Advice needed... do we need FCServer?

{quote:title=avideditor wrote:}Would this give producers access to browsing assets if they are not on a FCP machine?{quote}

Yes. We have folks on everything from MacPros to 5 year old junk PCs able to review, export, and approve assets.

It works great for us.

Will Griffith

How much you need Final Cut Server depends mostly on how much you reuse content - multiple users accessing the same content, keeping content around for reuse in other projects or archival purposes, or offline/online workflows. You seem to hit at least a couple of these.

There are a lot of questions I would ask before making a recommendation. Why do you need to work in uncompressed? (Not that you don't--it's just that FCSvr might be able to address some of the issues to improve your workflows.) HD or SD? What kind of projects? What kinds of collaboration? What kinds of delivery workflows? What are the situations requiring ProRes offline? What space restrictions do you have?

You may not need to worry about flooding your SAN with proxies if you are working with uncompressed--the disk space for proxies will seem insignificant in comparison. You also need those proxies for non-FCP machines to browse over Ethernet (which also answers your second question: yes, it would give producers access).

So yes, Final Cut Server could definitely save you time, disk space, and make your production workflow more efficient. Exactly how will require a deeper assessment.

Since no cameras are recording uncompressed HD, I'd question why you're storing in uncompressed HD. But FCSvr will take care of all you issues.

A properly set up SAN will deal with compressed HD (either the camera's native codec, ProRes, or DVCPRO-HD) with that many stations and FCSvr with no problems. Again, why are you wasting disk space and data bandwidth with uncomprssed HD?

Producers are important (well, at least I'm not going to argue that point), but it sounds like FCSvr could be helpful from a workflow perspective as well.

Every time you convert from one source to another, FCSvr could do that for you, and manage the connections between the media, and allow you to offline/online without thinking about it.

Copy your .R3D files to a drop folder, have FCSvr convert them to uncompressed and ProRes HQ (FCSvr handles the online & offline versions) and H.264, move the .R3D to an offsite backup, archive unused footage to nearline storage, etc.

Upload your RED RAW footage into FCSvr. Do you need a Watcher folder? Depends on your workflow. But you'll set FCSvr to create Edit Proxies (not only preview proxies, two different things), and when you use this stuff for your FCP editing project, it'll ask if you want to use original files, or edit proxies. You'll use edit proxies, until you're ready for full rez output. At that point you'll check out your FCP project file, and specify (you'll get a window asking you when you check out FCP project files) that you want to use the original RED RAW files. It's as simple as that. You don't need to convert to ProRes or anything, edit proxies turned on will do that automatically.

And there's still no reason in the world to make "uncompressed HD" files at all. Why would you waste the time and drive space for something that's basically not doing you any good?

"But we transcode to 10 bit when we mix formats in an online/color workflow, or when we pre-transcode .R3D files and use the 10 bit for color correction and in our post-fx pipeline. "

Well, uncompressed doesn't help with your color work. The data is the data, it doesn't add anything to your color or FX work. ProRes 4444 would take care of any FX work that requires an alpha channel, and even then, you'd take your footage in in it's native format, do your FX work, and only use 4444 when you have to move from one app to the other and preserving an existing alpha channel. RED RAW files don't have an alpha channel to preserve.

If I take any compressed video file, convert it to uncompressed, it will show on scopes exactly the same. No data is added to the original, it can't be. Just a scientific fact, you gain nothing in quality. Moving on...