Transcripts
1. Class Introduction: Hey guys, my name is [inaudible] and in 2014 I started Cinecom my own video production company. Several years later and we are now working with four people here in the studio, and often times we are even editing on the same project altogether. Both the workflow and the infrastructure has changed a lot since I worked alone. Now, I've made some great choices over the years, but also some bad choices which ended up costing a lot of money. But worst of the time that I've spent researching and how to work more efficient and getting the best performance, as a team has been way too much. That's why I decided to create this class, whether you work on a team or a freelancer or manage your own video in company, then this is going to be a great class for you. There's going to be two parts, students class. The first one is infrastructure. I'm going to teach you everything you have to know about setting up your own server, getting a good performance and share folders over your local network, so that everyone in your team can edit from that same server, and this is going to be super important as the last thing that you want to do is pass around USB sticks and media drives. There will be a couple of lessons specifically about setting up a server, and since I cannot get an overview of every brand on the market, I've chosen Synology. It's the brand that I started out with and I'm still using that today. They were also very kind to work close together with me on this class to provide accurate information. Even when working alone, a proper infrastructure has redundancy, better organization, and the possibility to expand in the future. I never thought that I would have employees, yet it did happen and so always very happy that I started working from a server right away. But a good infrastructure is not the only requirements to work efficiently and the second part of the class, we'll go over some workflow techniques and Adobe Premier Pro. You'll learn about the production feature, project locking and various other organization tools. Stop wasting time and money and join my mini class to start editing efficiently and organized with your team. I hope to see you there.
2. Setting up a Network Storage (Windows): When working in teams, you need to find a way to store all of your media and project files, so that multiple editors can access that. So we're going to step away from the traditional local storage and switch to a shared storage over network. Now before we're going to dive into the required hardware and different solutions. Let's first have a look at how you can create a simple shared storage on your existing computer. In this lesson, I'm going to show you how to do it all on a Windows machine. If you're working on a Mac, then go ahead and skip this lesson because in the next one, I explain the exact same, but on MacOS. I've got two hard drives in my computer. One is the local disk which holds the installed programs and the Windows Operating System. The other one is an empty drive. Now let's make that empty drive available to anyone in a network. Right-click on it, go to properties and in the dialog box head over to the sharing tab. From here, click on "Advanced sharing". A new dialog box opens up and we're going to enable to share this folder. Next we give the drive a name, anything that you like, and then press "Okay". Now you can close the properties window. You'll see in your explorer that your drive is shared because of this little icon right here. So now that our drive is shared among the network, we can access that by any other computer by opening up the "Explorer" and in the navigation panel click on "Network". Now it could take a little bit of time to find all of the devices in the network, but you should see the computer in there on which we shared that hard drive. Just double-click on it, and that will reveal this shared drive. From here we can all work on the same project without having to copy and paste media over. Whenever I'm adding something into this folder, everyone will see it. So this is the basis. But what if you want certain people to only read from that folder while others can also write to it. In other words, a little bit more organization. For starters, we're going to have to create accounts for every user. Everyone is going to get their unique login and passwords, and this way we are able to give different permissions to the members in the team. On Windows, that is simply a new local accounts. As you go to the account settings, you click on the tab, "Family and other users". From there, you can add someone else to this PC. We're going to create a local account. So click on, "I don't have this person sign-in information" and then choose "add a user without a Microsoft account" and here you can go ahead and create a new user. Once you're done with all of that, we can go back to our drive. Now what I've created in here are two folders. One is called library and the other one is called projects. In the library folder, I've got a bunch of stock clips, sound effects, etct. Now everyone in the network can use these materials, but I don't want them to make any changes to it or add new files in here. That's something that I'd like to manage. Then there is the projects folder in which everyone can read from and write to. Let's start with the library folder. Right-click and again go to "Properties", click on the "Sharing tab" and from here click on "advanced sharing". Like before, enable the sharing, but before we click on "Apply", let's have over the permissions first. From here we can add users, just type in the name of one of the accounts that we previously created and press "Okay". Now with that name selected, you can go and check the boxes on the bottom to define what that user is allowed or not allowed to do. For the library, Kevin is not allowed to change anything in the library folder. I'm also going to add my own name, Jordy and hit "Okay". Now for myself, I will actually allow full control. Let's press, "Okay", again and close. Now let's go to the advanced sharing settings of the project folder and do the exact same thing, add Kevin to the permissions and myself, for both of us will get full control for the permissions. Awesome. Now let's hop into a different computer in the network and see how we can connect to it. We're going to go back to network and select a computer that is sharing those folders. You'll see both library and projects in here. Let's double-click on library. But this time we're going to login using different credentials. We're going to use Kevin, the one that we created on the other machine, and we are now able to drag out any of the media files from here, we can use them directly inside Adobe Premier Pro, but