Has Apple’s shift to Final Cut Pro X, and the dissatisfaction of a legion of editors, created a market opening for PC-based nonlinear editing systems?

PCs are demonstrably less expensive than Macs with the same computing power, and programs such as Premiere, Sony Vegas and Avid have already made their appeal to editors on a budget.

In about a week or so, on May 28, 2012, a new competitor enters the market. And at a price that’s hard to beat.

Lightworks for Windows, which will have a free version and a $60 “Pro” version, will be released to great anticipation.

A good writeup on Lightworks from PBS’s POV documentary unit.

New EditShare server updates are available. Please see editshare.com/updates for details & downloads.

Please note that these are part of EditShare's 6.1.x series, with many notable changes & improvements to multiple product lines. The 6.1.3.4 update focuses exclusively on Ark enhancements.

EditShare Ark (2.1.3.4) - Changes in this version:

• Previously, Ark set the “block size” for LTO drives with each Ark Tape server boot up or each restart of the Ark Tape service. Now the block size is set each time a tape is loaded. This should fix reported issues with tape labels sometimes not being written or read properly, and with backups and restorations sometimes failing without a restart of Ark.
• On Ark tape servers where the DNS address was slow to respond, certain Ark processes could timeout. This has been fixed.
• Improved Unicode Compatibility. Until this release, the Ark User Interface might have occasionally failed to show the details for some running and completed jobs because of “unicode incompatibilties”. This has been resolved.
• In previous Ark releases, if you scheduled an Ark job more than once per day – for example, every hour or ever 20 minutes – the list of queued jobs might have failed to display properly. This has been resolved.
• Backups and restorations might have previously failed on Ark servers that were configured with multiple IP Addresses. This has been resolved.

Full information about this update is available in the ReadMeV6_1_3_4.pdf

Note for Avid users upgrading from EditShare 6.1.3.1 or earlier

If you were previously using EditShare Connect on OS X or Windows under EditShare 6.1.3.1 or earlier, and had configured Avid Style or the Avid Launcher, you must you must first un-configure these features in the old version of EditShare Connect.  Next, if you are a Windows user, you must uninstall the old version of EditShare Connect. Finally, both OS X and Windows users must update to the new version of EditShare Connect and reenable Avid Style and/or the Avid Launcher.

If you are upgrading from EditShare 6.1.3.2, you can simply install the new EditShare Connect clients over the old ones. You may need to re-target your Avid application in windows EditShare Connect and/or re-enable the Avid Style option on windows or os x.

Note on Ethernet Bonding

If you have previously configured an ethernet bond under 6.1.3.0 or 6.1.3.1, you should update to 6.1.3.3 but you must contact EditShare Technical Support for assistance remaking the bond before doing so.

If you use ethernet bonding but are upgrading from 6.1.3.2, you can upgrade normally without assistance.

Note on Thursby DAVE

Please visit the updated DAVE compatibility page for new information on the latest EditShare approved DAVE build, 9.0.2-1450. (Updated 30 April 2012)

Installing EditShare 6.1.3.4

If your server has a connection to the Internet, you can run Install Updates from the Control Panel on your server's desktop. Otherwise, you can download the offline updater from editshare.com/updates, copy it to your server, then go back and run Install Updates.

As always, feel free to contact EditShare technical support if you have any questions.

This story about how Pixar's Toy Story 2 accidentally got deleted really resonates with us here at EditShare:

“That’s when we first noticed it, with Woody.”

“[Larry Cutler] was in that directory and happened to be talking about installing a fix to Woody or Woody’s hat. He looked at the directory and it had like 40 files, and he looked again and it had four files.”

“Then we saw sequences start to vanish as well and we were like, “Oh my god”

“I grabbed the phone…unplug the machine!”"

That’s Oren Jacob, former Chief Technical Officer of Pixar—then an associate technical director for Toy Story 2—recounting the moment they discovered that the movie was being deleted off of the company’s servers after an erroneous command was executed, erasing two months and hundreds of man-hours worth of work.

You might have heard something about this lately, as a clip from the special features of the movie has been making the rounds after being posted on Tested. It’s narrated by Jacob himself, and the movie’s Supervising Technical Director Galyn Susman.

[…]

“You have 400 people on the network and they all have to have like pretty massive access across the board to the whole project, so it’s hard to like, limit the damage,” Jacob said. “It could happen from almost any terminal.”

“Pixar being a wide open Unix environment meant that it was very promiscuous. You could [change directory] ‘slash’, net ‘slash’ or walk across the network and log into Ed Catmull’s machine or Steve Job’s machine if you wanted to. Not that Steve ever did do any work on the film directly, but you could do that.”

