that was a lot of drama.
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yes, its been grinding me down - such a random thing of garbage, one bad apple poisioning my whole setup making me chase ghosts like a cray person .. nice.
now I have a extra NAS appliance and have AD joined my workstations with no particular benefit 
cool, random UIDs everywhere - gotta love the concept
- i know you all hate me for it , but these are shared machines, freelancers go on them , they are in a room , they need to work like “turn on start flame” and not “logg in , setup 500 things, then start” . I have now AD joined them but they all logg in with the same AD user now , shared home dirs and stuff is not even in scope for macs,
its great that I can logg in with my AD user onto these macs then cant use appstore licenses tools, have to change 1000 settings on every client i logg in, not even talking about all the third party licenses.
I get it for proper workstations espeically linux, no doubt - but god damn these macs are not made for it at least not in the way we use em.
well at least i learned a lot about NFS and about automounting it on macOS so there is that.
Not sure if using /Volumes/ or /opt/mnt/ for system wide mounts is preffered - I guess /opt/mnt
I get that this was an exhausting journey, and one could blame ADSK for various shortcomings that make this harder than it may have to be.
But it reminds me that the solution to all that are expensive and locked-down turn-key system. Where ADSK (or SGO or FilmLight or …) build the system from scratch, control everything, find and evict all the gremlins. Works beautifully. Stress free.
But you have to bill a lot of top-dollar jobs on yester-years budgets to afford those systems. And if you want to work on Flame, and Nuke, and Baselight or Mistika, maybe an Avid, you either need a very large office, or you get to pick one and only one. And then you can dream of the features the other tool does so well, but you can’t have.
So it seems aggravations of what you just had, maybe an ok price for today’s budget friendly systems, the ability to run all those apps and other things on the same system, and just have a bit more freedom.
As the saying goes: Freedom is inversely proportional to control.
3 Likes
Idk if thats the solution, I get the appeal - baselight still runs with it to this day although even they have softened up.
And I used to think there wasnt another way to get stability and performance on a acceptable level without hooking into the OS with a bunch of special stuff and limiting supported hardware.
But then Blackmagic has shown that this isnt really the case, no special storage needs at all, tripple OS support, Gaming GPU support from all manufacturers, strong performance throughout - simple database structure for projects, easy to deploy .. yadda yadda.
Flames switch to postgres is a step in that direction - hopefully at some point we can let go of file base “databases” and just run flame like any other “app” but we are far far from that.
from a pure business perspective i constantly re-evaluate all my software - if they are still the right tools for todays market and can do what we need to do the best/fastest etc , ease of administration is a important part of that evaluation.
So far resolve cant match flames functionality - but i allready spend more time in ComfyUI than in Flame so there is that whole thing creeping up 
(also considering a mac is so closed, its pretty much a mass-market turnkey system)
1 Like
Hoo-bloody-rah - drama over, until next time.
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From scratch it takes 80 minutes to create a virtual machine project server on proxmox that binds to freeipa, and connects seamlessly to a macOS flame and a linux flame.
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You can save 90 seconds if you have a script to make your VM.
You can save 18 minutes if you template an ADSK rocky 9.5 virtual machine.
You can save 20 minutes if your template already has freeipa client installed.
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I spent the extra minutes installing and configuring openZFS, creating a pool, mounting it strategically, installing DKU, rebooting, installing project server.
I may also have spent some time documenting, self-correcting and fixing my bad typos.
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Autodesk have definitely provided self-correcting software that requires very little configuration, but as others have pointed out, you need infrastructure before you begin. (in my case, a domain, a freeipa server, certificate scripting, firewall scripting, client scripting)
Also of note, the autodesk documentation for project server is so awful that there are at least 3 high level players who have requested improvements - the website is weak on facts/incomplete, the help file is missing key information - it could clearly be improved.
For example:
WTF is dataroot?
WTF is cfgroot?
WTF is logsroot?
WTF is dbroot?
WTF is projectsroot?
WTF are nfspaths?
WTF are nfsmediapaths?
WTF is imageprep?
The documentation provides the weakest explanations and the development team are not bothered by the weak uptake.
Also --no-dnssd?
which 1% of 1% of 1% (danny) does this apply to?
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Personally, I would never use or recommend project server since there are too many possibilities for failure and without comprehensive documentation for guaranteed success i couldn’t ever back it up.
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NFS is complex.
One dumb thing is that NFS forwarding,i.e. mount an NFS export from your NAS, then set your NFS mounts for your project server exports, doesn’t work under redhat/fedora/rocky, and will most likely never be supported by macOS…
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However, trying to finish on a positive note:
Install project server with defaults and it will immediately work with macOS and linux (despite the absence of coherent and comprehensive documentation).
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So whatever.
I hate project server and cached media - if you want to move toward that whole collaborative thing that other software manages to do, it’s a requirement to stop caching media in a stone that will not be supported in the future.
2 Likes
we dont render cached media or use any of that managed media stuff,
All I want is to have a central project repository for timelines only. thats all. media cache directory is only for temp playback caches.
Getting freeIPA to work with linux took me 15 minutes , this is easy. the mac part not so much, refsued to work…
our studiowide framestore is just 0.8TB after 2 years or so.
yep
this mac is bound to freeipa
UID and GID are the same everywhere
as for no cached media - you’re preaching to the choir brother
someone should do a logik-live…
or make a commercial for project server…
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I think you’re having rose-colored glasses on re: Blackmagic. I’ve been using it in production the last 6 months (for team based editing, for color many years before), and it’s at least as much shit as the stuff you went through with Flame. I know the grass always looks greener until you roll in it.
