Editing over an Ethernet Network

[JMDNYC]

I wanted to point out a cool new feature of Pro Tools 10 that hasn't been much discussed. It might help those thinking about whether or not to upgrade.

I'm a music editor, and for the past few days I've been on a mix stage where the hard drive and Pro Tools 9 system feeding the mix are back in the Equipment Room. I have Pro Tools 10 HD (software only) on my Mac Book Pro in the mix. I can mount the music drive over the network. I then open Pro Tools on my MBP, go into the Workspace and change the network drive from a "T" Transfer drive to a "P" playback drive. I get a new warning message saying that performance will depend on network conditions, which I dismiss.

I then make a duplicate of the session currently running on the main rig in the same folder. I open that duplicate session on my MBP, add a new down mix plugin to monitor the 5.1 through my stereo headphones, make my edits, save copy as PT9 then import the changes back into the main session.

In the old days (last month) you would have to have two drives with all the same media on both. With PT10 I can load the timeline into the disk cache. The video doesn't cache but it still seems to play back fine with only a little stuttering.

I would be curious to try this with two PT10 systems so that I wouldn't have to make a duplicate and a "save copy as..." In that scenario I wonder what happens if two systems are working on the same session? When you made a save in one would it update in the other?

[Chris Lambrechts]

Originally Posted by JMDNYC

I would be curious to try this with two PT10 systems so that I wouldn't have to make a duplicate and a "save copy as..." In that scenario I wonder what happens if two systems are working on the same session? When you made a save in one would it update in the other?

Delighted to see that other people are discovering this as well. I did some testing with this. Pro Tools 10 HD on an Icon system and Pro Tools 10HD software only on my MBP.
Audio drives from the Icon system mounted over ethernet network on my MBP. Opening the exact same session at the same time on both systems both randomly playing back at different locations etc etc trying to make the system work.

96/24 sessions btw ... no sweat ... works like a charm

We did some crazy project where we had to record 110 songs in 4 days for preliminary rounds of a show called 'The Voice'.
Worked out fine in the end but I would have LOVED to have PT 10 and these capabilities back then to handle recording on one system and have an editor working on a MBP while prepping the sessions for mixing, working on the same drives without having to copy sessions around.

I think the door is wide open now as well to start exploring some true networking and collaboration possibilities where you can send messages around to a mixer whilst he's working on a same session and you want to send him the update with edits from another system.

To a very large extend I feel people still have to explore some of these features and see the value of them.

Yes ... the ram disk trick is cool and very impressive but at the end of the day ? well ... who wants to copy around his sessions all the time to a virtual disk with the constant risk of loosing everything on there when you crash or simply forget to copy your last edits over to the real hard disks again.

Again ... props for setting it up but in the hands of the average user I see it as a very dangerous tool even.

Chris

[jmattchan]

this is very cool but how confident are you that this will hold up? i know it only accesses it to cache additional audio, saving sessions, etc.. but the last thing i need is some weird drive corruption happening when the cilent is paying a feature rate.

[DJ Hellfire]

This feature is the MAIN reason I wanted Pro Tools 10 as I frequently transfer sessions between the studio, my living room computer and my laptop. Then I discovered this function isn't available Native which really blows!

[Draulym]

Any idea what gets precedence when multiple users are editing the same project??

[DTM]

I was looking at upgrading our three PT LE suites to 10 so we could have a central network drive that everyone could work from. Just noticed this under the AudioSuite section of the manual which I think makes it pointless for us.

"Only audio files on locally connected hard drives can be processed with AudioSuite plug-ins. You cannot process audio files on remote hard drives over a network (unless it is an Avid Unity net- work).

[DJ Hellfire]

Originally Posted by DTM

I was looking at upgrading our three PT LE suites to 10 so we could have a central network drive that everyone could work from. Just noticed this under the AudioSuite section of the manual which I think makes it pointless for us.

"Only audio files on locally connected hard drives can be processed with AudioSuite plug-ins. You cannot process audio files on remote hard drives over a network (unless it is an Avid Unity net- work).

Wow! That is pretty useless!

[JMDNYC]

I have to say "Not True" to this, or "not entirely true." For this example let's call the Main System that has the hard drive attached System 1 and the Mac Book Pro that is accessing the session over the network System 2.

In my case I used an Audio Suite plug-in on a track that I had created on System 2. The audio on that track was, of course, on the System 1 drive. However, when I tried to import the track back into System 1 it couldn't find the created Audio Suite files. It turns out System 2 created a new folder on my internal drive and put the files there. Once I manually copied these files to System 1 then they re-linked.

The caveats in this case are System 1 was PT9 and System 2 PT10, so I wasn't accessing the exact same session but a copy of the session. Second, I was working on a track I created on System 2, so if you checked the Disk Allocation for that track it shows the new folder that was automatically created on System 2. I'm not sure what would have happened if I changed the Disk Allocation first (I guess I could do some experiments).

[stangroom]

Along the lines of this thread, has anyone attempted actually recording to a networked drive? I keep all of my studio's session templates on a networked drive so that every time we change one or add a new one, we don't have to copy it to all of the studio computers' local drives. Since PT 10 has come out, we now edit all of those templates on the networked drive, but I have yet to actually record anything to it. Makes me a bit nervous that we could lose files over the network potentially. And losing files is ultimate DEATH in this industry.

[Jazzbass56]

Great thread, I just updated to 10.2, and I find this to be a very useful tip, I too work as a MX editor, and was not aware of this feature so thanks, for pointing it out,.

Tommy