Is anyone out there working with Final Cut Pro off an Avid Unity Media Network? I'm having an issue with maintaining the media's connection to their render files, mostly when working with titles and effects. I'll render titles or effects in a sequence and they will play back fine as long as I stay within FCP. Once I switch over to the finder or another application, when i return to Final Cut the connections to the render files are lost. The render files still exist on the Unity workspace, but I need to then manually reconnect each render file which is extremely time consuming. Storing the render files on a local hard drive solves the problem, but I really don't want to have to do that. I know other people have experienced these same problems, but I haven't found any answers on the forums. Does anyone have any suggestions or solutions I haven't considered? I'm running FCP 6.0.2 and Avid Unity 5.0.1 on an 8-core 3ghz mac pro, OSX 10.4.11, w/ an AJA IO HD. Let me know, thanks. -Erik Auli

Well, we'll skip the obvious observations about teaching you to use FCP on an Avid forum....

To what do you have your scratch and render disk set in FCP? I will say this, FCP does not do well on Unity. It sees the workspaces simply as mounted volumes and loses connection to them often.

The scratch and render disk are set to the project workspace on the unity. I'm aware that changing the render files scratch disk to a local drive solves the issue, but I'm trying to see if there's anyway around that. I'm looking to work exclusively off of the unity if thats possible. It seems like its just a software issue with FCP that hopefully will be addressed in the next update, but wanted to see if anyone has found an alternative solution until that happens.

We bought an XSAN for the reasons BLKDOG states. They have brought out XSAN 2 but sadly you can't update or part exchange XSAN 1 for.  However this does leave the  first XSAN version a lot cheaper than it was.

 

Whoa, Whoa, Whoa. I thought the whole point with the "Open" archetecture of 5.x was so that other Applications work on Unity. AE, FCP etc.

Avid needs to re-hire their AE's.  It was such a bad move to become a marketing, stock market driven company in such a small, focused market as Post Production.

brent

Avid has pretty much abandoned the Open Storage Initiative. We've done a lot of FCP on Unity testing and the quick answer is that the render issue is an FCP bug, fixed in 6.0.3 FCP 6.0.2 had the "copy sequence render" fix, but 6.0.3 seems to now retain renders on Unity 5.0.1 Hope this helps, and "Hi" Brent, how are things at Digital Core? Sig Knapstad ACSR Elite Cutting Edge

But wait, there is more....

Turns out we have found that some renders are still not retained. If the file is Pro Res with an Alpha Channel then it won't keep the render if sent to Unity. It will retain the render if sent to local storage. I believe Pro Res doesn't have Alpha support, but it is still odd that it will work to local, but not to Unity. Other than this, all other renders (ie, Animation codec with Alpha) seem to work.

More later,

Cheers,

Sig Knapstad

ACSR Elite

Cutting Edge

 Are you using the updated Unity 5.02 connection manager on your Macs?