A lot of workflows need Photoshop (on the same computer as the Avid editing software) to access hundreds or even thousands of archival still-photos. Many Avid folks and Interplay customers advocate storing them on a separate "Graphics" workspace on Isis/Unity. Because Photoshop is usually accessing this across the interplay network - and because the Avid editing application is usually also active in the background, there is tremendous traffic across the network.

Anyone run into problems with this yet?

We've done this from the beginning with Interplay and never had any problems.  Your on the right track with the Graphics workspace, but this workspace should not be indexed by Interplay.  Interplay should only index Avid media files only.

The graphics files or any non-avid asset should be attached to the project for indexing.  How we accomplish this is by creating an Elements folder within every project in the Interplay Database.  This folder is not a bin or folder created in the Avid Project itself but just in the Interplay Database.  All non-avid assets from ALE to Scripts to PSD & .MOV files should be placed there.  This will allow for access to this files for revisions and the full use of the History functions in Interplay.

Hi all -- just a follow up to my original post here.

I'm thinking of changing our process for documentary editing... from placing all graphics onto the Unity, to doing so entirely on local drives for some projects. Some producers use a 3rd-party ap called Stage Tools to perform Pan-and-Scan like moves on images inside the Media Composer. Stage Tools is an AVX plug-in that runs out of Media Composer's own effects palette. When activated, it opens a separate window within Media Composer (similar to Avid's Marquee tool). The result is a data stream over the Interplay's pipes that clogs depending on the resolution of the original image itself. As you can imagine, some of the archive images this ap is accessing are 8,000 pixels wide at a dpi of 1,200.

For a quick, newsroom style workflow, putting images on a Unity-based graphics location is fine, but for massive documentary workflows, the system just can't handle it.