we cannot make any changes in here. When I try to delete files, I get prompted that I don't have the permissions for that or when I try to add files in the here, I'm also not able to do that. Going back and opening the projects folder, I'm also going to login using the Kevin credentials. In this folder, I'm able to place new files and make any changes. So this is in a nutshell how you can share a drive over your network with other team members and provide them with different permissions. Although this works, there are many limitations, with using your own computer as a shared drive or better said as a server. For one, the computer that is sharing the folders always has to be turned on. There's a security risk. There are very limited options, slow speed and the resources are always induced for that dedicated computer. It's a [inaudible] word, a solution if you're just starting out into working with two people on the same project. But it is far from perfect, if you ever plan to expand. In fact, back in the day when I started as a freelance editor, I immediately got myself a dedicated server solution. Not only its future proof, but already it gave me a ton of tools for organization and management for my projects. So in the next lesson, I'd like to introduce you to the different server solutions and to one that I work with. Thanks for watching.
3. Setting up a Network Storage (Mac): When working in Teams, you need to find a way to store all of your media and projects files so that multiple editors can access that. We're going to step away from the traditional local storage and switch to a shared storage over network. Now before we're going to dive into the required hardware and different solutions, let's first have a look at how you can create a simple shared storage on your existing computer. Now, in this lesson, I'm going to show you all how to do it on a Mac. If you're working on a Windows machine, then go back to the previous lesson where I explain exactly the same, so you can go ahead and skip this one. But you're on a Mac, so let's first see how that works. Open up your System Preferences, and it'll first go to User & Groups. From here, you want to make sure that the Guest User is enabled, and that guests are allowed to connect to shared folders. This is not so secure, but I first want to show you guys how shared folders work before we're going to work with accounts and permissions. Next, go back to the Preferences, and go to Sharing. From the left column enable File Sharing. We have to specify which folder we'd like to share, so click on the plus icon. If you have a second dedicated drive for sharing, you can select that from here, or if you like, you can create a new folder anywhere on your Mac. Let's call this one "Project", and click on Add. On the right-hand side, we have to give permissions, who can access, read, or write to this folder. For now, I'm just going to select that everyone can read and write. This is all that you have to do. On top, you'll find an address which other Macs can connect to. Sometimes this is the computer name or other times this could be an IP address. Let's take another Mac computer and then open up the Finder and from the menu on top, go to Go, and then choose to Connect to the Server. In this dialogue box, type in the address which is smb://lorenzos-mbp, and then hits Okay. You'll be prompted to connect to the server, which after you can login as a guest, select the project folder, and hit Okay. From the pads bar, you can then drag to connected folder to your favorites column. Now both Macs can work on the same folder, one of which of course due to local connection, but as we know it, this is not so secure. On the Mac on which we have shared the folder, I'm going to go to preferences and open up user and groups. Then from the bottom click on the plus icon to create a new account. For account type choose sharing only as we don't want to create new computer account, then fill in the rest for that user, and once you're done, click on create user, and repeat this process for every person who's going to edit from the shared folder. When you're done with that, go back to your preferences, open up sharing, and what I'm going to do now is create a new folder and name this one Library. I'm going to also add this to the shared folders. For the projects folder, I'm going to choose that everyone has no access to it. From the plus icon on the bottom, I can then browse to the users and groups, select one of the users that we have created previously and click on select. We can now give read and write access for this user to this folder. You can continue doing this for every person that we have created before and set the appropriate permissions. For the library folder, I'm going to do the same, but now only give read permissions. This way only I can add files in there like video assets, music, star clips, etc, which everyone can use, but never make any changes to, like adding new media or deleting files. On a different computer, we can connect again like before, select Go, then choose connect to server and type in the address and then hit connect. Instead of connecting as a guest, we will now log in with one of the usernames that we created before on the other machine. Hit Connect, choose the folder to which you want to connect, then drag the shared drive to your favorites and repeat this for every folder that you have created. You can now see that this user is able to write to the project's map, but he cannot write to the library map. Maybe you have a new intern that you don't fully trust yet. In this way you can also create a login for them and set appropriate permissions. It opens up many more possibilities and of course, the great thing is that we can all edit from the same location. This is in a nutshell, how you can share a drive over the network to other team members and provide them with different permissions. Although this works, there are many limitations with using your own computer as a shared drive or better said, as a server. For one, the computer that is sharing the folders always has to be turned on. There's a high security risk, very limited options, slow speeds and resources are always in use for that dedicated computer. It's a ready solution if you're just starting out working with two people on the same project, but it is far from perfect if you ever plan to expand. In fact, back in the day when I started out as a freelance editor, I immediately got myself a dedicated server solution. That only its future proof, but it already gave me a ton of tools for organization and management for my projects. In the next lesson, I'd like to introduce you all to the different server solutions and the one that I work with. Thanks for watching.
