We are currently in the process of upgrading our University editing facilities.

There are proposals to install 32 workstations in a generic IT lab (networked with internet connection) with Avid Media Composer for teaching purposes. IT insist that this will work with no problems, although, from what I can gather from reading the forums, I think that this will be problematic.

Does anyone have any experiences of this kind of setup?

Network + internet should not cause problems in general, but make sure your workstations meet avids hard- and software requirements, in particular graphics and sound solutions of "generic" internet workstations may not qualify to run mc.

Do you know the specific configuration of the machines? Any additional information about your network-setup and user-management might as well be helpfull.

Gillian:

although, from what I can gather from reading the forums, I think that this will be problematic.

What sort of problems do you expect?

 I have installed Media labs with Unity connecting via GigE, and they have worked fine, but not generic systems. I have used standard network drives, run a console command on the editor, mounted the drives and edited successfully though. However, if you try to share the clip with someone else you will get an exception error. It is not really great. If the IT people are expecting it to be a Unity, then the answer is really a big no, and it will not be nice at all. However, where you could use a generic IT network successfully is as long as they have a heap of bandwidth, there was no sharing of clips and projects (each student would have to have their own network drive if you like) and that was the drive that they mounted on the system. You can move media around but it would mean that you would have to be on top of consolidation techniques!  If the system had heaps of bandwith it would not be cheap.. The silly thing is that the IT people would probably end up spending more on a system that won't work compared to getting unity systems at an education price.

 We are also planning on getting a Unity system for 20 workstations- the 32 stations are merely for teaching in a classroom environment.

The problems which I am expecting are conflicts with operating systems (service pack 3 & automatic updates), anti-virus software & other software packages (I haven't been appraised as to what these might be- possibly Internet Explorer, Microsoft Office, Photoshop, Quark Xpress, Forscene + others). I haven't been told what the hardware configuration is to be.

Also, will the students be able to run the software with normal, User privileges? I was under the impression that users required Admin prefs to run the software successfully?

Automatic updates in the past have broken the system, and doubtless will again.  The best news is that with the release of SP3 (which is supported by MC3) automatic updates for XP can be expected to get fewer and fewer.  Microsoft have made it quite clear that their future plans don't involve XP.

Anti-virus software is always risky for resource-hungry programs like Avid, but in a student environment is essential.  Internet access is normally undesirable, but for these machines to maintain virus signatures it will probably be necessary.

As to other software - well, as has been well documented here in other threads, you're right to be concerned.  I think that your IT department are in for some tough times.

 That's exactly what I expect & I'll be left to sort out the problems.

IT insist that Avid have told them that it will "run without a problem", I'm not convinced.

Will the fact that the students will only have User Accounts cause any problems? We are currently running Xpress Pro 5.5 & I've had to set up accounts as Administrators, otherwise the program won't run.

Has this issue been addressed in MC 3?

 An option you can go with, since this will be a community lab, is to set-up the computers as dual-boots.  Have a boot partition for everyday multi-use computing needs, and then also have a clean Avid-friendly second partition that you can lock down.

Also, I do believe that the last few 2.x versions of Media Composer will let you run it as a Power User.

Good Luck,

 If you are running any anti-virus software be sure it is NOT running in the background when Avid is running. It can corrupt your media databases in addition to eating up resources. If you are connected to the internet, periodically run a system scan/update but nevera t the same time as MC.

You are right to not trust the IT guys. I have found they generally don't understand the nuances of Avid and can make uneducated decisions. Certainly not true for all of them, but Avid is very particular and I have heard IT guys say "yeah it'll work" and it doesn't. Just double check everything.

Good Luck

The biggest problem we're encountering now is that MC 3.0 requires an Nvidia QuadroFX graphics card to run - if you're using generic lab PCs like we are, with either on-board, or less capable graphics, it's just not going to work.

Our solution for the time being is to upgrade all of our systems (45 or so) to MC 3.0, but install MC 2.8 everywhere until we can get the necessary hardware approved (likely next year).  Not a great solution, but...

 I have a lab with 21 PCs and this is how I did it:

-Split the system drive in 2

-install on first partition XP with all your office apps, anti-virus, network, etc.

-on second partition, install a second XP this time with no network (disable the adapter), no anti-virus, and you can then turn off a lot of unneeded services (dhcp, server,  etc). I use this second installation just for Avid and Pro Tools and had no problems for over a year now.

All you need to do is leave your first install as default in the boot menu for a few seconds, (5 in my case), so the regular users won't even notice there's 2 operating systems installed. You instruct the Avid users to look for the boot menu and select the second partition and they're in business!

HTH