Can video be edited reasonably over a home ethernet network? I am particularly concerned about dropped frames etc. when processing the final cut. I have 35+ hours of family digital video sitting on cassettes (hi8/digital8) that I would like to start archiving and using to create compilation DVDs (and maybe one day Blu-Rays...). I have only about 10 Gig of free space on my computer. I plan to archive in as high quality as possible - say 6 or 7 Gigs/hr = 250+ Gigs of space needed (and counting - my oldest is only 10!) Meanwhile, I have a dire need for a NAS box to back up all of my work and home files so was planning to install one(secure place in my basement, fire resistant) I thought it might serve double duty as a file server for video editing. That is, given the shear space that all of this video will hog once it has been transfered I will likely only store it in one place besides on the the tapes themselves. I have read some posts elsewhere that say it is only reasonable over gigabit (don't have such a router but think my NIC may be). In particular I would like to hear comments from anyone who has tried video editing over plain old 100base ethernet. thanks.
Most consumer grade video editing software does not run in a server environment, or if it does, it doesn't work well. You need to get largest hard drive you can afford, for your computer, and when you capture your video, capture it as DV-AVI. The files will be large, but it is as lossless as you can get for capturing your video.
Yup.. the only realistic way to do tis is by running a remote desktop on your server and using the local cpu there to do the grunt. That means installing software which may not work in the server environment. I tried transcoding and authoring across the network when I was bulding my cluster thinking it would save time and hardware to run the streams to the nodes from my main desktop machine... big time fail.. 90% performance hit due to network latency and data bottlenecks.. also it completely swamped my network preventing any other traffic. Now every node has a ramdisk for local cache and a chain local cache drive on the load balancers. (not going to get any more technical.. my setup requires custom compiled software for 54 parallel processes) You can try installing the editing software on the server and see how far that gets you... but unless you know a fair bit about remote desktop applications and installing and running software in an unfamiliar environment you will do better following the previous advice. Don't know anything about your server and it's os.. but if it's anything like mine you will be waiting a month of sundays for a simple file join edit Of course you could always just use the server for it's intended purpose and dump all your files on there, bringing them over to work on as needed.
