Avid NEXIS/ISIS storage emulation tech info

Flame Tools and Tech
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Hi guys, do you know someone who might have a knowledge on a subject? I’m looking into writing and opensource something that enables bin locking on smn or fuse mount like sshfs, and it seem to be a truly misterious realm with almost no info avaliable…

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For AVID or Flame?

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For Avid Media Composer, could be a bit of an offtop but worth asking ). The goal is to enable bin locking for collaborative editing in MC on some kind of remote storage mounts to allow WFH with Avid actually running on a local machine. Media part is fine, it is just about how to make it look NEXIS-alike to MC

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@alanmcseveney ? @tombox ? @daveoy ? @tgentry ? @graeme @toddfreese ?

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Hi there,

If you’re using a Mac, I’d suggest Osiris. Makes any NAS look like ISIS with full locking abilities.

Flavoursys strawberry was the cheap appliance of choice for cheap alternative storage.

OR I could sell you my nexis, cheap as chips :wink:

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Forgot to mention, Osiris does locking for premiere too. If that matters to you.

So does my NEXIS.

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I’m a newbie to this type of workflow. Is it possible to use Projective Tech Strawberry with Flame? For those who have used Projective Tech (FlavourSys) with Avid and Adobe, how would you rate it from a Mac user’s perspective?

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There is a Samba 3 plugin called MediaHarmony which claims to do this:

https://www.samba.org/samba/docs/current/man-html/vfs_media_harmony.8.html

but it looks like it was never updated for Samba 4. Still, you may find useful info in the source code, and in the original MediaHarmony project stuff on SourceForge (hasn’t been updated in 10+ years).

Projective sells Osiris which does this and seems to work:

and there are other 3rd party solutions as well. Avid NEXIS storage is not cost prohibitive, and has the advantage of a single point of support contact if you have any issues.

Still, it would be useful to have an up to date open source solution, to trying to port the MediaHarmony stuff to the current version of Samba would be nice.

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Bumped into that plugin as well, thank you! It filters out avid database files so it does not rescan its databases in a loop using shared on-prem storage without telling it is is actually shared one.

I’ll try to explain the issue I’m having now to make it more clear. I have an offline editing gig now with the small team of 4 editors that is spread out from Ukraine to NYC. Having the systems on-prem and using Teradici kind f works but due to the distances it does not really work well - the thing is not frame-accurate and gives you a bit of a random time shifts which makes the editing process a bit dodgy for the trained eye.

Apart from looking into cloud geo-distribution the obvious solution would be to get the media on the editors machines synced and go, and it works well. We’re using synching that has an ability to filter out files based on regexps to sync dynamic media such as renders but it most of it is offline stuff that comes in read-only anyway so no big deal.

What I was trying to look into is to trick Avid into thinking that the storage is Nexis-alike for the project files folder to be able to use Unity-style bin locking for something that is mounted as sshfs or lucid-link or similar fuse-based solution.

There are some apps like Osiris or Mimiq that seem to be doing the thing, and I’ve requested a demo from them (Mimiq did’t wanted to give one as yet, and Osiris stayed silent for about a week now) so I though there might be some knowledge around on what exactly one should do to make it work. It looks like there is a library called AvidSharedStorage smth that does the actual communication and apparently there is some sort of dynamic query on a startup that those things are catching and giving it a proper reply that the storage is shared.

Ive tried Postlab and it works with lucid but it is Mac-only and also a bit of an overkill trying to be some sort of a project-management, chat and shared storage thing.

So currently awaiting Osiris to reply I was just curious that maybe it is something one can do relatively easy to make it work in such a remote-based scenario, as I happen to have a good guinea-pig project of a decent scale to test it with.

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Was going to suggest Hedge Postlab which sounds a bit like what you wanted to do, and the pricing seems pretty reasonable?

Some other, likely more expensive options:

  • remote access for Media Composer over Teradici, but only for the UI, and use a streaming video solution like ClearView Flex for the broadcast monitor, so “interface lag” is less of an issue
  • deploy “Media Composer in the Cloud”, complete with NEXIS storage in Azure UK region, half way between NY and Ukraine, so you have about the same latency for both sides, and you can maintain the model of “multiple Media Composers editing off the same storage with full locking functionality”
  • go all-in with Avid MediaCentral, but that’s likely lotsa $$$