The common way to prevent an accidental command like this being run on an entire project is to lock users down with permissions to only the files they need. But, because of the way a project like a Pixar film works, almost everyone working on the show needed permissions to read and write to the master machine. This was their job.

Assigning micro-managed permissions would have eaten up administrative resources, especially in crunch time.

This sort of problem is exactly what EditShare shared storage was designed to solve in the first place.

With EditShare, film & video editors can collaborate on footage on a common file server and be assured that situations like this shouldn't be a problem, because the system actively manages permissions so that simple human mistakes don't become catastrophes.

It works great, and we'd love to talk to you about it if you'd like to learn more.

Editshare will release its free non-linear editing platform Lightworks by the end of the month.

A professional version of the software will be available for £38 ($60) per year.

Lightworks supports AVCHD, H.264, AVC-Intra, ProRes, Red R3D, DPX, XDCam HD 50, XDCam EX, DVD, BluRay. DNxHD will be available for an additional payment.

Editshare EMEA managing director James Richings said: “Although we are a little behind our original release schedule, we think the wait has been worth it. We are now able to release Lightworks with more features that will appeal to every type of editor.

“We’re speeding up our recruitment of developers, and we’re making it easier for broadcasters, film-makers and educational establishments to get started with Lightworks,” added Richings.

Editshare said there were 250,000 registered users of the beta version of the software since it was made available 18 months ago. The full software will be available on 28 May.

Editshare acquired Lightworks back in 2009.

EditShare Storage (6.1.3.3) - Changes in this version:

• Previously, you might have gotten erroneous warnings in the Daily Health Report about RAID Verification not having occurred in the last week on various hardware RAIDs, when in fact verification had been occurring. This has been fixed.
• New preference in EditShare Connect to hide Mac resource fork folders on Windows machines, which resolves some issues sharing Avid projects between Mac and PC Avid systems.
• Fix for Avid users receiving Segmentation Fault errors while using Avid Style media spaces, especially when switching from Avid to other applications or to the desktop.
• EditShare Connect is designed to warn you and not proceed with mounting spaces if Avid is already running when EditShare Connect is launched. However, in previous versions of EditShare Connect, the check for whether or not Avid was already running was too sensitive. Even if only the AvidBinIndexer was running and not the Avid application itself, EditShare Connect would say that “Your Avid application is already running”. This has been resolved.
• A new version of the EditShare network configurator ensures that proper network performance parameters are getting set according to the type of network card in the server – 1 Gigabit or 10 Gigabit – and according to whether bonding and/or bridging is enabled.

EditShare Ark (2.1.3.3) - Changes in this version:

• Flow proxy and database files can now be backed up to Ark (Please contact EditShare Technical Support for configuration details, automatic configuration to follow in a future version).
• Ark will now properly run multiple backup or restore jobs simultaneously (assuming they don't require tapes from the same pool).
• Fixes to Ark Check Jobs – When running Ark Check Jobs, you will no longer see a progress bar that looks as if the job is running, nor will you get emails for each Media Space that was checked. You will only see a pop up box and receive an email – both providing a summary of the results of the Check Job.
• Ark no longer allows you to back up a media space in Maintenance or Unshare Mode, which ensures that correct information is reported to the flow database.

EditShare Flow (2.1.3.2) - Changes in this version:

• In Flow Browse, if you browsed to a mounted Media Space in the Local tab, duplicate clip entries might have appeared in the database. The new v2.1.3.2 Flow clients fix this problem.

NOTE FOR AVID USERS UPGRADING FROM EDITSHARE 6.1.3.1 OR EARLIER

If you were previously using EditShare Connect on Mac OS X or Windows under EditShare 6.1.3.1 or earlier, and had configured Avid Style or the Avid Launcher, you must first un-configure these features in the old version of EditShare Connect.

Next, if you are a Windows user, you must uninstall the old version of EditShare Connect.

Finally, both Mac OS X and Windows users must update to the new version of EditShare Connect and reenable Avid Style and/or the Avid Launcher.

If you are upgrading from EditShare 6.1.3.2, you can simply install the new EditShare Connect clients over the old ones. You may need to re-target your Avid application in Windows EditShare Connect and/or re-enable the Avid Style option on Windows or os x.

NOTE ON ETHERNET BONDING:

If you have previously configured an ethernet bond under 6.1.3.0 or 6.1.3.1, you should update to 6.1.3.3 but you must contact EditShare Technical Support for assistance remaking the bond before doing so.

If you use ethernet bonding but are upgrading from 6.1.3.2, you can upgrade normally without assistance.

NOTE ON DAVE:

Please visit the updated DAVE compatibility page for new information on the latest EditShare approved DAVE build, 9.0.2-1450. (Updated 30 April 2012)