Multi office video editing solution

Case:

– Project types and workflow –

Professional film and TV productions, weekly location shooting for documentary series, HD/4K editing, VFX compositing, graphics and grading, data collaboration with external providers, customer screenings and file distribution for publishing.

– Two offices in separate towns –

Office 1:
Medium sized office with 3 separate rooms for editing.
2x iMac (2017 or newer)
2x high end Windows workstations running Premiere and Adobe After Effects.

Office 2:
Small office (one room) with 3 editing stations in the same room.
3x iMac (2017 or newer), running Adobe Premiere

– Storage capacity needs –

A absolute minimum of 40tb capacity is need on both locations, with the possibility of a capacity upgrade. Material on both locations will be largely identical, and should be synchronized between the offices.

We are currently looking at the following products:

QNAP TVS 1282T3
QNAP TVS 1282T
QNAP TVS 882T

Questions:
Is the thunderbolt 3 aspect really that important for someone like us? Some of our workstations aren‘t even t3 compatible (the older iMacs)
We were wondering if the older Thunderbolt 2 QNAPs (with LOTS of 10gbs ethernet ports would be the way to go.
Will we in any case be best off basing our network around a switch?
We‘re struggling to understand the use of the 2.5” bays. Are they only for SSDs, and some sort of caching, or can we put regular disks in there and have them included in our RAID?

 

Many people start their data storage solution similar way with external drives connected. But it becomes difficult when you have a team working on the project.
I hope I can help finding the best NAS for you.

Thunderbolt2 models would work perfectly fine for you. Just keep in mind that this connection is old and therefor related models will go EOL soon. You might experience problems finding expansion unit year or two later when you decide to expand.

Thunderbolt3 models can be still connected using Apple Thunderbolt3/2 adapter.

If you had a server room, then you could consider a rackmount model (quite loud) and mainly connect via 10GbE. Thunderbolt ports meant to save you money by avoiding purchase of the 10GbE switch and 10GbE cards for computers.

 

Here is a future solution when your business grow bigger and you will have more editors. Then you will need Intel based rackmount solution which can be easily expanded by stacking up expansion units. You can then choose single or dual power supply to ensure you have uninterrupted workflow.

• ts-883xu  /  ts-883xu-rp   /  ts-1283xu-rp
• tvs-872xu  /  tvs-872xu-rp   /  tvs-1272xu-rp

The SSD bays and the use

Qnap allows you to set up tiered storage solution. You can create a RAID for HDD as well as SSD media. Then Qtier will merge both arrays together. But in the background often used data will be moved to SSD RAID and colder data would live on HDD RAID. It is similar like cache, but with its own benefits. You can even enable both with x82 series NAS.

At the end you need Intel based model with few PCIe slots for adding extra 10GbE ports. My choice wold be TVS-1282 or TVS-872XT (with amazingly fast NVME slots) series.

There are quite few ways of synchronising NASes in two remote locations. Most popular options is RSYNC (built in function).

You may also find useful Remote Replication – more about it here

Find regulary updated NAS offers here
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