Hey All, 

Today I moved my “office” Avid to my house, where I’ve already been set up with my “home” Avid. The specs on each are listed below but basically the I’ve got a 2017 iMac running MC 2019.7 and bringing in a MacPro 2010 8core tower running MC 8.6.

Question is, what’s the best way to network them together, maybe using the 8core for rendering and transcoding, and the iMac as the main editing box? Ethernet I’d assume? Or should I even bother connecting them? I know the new software offers Distributed Processing for just this kind of thing, I think... or it probably requires Nexis? Can someone point me to more info on that?

I’m anxious to run some tests in the next couple days to see if, and by how much, the MacPro is faster than the iMac. Or maybe it’s not. 

Anyone ever mess around with such a setup? Maybe it’s a fools errand and I should just sell off one of them. 

Appreciate any thoughts. 

Nick

Hello Nick,

You can connect through Ethernet cable if you want to netwotk this shating the files back and forth between the two Mac computers. I do that with teo computrs through Ethernet it works very well rather then swapping drives between two computers.

Distributed Processing needs the Nexis to give that feature I read. Also the additional software for Distributed Processing not sure if it's included etc with Nexis or a paid add on.

Thanks,

Leo

@Nick Link:

This section of Frame.io's WORKFLOW Guide should be helpful too:

Chapter 3: EDIT -> Shared Storage: https://workflow.frame.io/guide#ch=edit&s=shared-storage

Some of the deep dives focus specifically on Media Composer in a multi-workstation environment.

In answer to a couple items:

1. That Mac Pro should be helpful as a dedicated transcoder, but that iMac will probably be faster (more cores, faster clock speed).

2. While transcoding, launch Activity Monitor, then go to Window -> CPU Usage. Observe and compare how MC uses your CPU cores during transcoding.

3. If you're weighing out a Shared Storage option, I can't recommend the Lumaforge Jellyfish enough (https://lumaforge.com/index.php?p=jellyfish). They cracked the code.