Just of the top of my head:
- No traffic throttling. Once it starts syncing, my NAS occasionally disconnects and some websites time out because Resolve is such a network hog that it starves everything else off air.
- The sync status is not real-time, but some background magic, which is somewhat up to date 5 minutes in. You can’t control it at any granularity.
- In version 19 (finally fixed), if you synced proxies, proxies couldn’t have alpha channels, so any rendering you did with GFX was f****. Your editors couldn’t make review renders unless they synced camera originals for TB of data. And you couldn’t pick and choose.
- Editing works most of the time, but there are still to many things missing. Every time I restart Resolve, the first time I have to freeze frame a clip I have to do it through the menu, because the keyboard shortcut doesn’t work. Once I have done it once through the menu, the keyboard shortcut (mapped to my Streamdeck) then magically works until I restart.
And that list goes on an on. Go migrate and use Blackmagic for real. We’ll see a lot more threads like that of you pulling whatever hair you have left out.
Blackmagic Design is great for YouTubers. It’s shit for everyone else who is serious. I’ve lived it for way too many years to take it serious. The only reason I tolerate it these days is because as of these times, it’s less shit than Avid, which is what we had before. And Premiere isn’t even in the league, so lets not talk about them. Avid still rules in some aspects, but as a whole package is dead in the water.
So yes, Blackmagic has the benefit of having developed all these features at a time where cloud infrastructure was already a thing, and has maybe less tech debt in that part of Resolve. They have plenty of tech debt in other corners. But they absolutely don’t have the leadership, forethought, and engineering excellence of some of the other shops (looking at ADSK and FilmLight among others). Their stuff is grave yard finds + duct tape + vibe coding, rapidly iterated on to hide the stress fractures. The only reason Blackmagic gets away with some of it, is because the next release is never more than 3 months away and they have an army of groupies that adores them on YT.
They might as well be Taylor Swift.
4 Likes
There is a correlation between the quantity of engineering staff for colour, the quantity of engineering staff for flame at these big companies, and the quantity of support required.
1 Like
I am very heavily using and admining resolve ever day, we have a lot of color and nowdays edit sessions with resolve. my time is really split arou d 50/50 resolve and flame,
My admin need for resolve is exactly 0 after setting up the db in a docker container in a CM once like 3 years ago, ok i need to tell people to properly name their projects, but other than that.. easy peasy lemon squeezy.
As always depends on the usecase, we do things like have 4 colorists in the same project coloring dailies or whatever , i hook up to the library from on the go with a vpn all the time
not saying its perfect , resolve caching is shit for example, no neat to sugercoat it and a lot of the new ML features are half-baked at best
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That is our experience too. I haven’t had to touch or think about the Resolve DB since I installed it in an Ubuntu VM years ago. I can’t remember the last time I logged into it, or updated it. Zero touch. We’ve never had any issue with its Caching mechanism either.
2 Likes
You’re talking about the local version, right?
Yeah, we don’t do anything Cloud.
Bro. @finnjaeger. Sounds like you’ve been gettin hammered. From a much, much comfier position of not being in your shoes with your challenges, what kinda shop/studio/person/artist/human do you wanna be? Should be? Can be? I mean, I know you can be anything you want. You’re the smartest person I know.
I’m constantly in awe of the geniusness of those around us daily, ESPECIALLY YOU, and especially those that have chimed in on this thread. But, I’ve gotta be me and do me and live my life. Which, I’m a doing a terrible job of but will nail one day. 
So I draw the line somewhere. FreeIPA + Linux + workstation graphics cards + Mac’s contain disposable data is a fine sweet spot to be in where you can spend the right amount of time spending money and the right amount of time making money.
Running a VFX studio is a lot like parenting. There are millions of ways to do it, none of which are right or wrong. They either work or they don’t for you and your children I mean clients. And it’s fine to draw a line somewhere.
This is how long it takes to join a Linux client to Free IPA:
## free ipa client setup
su -
dnf install -y freeipa-client && \
ipa-client-install --mkhomedir --force-join
# centralized home directories
## Add this to /etc/fstab
` sudo echo "10.10.0.162:/export/homes /home nfs defaults 0 0" | sudo tee -a /etc/fstab `
## sssd
` sudo nano /etc/sssd/sssd.conf `
[pam]
pam_mkhomedir = True
` sudo systemctl restart sssd
Give yourself permission to spend time on what truly matters. Whatever that is.
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Linux clients bound to FreeIPA is trivial. It’s getting the macOS machines that is basically voodoo piecing together information from a few scant webpages. It’s wild how there is no official support for it.
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yea the cloud stuff is not solid enough in my experiecne, low latency, postgres in a docker.
Staying local takes some of the issues out of the equation. And color is what they started 10+ years ago with, that part is most solid. The rest is hit or miss. Edit and Sound are the weakest of their tabs.
you forgott the fusion tab 
its the worst of them all , i disabled it all lol.
honestly dont have a problem with edit tab , only use edit and color and deliver page
2 Likes
I think that one is controversial. Obviously it doesn’t measure up to Flame or Nuke, it always was a poor man’s Nuke tool. But there are lots of folks that have put it to use in decent ways.
Long time ago I used Fusion more frequently, and it has it’s annoyances for sure. But it’s good for what it is.
1 Like