Nothing these days "struggle(s) with a few editors accessing the same footage".

AVID hasn't been at the forefront of video editing since the Avid/1 / ABVB days. They sell a reasonably usable program with horrible hardware (since Meridien hardware - it's good they finally let us use other hardware such as BlackMagic), but never truly fix large problems. People therefore stay on a specific version of the software for ages, because everyone is scared of new and different bugs.

AVID's shared media offerings are tenfold the cost of other storage options simply because they have a flag on the mounted volumes that tells Media Composer to allow project and media sharing. "800MB pr box sustained" means nothing because anyone can do that easily with commodity hardware.

In other words, AVID is milking their cash cow and they really don't innovate or even try to offer a good product.

Apple, on the other hand, destroyed their professional editing products, then replaced them with decent tools, but ones that are worlds different. Many people have mixed feelings about this. On the other hand, if you want to edit 8K ProRes, Final Cut Pro makes it simple on any ARM-based Mac.

What's your experience based on? Do you work in post production on big projects?

It's their dependency on Blackmagic that's been there biggest problem the past 5 years.

Meridian was light years ahead of the competition. The firewire based adrenaline sucked.

And you won't find anyone complaining about their DX series just to bad they dropped that.

And your really not understanding the way avid nexis works if you think it's just a flag

First, facts don't rely on the amount of experience the person sharing them has. But I do get that it's easier to take someone at their word when they have lots of experience, so yes, I've worked on all sorts of projects of all sizes.

I think you've been sold a bunch of ideas. For instance, Avid has no dependency on Blackmagic. They use Open IO, which means you can use any card that supports Open IO, whether Aja, Blackmagic, Bluefish, Matrox, whatever.

Nexus / ISIS isn't special. The flag is literally just a flag that tells Media Composer to enable bin and media sharing. It can be enabled on any kind of sharing - NFS, AFS, SMB, et cetera. For example, check out Mimiq software for enabling it wherever you want.

It's just that you get everything wrong, if you had real experience you would know that.. for a fact. AVID depends on Blackmagic if you knew what you were talking about you would know (this is where you Google i bet)

The NEXIS hardware/software isn't just a flag, another visit to Google

First, I don't use Google, but that's not the point.

Second, please tell me how the fact that you can use no video interface card or Aja means you're dependent on Blackmagic.

Third, please tell me how bin locking on ISIS / Nexis is different than bin locking on third party shared storage with the AVID sharing flag turned on.

You've offered literally no searchable facts. If I search for anecdotes about how ISIS / Nexis are different, I'm only going to get marketing fluff.

So offer something of substance. Claiming someone is wrong without even saying what they're wrong about is not how any of this works.

AVID sells AVID branded Blackmagic hardware, come again how they aren't dependent, and as you know from your vaste fact based AVID experience that has been a problem since Apple Silicon. Bin locking is half the story, the AVID Client enables link aggregation to the NEXIS storage, 4 NICS = 4 times the bandwidth, you won't get that with 3rd party hacks. The NEXIS Storage uses a AVID custom filesystem that does what you claim isn't special, delivers sustained 800MB even if 20 clients are reading files.

Now please, before you make more fact based claims, i have used and still use the 3rd party "bin lock" solutions when I have special cases, and i can promise you, an ordinary file server does not compare when many clients are hitting the storage.

Substance delivered, lets see if there is a chance of someone learning something.

All I can say is that you've been sold selling points. I appreciate the attempt, but:

1) How does AVID selling Blackmagic hardware make that a dependency? You can just as easily buy Aja hardware. "This depends on that" means it requires it. AVID systems do not require Blackmagic hardware at all. If you think they do, please explain.

2) Bin locking and media sharing (client specific paths in "OMFI MediaFiles" and "Avid MediaFiles") is a flag that is either off or on. That has nothing to do with all of the other things that have been sold to you as "special" about AVID storage.

For instance, link aggregation has been built in to macOS since the early days of Mac OS X. Also, it really doesn't matter. If you want something that literally does 4 gigabytes a second, you can do that all sorts of ways with current Macs - no need for multiple NICs.

