the new 2017 Team Project feature.

So my question is..

Is there a video or tutorial with "Best Practice" setup for this type of edit?

We have 3 new Apple Cylinder editing workstations on a 10 GB/s SAN network, with 500/Mbps tested off of the server, which is SSD.  We are editing 22 minute episodes of 2K footage in rendered TIF sequences.

We have seen a LOT of curious behavior when working on 2015.3 in the same scenario, and have yet to be able to determine what the best practice is for performance in this scenario.

For instance,

-Where do we set the cache?  Right now we are setting it locally on each machine to a dedicated thunderbolt SSD.  The thinking being that we don't want to use any network bandwidth to edit the TIF sequences, which are quite large, around 128 GB per 11 minutes.

If we put the projects on the server, will it automatically detect a team edit?  Can you make a team edit on the same sequence at once?

Do we set the scratch disks for previews and such on the server or locally as well.

Do projects carry these settings internally?  We noticed that if we had a machine with Premiere loaded on it fresh, and the machine had set its' intermediate time database as 29.97 fps, then if it loaded up a project that had a hundred TIF sequences originally imported at 24 FPS, the NEW machine will open the OLD project using 29.97 fps.  We then have to go back and manually link re-interpret each of the sequences... VERY ANNOYING!

Any overview of working off of a SAN and Team Projects would be greatly appreciated.  It is a nice feature, but it (like so many things ADOBE) is released with a seeming VACUUM of information on how to best setup the technical side.

Thanks

Chapman

[Ramesh_Encore]

Hi Chapman,

Thanks for your interest in Team Projects (Beta). Here are some very useful links and FAQs:

Team Projects FAQ

Working simultaneously in shared video projects

Collaborate on shared video projects

I will try to answer a few of your queries.

Where do we set the cache? Right now we are setting it locally on each machine to a dedicated thunderbolt SSD. The thinking being that we don't want to use any network bandwidth to edit the TIF sequences, which are quite large, around 128 GB per 11 minutes.

The editing workflow with team projects is not dependent on the cache. Each editor in a Team Project can set the Cache location according to his/her convenience. If I am the remote editor and I open the Team Project created by you, I will get all the media files if I have access to the location where all media files are. Then all the cache will be created for me as well.

If we put the projects on the server, will it automatically detect a team edit? Can you make a team edit on the same sequence at once?

If you are working with Team Projects, there is no project file which can be stored. All your project data is stored on a server which is not accessible physically to anybody. But there is option to convert your team project into a project but if you do so and start working on that local project, you would not be using Team Projects service and hence will not be able to collaborate in "Team Projects" way. But if you decide to go just with Team Projects then all the edits you do will be stored in your session and then there is option to "Share your changes" with others. Once you share your changes, then all the other collaborators in the team projects will be able to see your changes. They will have to "Get latest changes". And yes, editors can work on the same sequence at a time. The editor who decides to share first will put changes to the server. If other editors then decide to share, they will first have to Get the latest changes and then they will see a conflict which can be resolved with given options. You can find all this detail in the links I shared above.

Do we set the scratch disks for previews and such on the server or locally as well.

Again these settings depend on the editor's choice.

Media Management works the same way as you would have done before Team Projects. Before this also the editor had to have the access to media or the proxies and with this service also this condition remains true.

Hope this is helpful and you can get started with Team Projects.

Thanks,

Ramesh.

[chapmattman-ZSGPag]

Hi Ramesh-

Thank you.  I reviewed all of the material that you provided in the BETA forums.  It looks like Team Projects will not work for us as we have a strict company policy about placing projects into clouds of non-approved vendors.

Additionally, we use Dynamic link quite often in our projects, so the limitation of removing that is far more crippling than the current system.

I will ask in a different post about what the best practice is for using Premiere with multiple editors on a SAN across many projects.  We are encountering many issues when we get farther along into edits where certain timelines will freeze, or cause Premiere to choke.  I believe it to be an issue with Cache/Media/Proxy settings, so I'd also appreciate an overview of those, with regard to a network setting.

Thanks again

matt chapman

[Ramesh_Encore]

Hi Matt,

There is nothing like any project file which is stored anywhere. Everything is in database tables and very much secure. Regarding the Dynamic link feature, we have this in our priority list and I will update you once we have some information regarding this from the team.

For now, if you have multiple users working on After Effects, then you can use Team Projects in that workflow so that you don't have to involve Premiere Pro.

Thanks,

Ramesh.

[chapmattman-ZSGPag]

Great thanks, Ramesh.  So then a team project is stored on your server or our own?  How do you open one from the point at which you are in Premiere 2017?

I'll still post another time about what the best practice is for working with a SAN network.  I saw this post, but I am not sure that it is current, and the solution seems like it is from another user's trial and error, not Adobe...

Re: When group-working from SAN, where is the best place to store Cache Files, the Cache Database, a...

Thanks

Chapman

[Ramesh_Encore · Accepted solution]

Hi Matt,

The team project is stored on our hosted Team Projects server in the form of database tables. Nobody has access to that database.

You can open the Team Project from any point in any of the application (Prelude, Premiere Pro and After Effects). What I mean is that you can create your team project in any of these three application and then shift to any other application. It would work smoothly. The only thing is that there are some application specific features which are not available in another application. For example if you create a Sequence in Premiere Pro which has multiple layers of audio and video or images, then you will not be able to use that sequence in Prelude.

Dynamic link between Premiere Pro and After Effects is not supported. So any Premiere sequence will not be usable in AE and vice-versa.

Thanks,

Ramesh.