Transferring And Moving AVID Files On The Internet

(From The Yahoo Avid User's Group)

We've spent the past several years connecting our 4 offices (LA, Chicago, NYC and London) with the objective of sending whole AVID jobs between our offices.

This has been an expensive and frustrating process, but
we eventually got this going with software and servers.

Using our stuff, we typically transfer our projects, bins and OMF media at a rate of about 16 GB/hour between any of our offices and have gone as high as 20 GB/hour.

We looked at AVID'S TRANSFER/MEDIA MANAGER, but this was an expensive option that did nothing for our media transfer optimization over a WAN.

The issue we've had with services like DIGI DELIVERY or FILES ANYWHERE is the idea of "copying twice" -- one copy gets uploaded to a server someplace, and then another copy when it gets downloaded. That takes time. And this only helps the "transaction" of the media transfer, not the speed.

A T1 will only handle 1.5 Mb/s of bandwidth but that's just what's theoretically available.

You would think that if you had 1 GB of 10:1 media, you should be able to transfer that file at 1.5 Mb/s to its destination. But if a decent distance is involved, such as LA to NYC or even across town, you start to get hammered by the latency and this will slow the speed considerably -- increasing your time to well into an hour or two per GB.

Use SOHONET's calculator to check 1024 MB at 1.5 Mb/s.

You could probably drive it there or better use FEDEX.

It doesn't matter if you use FTP, CIFS, APPLE SHARE or whatever, the 2 hurdles are BANDWIDTH and just plain old PHYSICS.

We increased our bandwidth considerably, but found that the physics (latency) was still a problem that limited our transfer speeds to around 2-3 GB/hour. Not bad, but not nearly what we needed to make this work for us. We then spent considerable time fooling around with the latency.

Today our film dailies are processed and digitized in LA and can be sent to any other office the same day. Sending a job from LA to London used to take 3 days, a firewire drive and a prayer to get through customs -- now it takes a couple of hours.

For example, a couple of months ago we worked on a film for a director who shot, processed, sync'd and digitized the media in London. The following morning, he brought it over to our UK office on a firewire drive and we transfered it to our LA office that same day.

So our LA editor walked in each morning to view dailies that were shot on the previous day. This has enormous benefits to everyone involved as you can imagine. It's been a remarkable capability and one we're now using everyday.

We looked at WAMNET!, SOHONET, all the hardware WAN optimizers and have found all of these to be incredibly expensive for what they give you.