This IS the Avid L2: [Avid-L2] Re: Avid needs to become a PRIVATE company!

Sunday, March 3, 2013

[Avid-L2] Re: Avid needs to become a PRIVATE company!

> Andi Meek wrote:
> Judging by the responses in that thread Mark,
> the answer is "no" in my opinion.

Neither FCP X or Premiere Pro offer collaborative editing like a Media Composer/Unity set-up. In other words, several editors opening the exact same project. But then, neither did FCP 7, so it depends on what you are trying to do.

PPro works more or less like FCP 7, but with some major limitations in terms of this question. You cannot open multiple projects at the same time. When you import a sequence from another editor's project, it also imports all of the associated master clips, even if they already exist in the target project. Deleting the duplicates causes the sequence to go offline. However, if the media is central, then Editor A can open/edit/save/close a project, which can then be worked on by Editor B.

Adobe Anywhere will likely change this, come NAB. It requires server-side software and qualified off-the-shelf hardware, but works using a check-out/check-in system. From the demos I've seen, two editors can work on independent copies of a project and then Anywhere manages version tracking. I suppose some human determination of which file is truly the final version is essential.

There are several ways FCP X works with collaboration and it seems to vary with file-based or volume-based SANs. The media folders want to be at the root level of any drive. X uses a feature called "add SAN location", which lets you bury folders down into your SAN, but it really only works correctly (from what I can tell) on Xsan. When it does work, only one user can access a specific "SAN location" at a time. I work with a volume-level SAN and that feature doesn't work at all there.

Look at X this way. It uses a file/folder structure at the Finder level that is pretty much the same as the Avid does it. Not a single, self-contained project data file, like FCP 7 or PPro. If your media is central (on a SAN) and your Event/Project folder are local with media linked, then it's more or less like bringing files into Media Composer via AMA. This means that you can have central media and each editor would have local mirrored Events (think of these as bins for source clips). The project files (edited sequences) can be moved between editors, just like copying an Avid bin that only contains an edited sequence. So the workarounds aren't as onerous as you might think.

- Oliver