Anyhow, speed is largely irrelevant for editing systems. The only time speed matters is if the storage can't keep up. You're not watching video at 2,400 frames per second as you're scrubbing through video at 100x speed, so people who are concerned with "800 MB" (you're not even saying per second, or anything like that) are no different than the people who want the wanna-be muscle car that puts out 500 horsepower but that are just going to and from the store. Who cares? If you care, you know. If you have the need, you know. If you're working on 4K uncompressed, you're not doing it on shared storage, anyway - that's just silly. But if you REALLY need to do 4K uncompressed on shared storage, guess what? You're not using AVID, because it can't support that :)

Otherwise, "800 MB" is just a sales number. I just build a NAS for less than $2500 that does 1.2 gigabytes per second, and I wasn't even trying to make it fast.

> i have used and still use the 3rd party "bin lock" solutions when I have special cases, and i can promise you, an ordinary file server does not compare when many clients are hitting the storage.

Those are two different things. If you choose to conflate them, that's up to you, but I can easily show shared storage that makes AVID's look outright pokey, particularly with twenty clients, just as I can show you software that turns the AVID bin locking off or on, so you're not fooling anyone by trying to suggest that all bin locking file servers are somehow inferior, or that they're inferior because they support bin locking, or whatever way you want others to think they're connected.

They're separate things. You do understand that, right?

I hope you take away from this that there are more products than just the half a dozen that are most common, and that products outside of the post world often make products in the post world look ridiculous, if in part because the ones in the post world are a generation older and multiple times the price. But because people in the post world don't know any better, they more often than not spend literally ten times the going price to get something with an AVID sticker on it, even when you can show them that the AVID product is just a rebadged Seagate storage array or whatever.

1) You don't think they depend on Blackmagic when they have sold their hardware to their customers.. what? 2) Let me quote someone, you: "AVID's shared media offerings are tenfold the cost of other storage options simply because they have a flag on the mounted volumes that tells Media Composer to allow project and media sharing". So what is what? And i knew you would come with a long write up about "link aggregation" you don't understand it, not a surprise!

But at least you use a car reference, AVID is the Ferrari, the "I CAN BUILD A NAS" is the useless muscle car. And of course they have gear that can handle uncompressed Footage, please, they are the standard for winning an Oscar.

I take away from this that you have no idea of how this work, it's not called "bin locking servers" that's just software. And it's not the hardware that makes a NEXIS special, it's the AVIDFS. I am only writing this for others that might read this so they understand.

Please keep this going, I am entertained

I spent some time a while back thinking about a web-native video editing tool with very lightweight client demands. This came up after watching all those LTT videos about their storage & networking misadventures around the editors. It seems something approximating this (or superior to it) has already been developed.

The way you develop & manage the proxies appears to be the biggest part of the battle in making things go fast. There's no reason for editor workstations to be operating with the full res native material unless theres a targeted reason to do so.

Before Covid your idea was the one everyone was pursuing, including AVID with a embarrassing system that i never saw a in a satisfying version.

With Covid remote access became the norm and the online/proxy workflow more or less died. Avid still has a working version (better than the original) but it's widely used.

Proxies are used for several reasons, expensive storage, heavy codecs at high bitrates or multicams.

They are typically avoided whenever you can because the online part of a proxy based workflow can be a challenge. And especially if you have tight deadlines you want all the variables out of the way.

That is a pile of contradictory and nonsensical statements.

Could you be more specific or am i on Twitter?

EDIT: Nevermind i saw you other comments, you have no idea what you are talking about.. Twitter confirmed!

FYI they’ve reposted their nonsensical tirade in a new (unflagged) comment above.

Fortunately it appears not.

That is a pile of contradictory statements. And since you're upset by that idea and unwilling to re-read what you wrote, here's some spoon-feeding:

"With Covid remote access became the norm and the online/proxy workflow more or less died"

No; remote access DEMANDS a proxy workflow, since you're not going to edit full-resolution files over the Internet. So it did not "die;" just the opposite. Witness the entire "camera to cloud" marketing mania that swept NAB a few years ago. That's based entirely on the rapid upload of proxy files to begin editing ASAP.

