Final Cut Pro 7 Setup/workflow

Hello there,

I work at a small company and we are starting to build large amount of raw tape and capture scratch data. I am writing to learn about best practices, procedures, and troubleshooting techniques. We have two editors who both work off Macs on a 1 gig Ethernet network using Final Cut Pro 7. The data lives on a remote storage device, synology volume. They are currently connecting to the device using AFP and creating projects over the network.

Mac Devices:

iMac 27 OSX 10.9.5

16GB RAM

512 SSD

Synology:

4x1 gig E bonded

40 TB usable

Small Project :

Raw Data: approximately 13GB

Capture Scratch: approximately 15GB

Final Cut 7 project file: 170KB

Large Project :

Raw Data: approximately 135GB

Capture Scratch: approximately 345GB

Final Cut 7 project file: 11MB

The two editors are experiencing different level of lags and poor editing experience. The editors work off the remote volumes, they don't move the data (capture scratches) to their local drives when they are working on these projects.

I have a number of questions about to how approach this:

1. What are best practices for setting up -editor machines/volumes/etc?

2. What transfer/mount protocols should they use AFP/SMB/NFS ?

3. What software can I use to get benchmarks for read/write to the remote volumes ?

4. If we went to a 10Gig E network switch, should we upgrade the nic cards on the iMacs? should we use Fiber optic ? copper?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks

Media@relay