4. Introduction to Network Access Server: Now that we understand that a network shared drive allows us to work together on the same project built so know that sharing our own computer drive is not ideal. Let's have a look at a network access server or in short, a NAS. Essentially these are small computers specifically made for such tasks and there are various brands that make these. Some popular ones are Western Digital, QNAP, and of course, Synology. Though, I've always been working with Synology and since I've had nothing but great experiences with that brands, I also wish to focus solely on Synology NAS. I can not speak for other brands, but from Synology I had great support in the past. There's much information to be found on the web and over the past 10 years, none of my servers ever had any issues. Every Synology NAS has a certain amount of slots where you can insert hard drives. These are called base and the more base you have, the more storage that you'll get, but also the better the performance will be. Your Synology NAS can work with the different drive simultaneously. It's actually better to have 12 drives of two terabytes than four drives of six terabytes, keep that in mind. When you purchase a NAS, it arrives empty. Net means that you need to purchase a drive separates any brand works. Most brands even have dedicated drives for NAS systems. Synology works with many hard drive manufacturers including Seagate. Seagate's NAS drives were the first NAS specific drives to hit the markets and they integrate with Synology's Health Check System. This gives you extra diagnose features, but of course that's not mandatory. Pick any brands that you feel most comfortable with. I do have this Seagate drives, these are the IronWolf NAS drives which you can recognize from this logo. As some of you might be wondering what about SSDs? That's definitely possible, and of course it's going to give you much better performance. But as you know, a single video project can already be hundreds of gigabytes. Although SSDs are getting cheaper by the day, having to buy a couple of terabytes of SSDs is going to break your bank. This is why we still choose traditional hard drives, which is actually not that bad as we're going to place them into a rate system, which we have a dedicated lesson about. Don't worry about that yet. Apart from these base, there's a computer inside of your NAS. Just like traditional computers, it has a Processor and Ram memory. For video editing, we won't be running many programs on the NAS. Unlike the computer that we actually edit on, the NAS doesn't have to be high-end. However, being connected with several computers at the same time while editing from it thus requires some performance and Synology offers various models. I would suggest you use their NAS Selector tool or to get in touch with them to find the model for your needs. But here's a quick overview anyways. The J Series is mostly for personal use, so I wouldn't recommend getting one of these to edit from. The Value Series is the next step, which could be an entry-level NAS if you're working alone. However, there's one NAS within the Value Series called DS1817, which is actually quite powerful and provides great reading speeds. We have one of these in the office and you're able to edit with four people from it. Next is the Plus Series: This is probably the category that you would look at if your team is rent under six people. If you have a larger team, look at the XS and FS Series. These are the most powerful and it will also give you the most headroom. But if you're looking at those, I would recommend getting in touch with Synology to get personal guidance. Because at that level, a lot more factors like infrastructure null will become much more importance. Let's have a look at the back of a NAS. You'll find various ports and the ones that we are interested in the most are the ethernet ports. Basically you connect your NAS to your router or switch. It can then be found in a local network. Everyone can access the NAS and edit from it. We'll see how to do all of that in the next lessons. If you're not familiar with these two yet, a router is usually where your internet comes through and all of your devices connect to and apart from the internet, this device also creates a local network. Then a switch can be seen as a power strip. If you have one power plug available but need to connect multiple electrical devices to it, you can use a power strip. A switch is just that, but then for connecting devices into a network, some systems only have one ethernet port. This means that all of your traffic needs to go through that one cable. Other systems have more ports, which means that we can connect the NAS with multiple ethernet cables to the router and to distribute the traffic over four ethernet cables, which is of course going to give us better performance. This is called linked aggregation, which I have a separate lesson for. Most NAS systems have standard one gigabit ports just like most routers, switches and computers have. There's one unit which has a built in 10 gigabit port or some others have the ability to install a 10 gigabits carts. This is something that I would really recommend looking for. Definitely if you add it with more than two people, a one gigabit ethernet connection will give you speeds of roughly 100 megabytes per seconds. Playback of 6K reds raw footage in Premier Pro consumes about 60-70 megabytes per seconds. You have plenty of speeds from a one gigabit network port unless you're editing with more than one person. Speed is super important to us; definitely, if you're working with 4K or higher-resolution video files, and when searching for a NAS, you can filter by land ports and either choose the ones with the built-in 10 gigabit ports or those who accept a 10 gigabit NIC cards. Try to look at those because maybe you don't need it just yet right now but