We are in the process of upgrading our post-production facilities to 20 MC workstations. I have recommended that we will need a Unity storage solution to accomodate the increased number of student projects for future years (after much arguing with our IT department that networking the machines is not a good idea!).

It may sound like a daft question, but can anyone give me a quick guide to the Unity system?

How does the file management work?

How are the workstations connected?

How are User accounts & projects accomodated?

Do you only need one dedicated workstation for capture/digital cut?

What pitfalls should I avoid?

Any advice would be much appreciated.

Hi Gilian,

I got myself a used Unity Lanshare last year, and I can't begin to express how easy it has been working for me. Now there may be all sorts of different versions and options, so I'm not sure that my experience will apply to your 20+ system setup. I'll just describe what I encountered.

File management. You create workspaces on the Unity system (it has its own CPU). Those workspaces can be made available with read/write or read&write access to several or all users. They can be protected, if so desired. Any user can log into a system, and mount these workspaces, which then appear as network drives. On those drives there are the usual MXF folders, but inside them, there will not be folders named 1, 2, 3, but each system gets its own subfolder to work in (like AVID1.1, AVID2.1, etc). This is self-organizing.

The workstations are connected over either Ethernet or FibreChannel (more bandwith).

Projects can be stored on one dedicated workspace. Multiple users can potentially access the entire project and its media at any given time. Only ONE user will have write access to any bin at any given moment (the first one to open the bin), but all the others may read it, even when someone else is working on sequences in that bin.

The central Unity CPU has the software that allows you to manage user accounts and workspaces. You can increase or decrease the size of workspaces at any time. You can enable or disable the mirroring of media, per workspace.

You don't need a single dedicated I/O system, any system can capture/playout to/from the Unity. Simultaneously, if you'd like. But yes, you could have one I/O system and muttiple edit systems with less or no I/O.

I can't think of any pitfalls, but with many systems and users, I reckon that someone will need to spend quite a bit of time keeping everything organized, since lots of people might leave their files all over the place if you don't adhere to a certain system. An option is to have a dedicated workspace for the media for each project. I even break it down into separate workspaces for Picture, Sound and renders for each project.

I don't think it is recommended, but I use one 10GB workspace on my Lanshare where I put imports and exports, so that any of the three computers hooked up to it may access those files, so basically like a network drive.

I think on bigger sites, like yours, you'll likely need to have someone present that is very familiar with the product and will act as an administrator.

The best thing would be to go someplace where they run a system and check it out for yourself.

Gillian:

How does the file management work?

Avid has a proprietary file system called the Avid File System (AFS). With the client software installed, workstations are able to read/write to these drives.

The AFS allows Avid Unity File Manager to control permission per file dynamically - thus a file based Storage Area Network (vs volume based SAN).

An allocation group (bunch of disks) are grouped together. Allocation group is the pool from where workspaces are created (so 1 allocation group can have several workspaces). These workspaces will appear as the drives on your client side where you can work from.

As long as the client is installed and connected, any Windows or Mac system can use the drives like any other drive. It can be for Avid or Photoshop or After Effects or ProTools, etc. It shows up as network drive. The Avid NLEs however benefit from an additional feature - real time project sharing. This is unlike low cost SANs. Editors can work in the same project. Read/write permissions for bins are resolved by the basic rule of 'who opens first is the only one that can save changes'. Others can save the bin in another name or copy it to their own bin.

Gillian:

How are the workstations connected?

Fibre or ethernet (GigE).

Gillian:

How are User accounts & projects accomodated?

User accounts are setup using the Administrative Tool. From here you can dictate read/write permission for each workspace (the drives that shows up on the client side).

The usual workflow for project sharing is to designate a drive for projects. From here Avid will automatically manage the opening, closing and saving of bins in real time. If you don't want others to change the project you can place it in a Read only Unity workspace.

Unity also automatically creats an Attic for any Unity projects.

Gillian:

Do you only need one dedicated workstation for capture/digital cut?

Yes. This is a common workflow for Unity projects but you don't have to.

Gillian:

What pitfalls should I avoid?

You need a good admin that is both proficient in IT and video. You must follow the Avid qualified setup to the bone. If not it can lead to instability at best or lost data at worst.

Once you really have a Unity expert then you can do some tweaks on own. Even then most stay with Avid's recommended setup.

There are a lot of lit you can get from Avid. They may even schedule a demo for you at your local reseller. Contact them for more info. Or visit a local facility that has one.

Dom & Job have covered all the bases here.  Can I just echo their sentiment that you're going to need someone, probably full-time, to administer it.  This isn't because the Unity is technically complex, in fact once it's setup I've found most of them to be virtually trouble-free.

The administrator is mainly going to be kept busy ensuring that old media is deleted, re-usable media is kept safe, and new users have somewhere to store their media.  You'll need to create, and enforce, fairly rigid guidelines if you're talking about a 20 workstation setup.

Agree with Chad, i have a 9 client setup and its a big job for me to keep track of everything and manage it.  Plus, i gotta edit too!  Love Multi tasking!

Then again, if one were to manage 10 or 20 systems and tens or hundreds of mediadrives, sneakernetting stuff over from bay to bay, that might cost even more time.

Job ter Burg:

Then again, if one were to manage 10 or 20 systems and tens or hundreds of mediadrives, sneakernetting stuff over from bay to bay, that might cost even more time.

Oh my yes.  And I've had to do it more times than I prefer to remember.  Unity is vastly superior to local storage-only.

 We have been on Unity for about 5 years now. It functions very well as a shared storage environment for multiple platforms to access and use the same media. However, in a scenario with that many platforms, for file management,  Media Manager is a necessity to track different projects using the same media so that shared media is not deleted until the last project using that media is deleted.

That being said, I don't think the first generation of Unity is being marketed anymore. Now, there is Unity ISIS and Avid Interplay, which helps manage multiple resources and integrates several applications into one "wrapper" if you will. We are in the early stages of a conversion over to ISIS/Interplay. So you might want to do some more research regarding availability and pricing.

Oh, and you can capture from any platform connected to Unity, you don't need a dedicated workstation for that purpose, unless your platforms are so busy that capturing needs to be done independent of the editing environment. And a digital cut of any project can be output from any platform connected to Unity.  Multiple users can even write to the same project at the same time, so long as they are all in different bins within that project, subject to individual user permissions profiles, which you as a Unity administrator would determine.

Workstations are connected to the central Unity core via Ethernet or Fiber networking, with the appropriate fiber cards in each platform.

Very generally, you create a user base within Unity with definable profiles and password protect if desired.  Then, you create workspaces that you profile according to your needs, perhaps by Edit Room name, editor's names, or project categories like "daily shows", "documentaries", etc. It's entirely up to you how you want to organize your workspaces. Then within the Unity administrator tool, you allocate gigabyte, or now teribites of drive capacity to each workspace. You can vary the percentages of allocations to any given workspace at any time.

"Classic" Unity (non-ISIS) is still available, just in a different hardware configuration.  Rather than a stand-alone File Manager, they now sell an Avid Unity Engine.  This is very similar to the new LANshare LP.  You can connect up to 4 additional chassis' for a total of 40TB's.  The new technology will allow even larger configuratioms.

Other Unity advantages include:

• Changing volume size without having to remove media, and even while users have the volume mounted

• Multiple clients can write to the same volume at the same time, including both Mac & PC

• Once a Unity Workspace is mounted, it is completely transparent to the client.  Media Composer is "Unity Aware", and automatically manages the media for multiple users.

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