From NAB last year: “We introduced the [Blackmagic Camera] iPhone app a little while ago,” said Bob Caniglia, director of sales for the company in North America. “You can shoot with that phone, work with the cloud service, share proxies. The camera to Blackmagic cloud to Resolve workflow started with the camera app. The Ursa Broadcast G2 [camera] is now in beta for that software too. That's a good direction on where we're going.”

Does that sound like it died? Or https://blog.frame.io/2024/04/11/visit-us-at-nab-2024/

But back to your assertions: "Proxies are used for several reasons, expensive storage, heavy codecs at high bitrates or multicams. They are typically avoided whenever you can because the online part of a proxy based workflow can be a challenge"

That makes absolutely no sense. You just claimed that proxies are used to avoid "heavy codecs at high bitrates" but then claim "the online part of a proxy based workflow can be a challenge." But you neglected to provide a single example of what's so "challenging" about it, especially when you just cited proxies as an advantage.

Thus, since you pushed the issue, we see that in fact it is you who has no idea what you're talking about. But hey, keep insulting other users.

Or... if you prefer to be informed: https://filmmakermagazine.com/120946-new-remote-tools-workfl...

https://www.tvtechnology.com/news/cameras-support-expanding-...

and many many more...

LTT is probably not a good/representative example for anything. They'll do infra stunts for content, then it will fail and they'll get content from the failure and content from the new thing. It's in their interest to be slightly on the bleeding edge and slightly janky while having access to subsidised hardware.

And I mean that in a completely positive "it's awesome" way. Just... not the problems anyone else should be facing.

Have you used an Editshare?

I actually tried the first version.. back in the day. But even if NEXIS is stupid expensive it's still acceptable if you have the productions for it.

One of the main reasons it's used in larger post houses is the hardware and software support that is world wide with people on site if needed.

I Avid too. And manage two sizable (300+ virtualized editors) on-premise VDI systems, and one bigger(somedays 600+) AWS-based one that holds more Adobe than Avid. Remote experience is a bandwidth and latency thing more than anything else, but the technology is limited - for example you can't do a good ProTools system virtualized with a control surface and sync can be a real pain to sort out. As for Avid's solutions to the problem: they do it a couple of ways:

- Composer/Nexis all hosted on Cloud (AWS): fine, but pricy and the Nexis experience is meh

- Composer hosted Cloud/Nexis hosted on Prem: actually works well, but you need to have a direct-connect to AWS (the network can be pricey)

- Composer on on-premise VDI/Nexis hosted on Prem: works really well, and I have a bias towards this instead of fully in cloud for not only security reasons since the TCO is less

- Composer Cloud (or whatever they call it today - used to Composer Sphere): this is a setup where instead you stream real-time proxy to the Composer from MediaCentral. You can download hi-res media if you need to. It works ok, but it more suited for News workflows. Security is a thing with this solution.

- Adobe/OpenDrives on AWS: I mention this, because we do this too. This has all sorts of things to talk about, and is pretty good, but, again, you gotta know what you are doing.

For the on-premise ones, VMWare is our Hypervisor of choice, and, yup, we are looking for other options. And we have all the usual IT problems: domain management, updates, roaming desktops, etc.

If you are looking for 3rd-monitor image viewing (like in the old days with hardware), you can swing NDI or 2110. NDI is ok, and for 2110 you need a network and router to handle it.

During covid I ran a home made ndi solution for remote color correction.

It worked.. Kind a

The "600+, AWS" detail is great to read, as confirmation that this kind of thind does work. We're urrently setting up remote AWS systems and finding a lot of moving parts for getting smooth playback while editing in AE/PPro.

If you have time to expand on the "bandwith and latency thing", I'd love to hear more. Even a "you need to be geographically within X miles of the instance" ballpark figure would be wonderful to know.