having the ability to upgrade to such a 10G network card in the future is definitely recommended. Here I have the DS2419 plus which has 12 base. It only has a couple of normal one gigabit ports. However, it supports NIC cards. I was able to install a two-port 10 gigabit network cards. Again I can hook up two cables to the router to utilize a theoretical 20 gigabits per second speeds. That is of course theoretical because the NAS is not the only factor that will determine a speed, from the NAS to your computer, that NAS is only one link in the chain and the top speeds are limited to the weakest link in that chain. We have an entire lesson dedicated to that as well. For now, you do have an idea of what to look for into a NAS, even if it's from a number of brands things like ethernet ports remain as important. One last thing to mention about Synology is that they offer two models for the NAS systems. You have the desktop versions, which is simply a box which you can place on your desk or in a closet. It's also built for that so you wouldn't get much fan noise. The other one is for rack systems. These are cassettes which have a standard size, meaning that they can fit within your existing infrastructure if you already have a rack. They have power redundancy and easier scalability. They do make a ton of noise, but that is usually not a problem when you have a rack sitting in the basement of your company. When you believe a rack station is something for you then again I would highly recommend getting in touch with Synology. This class is focused for those who work in small teams and one of the desktop models is perfect for that. Thanks for watching and in the next lesson we're going to see how to set up your NAS.
5. Setting up a Synology NAS: The delivery guy has just brought you a fancy box and inside is your symbologyness. You're super excited to get started. So let me guide you step-by-step, on how to set it all up. The first thing that you want to do is pull out to drive B, and to move to fastening panels from the site later hard drives in the tray with the connectors to the back, answer print of ports. Then click the fastening panels back in place, so that the driver is secured. After that you can insert all of your drives into the NES. Make sure that they click so that you can close the lit. You can use the keys to lock the base, if you'd like to avoid pulling them out accidentally. Next step, connect to power and insert the ethernet cable into one of the land ports. It doesn't matter which one. The other end of the Internet cable goes into your router or switch. You can now power on the NES. Now this way the NES is connected to the network, and every computer can access it. As you can tell, there is no way of connecting a monitor keyboard and even a mouse to this server. This is because we're going to use a normal computer to install it. Basically, we're going to have to access the NES to a web browser. So open up the Internet and go to find.synology.com, and it should find your NES. If it doesn't, then go to this analogy website and download elegy assistant. They'll leave a direct link to it in the class notes. So assuming that it did find your NES, you'll see it appear and we're going to click on Connect. Once connected, click on ''Setup'' and it's going to install disc station manager or DSM in short on the NES. This is the operating system of the device. So click on install now. All your drives will be erased during the installation, if you have purchased new drives, this is of course not an issue. If you're using drives you already are laying around, make sure that you have a backup of from any data that you want to keep. Check the box and click ''Okay''. The assemble now be installed, so just wait it out until it's complete. When DSM is installed, your disk station will restart and you'll hear a beep when it's completely done, enter browser will automatically refresh. We're now asked to give our server a name. You can choose anything that you want. Let's choose Sydney Come, which is the name of my production company, create a username and password, which is going to be the administrator login. Click ''Next.'' We're now prompted to create a quick connect idea. This is going to be very useful to access the NES from anywhere in the world. To do that, you'll need to create a chronology account. So let's do that. The quick enact idea is a unique name, which is going to be the address to connect to your NES. Let's also call that Sydney Com, it's next and agree with the terms. Unless you don't agree. But let's assume that you do then in the next page you'll find the address which is quickconnect.forward/sydneycam. When I browse to that address, I can access everything on my NES from home, on my phone or anywhere else in the world's. Click ''Next''. It was going to ask whether or not you'd like to install a bunch of programs that we don't need that and if you do, we can always install them later on as well. For now let's choose ''Skip'' like technology to keep finding your NES true defines.neurology.com web address, then enabled that right here and hit ''Go''. That's it DSM is installed answers phenology, NES has been completely setup. From the top menu, we can access all of the programs installed or go to the control panel to locate all of the NES settings, which we'll dive into in the next lesson. So at all time, you can access your NES through fines.analogy.com. Or you can also directly type in the IP address, which you can find here pretty system information into your browser's address bar, when you are not to the local network, but for example, at home or in a train, then you can login here, by going to quickconnect.forward/ydney.com, or the name that you have chosen. That's pretty much it. Although we haven't created a volume yet from which we can create shared folders. So let's see how to do that in the next lesson. Thanks for watching.
