Edit Statio and Render/Storage Station - Over LAN?

ZachAtk1 wrote on 12/11/2015, 8:30 PM
Hey guys,

I'm looking to redesign my workflow. Currently I do all my editing and rendering on my one workstation. This is an absolute pain since I'm left hours waiting for renders to complete losing precious time while I could be editing. I am also running out of hard drive expansion on this system.

I want to bring another system into the mix to handle the rendering and file storage. I would like to use a LAN connection to connect the two machines together. The question: Is gigabit LAN fast enough for video editing? Or should I move towards the more expensive 10 gigabit options out there?

I was considering getting a refurbished Dell Poweredge server off eBay to do this work. Ideally I'd like to have Windows Server 2012 installed on the server. But this comes to my next area of concern:

The setup would require Vegas to be installed on both machines. I would edit on the workstation over the LAN with the server hosting the video files. Once I finish editing, I would open the Vegas project on the server and do the crunching on there.

Can Vegas Pro 13 be installed on Windows Server 2012? If not, I suppose I can settle with a regular version of Windows installed on the server. But then I come to the question: Why bother getting a server when I could just build second system with a RAID controller and lots of hard drive carriages?

I am primarily editing HD GoPro footage.

Thoughts, opinions... how are some of you guys handling this type of situation? Thanks!

Comments

john_dennis wrote on 12/11/2015, 9:24 PM
"[I]Is gigabit LAN fast enough for video editing?[/I]"

I frequently edit on my older system (where my photos and camera videos are stored) then move mid-project to my newer/faster machine and finish the projects across a gigabit network. It works OK for 35 mbps single camera source files. It would almost certainly break down if I was doing multi-camera projects.

I've run Vegas on HP servers before but always used desktop operating systems. You would likely be better off to skip the server idea and just build a powerful workstation. Servers are also very noisy and the O/S is expensive. You would definitely want it to be somewhere else. They are built to conform to rack standards and unless you get one that's 5 to 7 RU, you'll have a tough time installing any video card that would assist with rendering.
Chienworks wrote on 12/11/2015, 9:29 PM
Why do you wait while the render is running? Set the process priority on Vegas doing the render to "below normal", then launch another Vegas instance and edit away. Usually editing takes up very little CPU on average so the render in the background won't be slowed down much, but by setting the render to below normal that allows the editing session to have as much CPU as it needs during those few moments it needs it.

I've had many renders running simultaneously in the background while continuing to edit.