I’m looking to build a portable workstation that I can move frequently. It will be based on the latest and most upgraded Mac laptop, possibly with an external RAID SSD storage solution.
In the past I’ve had many issues when moving workstations, especially with IP, backburner, caching, etc.
How would you approach this setup? What are your recommendations and experiences?
Most importantly, how can I avoid problems with IP configuration, backburner, caching and similar issues ?
Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated and might help others as well.
I didnt have any IP/network issue on my macbook for a long while, i had them all the time back in 2014 ?
what I would recommend is not to use a external raid, if the framestore gets pulled you will have a bad time.
You can now work unmanaged (modern) in flame and dont have to rely on the old framestore -caching ways of ye old times. if you adopt a worklfow like this you dont need that much storage for framestore at all!
this will be your gateway to getting away from these costly things
The other way that many do is just have a mac studio in the office and then a macbook air or something to remote into the main mac or linux machine using parsec/jumpdesktop/hpAnyware . that is usually the preffered way unless you have to use flame in situations without internet, like on set
Thanks for your answer @finnjaeger, very helpful !
I have a few questions about what you explained.
Do you know of any good resources online to learn this workflow ?
I’m most of the time receiving timeline and shots to do the retouch on. I’m not doing conform or format.
I’ve also seen @philm unmanaged project but I think it’s not yet available, this could work for me ?
Is disk speed less important in an unmanaged workflow ?
What do you recommend for storage with this approach ?
Does dwab work with ProRes ? I often work with ProRes and sometimes EXR.
What’s your preferred remote solution between those 3 ?
I’ve used remote solutions sometimes but I’m always worried about potential shutdowns like internet or power outages. That’s why I’m looking to try something else. And Yes the laptop will be max for ram
Yea its basically phils setup, i built my own that works for me, its not very hard, its very similar to how feature/nuke works
→ Disk speed is less important especially if you consider to cache to DWAB and not PIZ, huge difference!
→ totally depends on you total setup, are you just yourself with that macbook or is this part of a larger deployment? If I was freelance right now I would get lucidlink and just use that as my storage for projects, but hey depends on how you work.
→ I wouldnt go less than 4TB no matter what if this was my only machine, most likely would pick 8
→ parsec and jumpdesktop are pretty equal nowadays(jumpdesktop beta has 4:4:4) , for jump you need a local TURN server, parsec is a bit more resillient to firewalls but cant really handle complicated network topologies, so i actually say you want both depending in how the local network is laid out, between these 2 i can usually always get into my machines .
DWAB is only for EXR, its pretty much the equivalent to prores compression but for EXRs.
@Jerem - you can think of Lucid Link like google drive or one drive, but better.
Costs depend on your usage and expected connection speed.
Check the costs in your region, check where the closest center is, check your internet connection speeds.
There are many upsides to working this way.
Read and evaluate.