6. Configure a Proper RAID: We've gone through the setup of our Synology NAS, and to be able to log into DSM to access the control panel. From the menu on top, we can find various applications or settings. From the Package Center, we're even able to install additional programs just like a mobile app store. We're not going to cover that as we won't need that for basic file sharing, but feel free to explore that. But before we can start using the NAS, we first need to create our volume. From that menu we're going to go to Storage Manager. Click on the ''Volume Tab.'' By default, DSM has already created a volume for us, but with the SHR RAID type. This is a RAID system from synology, which is for if you don't know what you're doing. But we know exactly what we're doing, so we're going to remove this volume. Click ''Remove.'' Then we're going to go to the storage pool and also remove this one. We can now go ahead and go back to the volume and click on ''Create'' to set up a new volume and to create a new storage pool. Choose custom again, otherwise, it will create the same SHR RAID that we had before. Since we deleted the previous storage pool, we're going to have to create a new one. Then it's going to ask us what we want to do with the storage pool. For us, better performance is more important, unless you'd like to create a multiple volumes, but that's not going to be necessary for us. Choose better performance and hit "Next". Now it's going to ask us which type of RAID that we would like to create. This is something very important, and what this lesson is going to be about. Traditional USB drives usually consists out of one hard drive. If that drive fails, you've lost all of your data. It's that simple. A RAID system will utilize multiple drives and spread your data across them. This provides faster speeds and a data protection, as when one or more drives fail, you can always restore your data back. Now we have all of our servers configured in RAID 5, but that is a personal preference. Every RAID system has different speeds and security levels. For example, RAID 0 simply combines all of your drives into one volume without any redundancy. Although this RAID type gives you fast speeds, having one drive fail could lead to data loss. So I would not recommend choosing this RAID type. The second is RAID 1. This RAID type is going to duplicate all of your data to a backup drive. So you'll need at least two drives. If one of those two drives fail, you can simply swap it with the new one without the data loss. The downside is that you lose half of your total capacity as for every drive you'll need a backup drive. Speeds are slower than other RAID systems as well. RAID 5 is probably one of the most popular as it only needs a one drive as a reserve for data protection. You do need a minimum of three drives for this setup. A maximum of one drive can fail, which if you swap with a new one synology can rebuilt all of your data. But speed is much faster than in RAID 1, but with only one drive that can fail, it gives less redundancy. RAID 6 is about the same as RAID 5, only here you'll need at least four drives. Two of them are used for redundancy, which means that two drives can fail at the same time and you'll still be able to reconstruct your data. It's more safe, but you'll need to sacrifice the capacity of two drives. Then we've got RAID 10, also called RAID 1 and 0, as it's literally a combination of both RAID 0 and RAID 1. You'll get the fast speeds of RAID 0, but you'll loose half of your capacity because of the redundancy of RAID 1. If data protection is the most important to you, I would choose between RAID 1 or RAID 6. For the best performance, I'd recommend RAID 10 because RAID 0 gives no protection whatsoever. If storage is the most important to you, then RAID 5 is the way to go. You can still have one drive failed, so to me personally, I feel safe with that thoughts. Now chances are that you're leaning towards RAID 10, because of its best performance. The more drives you have, the better speed performance will be. But that's just in theory. One thing to always remember is that the speed at which you can write or read media files is always limited to the weakest link in the chain. Your synology NAS, is connected to a router or switch, which has its own speeds. The cables that you use, the network cords, your computer and so much more, all of these elements way under speeds performance. That's why a RAID 5 is not that bad, plus as a video editor, we need lots of capacity. So go ahead and choose RAID 5, and click "Next". Then select all of the drives that you would like to combine, which is going to be everything, and then click "Next". The older drives will be erased, hit ''Okay,'' and then choose Btrfs as the file system. This is a newer file system. Only if you're going to work together with older servers or Linux environments, you can pick EXT 4, which I doubt you'll need. We're going to use all of the volumes, so simply hit next. We're then prompted with the last overview of all of the settings, which look good to me. So hit ''Apply.'' You can always go back to remove the volume and the storage and to do it all over again. Do remember that your files will be deleted for this process. Now, creating this RAID could also take some time as it's undergoing a consistency check. You can already start using your NAS but just note that your server is going to be slower because of this. Once that is done, you can enjoy the full performance of your NAS. In the next lesson, we're going to take a look at how to configure folders and share them over the network.
