I haven’t used Media Harmony myself, but I know others who have and found it pretty solid (it’s not hugely dissimilar from EditShare and others really). Bandwidth issues can be a problem, but reasonable managed Gigabit network should support a workable number of streams to a small number of clients (depending of bitrates obviously) – but I’d imagine that Offline/Online workflows would be requried for HD programmes at least.

Avid Database corruption is actually something that’s been pretty annoying in our Unity environment, made even more annoying by the fact that indvidual clients have to rebuild their database for all other clients to benefit from that.

I guess in summary on the Avid media on Samba idea I’d say – If you’re pretty confident about how Avid handles media and networking then give it a try if you want.

As far as the plugin, while it’s clever workaround, it introduces several concerns:

1. Massive limitation on bandwidth for a SAMBA connected client. This means compressed workflows and low track count. The TCP/IP protocol introduces a ton of latency and overhead.

2. Support. Avid will laugh and hang up on you if you call for support with this. I am a massive proponent of having my systems in compliance – so when I need to call for help, I’m qualified. With how prone the Avid database files are to corruption with just local storage, this workflow would worry me when the media file count gets high.

this will export a DNxHD .mov file, NOT a DNxHD .mov in an MXF wrapper, which is what Avid needs to understand a file without transcoding or a quick import.

A .mov file encoded in any native Avid codec will “fast import” if the import settings are correct – namely that the pixel aspect is set correctly and the colour space is set to 601 not RGB. The time taken to import then if pretty much the time it takes to copy the file.

“avid media” samba share
Nope, can’t do it – if you’re trying to share an OMFI or MXF folder within Avid.

Not totally correct – a SAMBA VFS plugin developed by BBC R&D called MediaHarmony makes it (mostly) possible – http://ingex.sourceforge.net/MediaHarmony/

It virtualises the media databases for each client so that each client doesn’t overwrite the database (which is what prevents sharing media on non-Unity network storage usually). Each client maintains it’s own copy of the media database. However it doesn’t work in the same way that Unity does where each client sees and reads the databases of other clients. So if client A creates new media, client B will have to index that media – resulting in occasional “Scanning media” dialogs popping up on connected clients.

But it does work. It wil not help, however, with project sharing in a non-Unity environment, which is always tricky.