7. Creating Shared Folders on a NAS: Your Synology NAS has been completely setup, and we are now ready to start creating shared folders. But first, let's create some user accounts. For every employee or editor in your team, we're going to create an account. From the Menu on top open Control Panel, from here, click on User, create a new user, and this is pretty straightforward. Give your new user a name and create a password for that person, and then click Next. We're able to assign this user to a group, but we haven't created the group yet, I'm just going to leave him in a default users group. This is mostly interesting when you're working with a large number of people to organize everything better together. Hit Next, and we're going to skip this step for now, hit Next again. You can also assign a quota, but for us video editors that's not going to be needed, just hit Next again. Here we're going to assign the new user to specific services and I always make sure that they have access to DSM, which is the web page that I'm on right now, and allows them to access files from home. If you don't want that, then you can of course, denied access as well. Hit Next again and then hit Apply. Now, we're going to create such a user account for every person on our team. If there's someone else who you'd like to give administrator rights as well like you have, you can assign them to that group. All right, all of our team members have their user accounts, then let's create those shared folders. Head over to the Shared Folder tab, on top click on Create and give your new Shared Folder a name, I'm going to call this Projects. From the bottom we have some more options, whether or not we'd like to show this folder to everyone in the network, and this could be interesting, if you have created a personal private folder for yourself or whenever you create archives that you don't need access to anymore. The Recycle Bin option could be useful for whenever you accidentally delete files, you can choose if only administrators or everyone could access this, do know that such a recycle bin takes up more space. Click on Next and here we are being asked whether or not we'd like to encrypt this folder, and since we're going to work with user accounts and the folder will be in a shared private network, I usually skip this so click on Next and then hit Apply. We are now prompted towards the settings of the shared folder, if you cancel this and then click Back on edit with your folder selected, you can access this again from the permission step. As since this is the Projects' folder, I want everyone to be able to read and write from this folder. However, James, he has just started doing an internship here and I don't trust them completely yet, I'm going to give him only read access, hit Okay. Next I'm going to create a new shared folder called Library, and this will be a folder in which we store all of our music files, sound effects, video assets, etc. Now, to keep this organized, I'm going to give everyone read only write students folder except for myself, of course, so that I can add new files on here and organize it better. You can continue to share folders like this. Important is that you create a good structure and organize everything well, and once done, with creating all of your desired folders and assigning the users rights to it, we can go ahead and add these to our computer. But before we start, make sure that your computer and NAS sit on the same network. Let's start on windows and then I'll show you how to do it on a Mac, click on the Start menu and type run to search for that program. Open it up and in the input box type a backslash, backslash and then the name of your server, not to name of your shared folder, the name of your server which we've said up during the installation, and if you can't remember what that is under the Control Panel, Info Center, Network, you can find the server name on top, that is after the double backslash and then hits Okay. Then prompt you to login to the server, and here you're going to use one of the user accounts that we have created previously. For every computer, that username is going to be different and of course you want to make sure to remember the credentials before you hit Okay. Once connected Explorer will then show all of the shared folders that you have created. Right-click on one and choose Map Network Drive, assign a letter to it hit Finish, and as you can see, that shared folder is now recognized as a normal drive on your computer, we can access it, we can place files in here, and everyone connected to this drive will also be able to work with that. For every computer in your office, you're going to have to repeat this process, but make sure to login with the credentials of the person working on that computer, and a scenario where a staff could work on multiple computers, you can also log in with the same credentials instead of creating an individual account. Now, instead of creating individual accounts, you could also create one for all of the editors or one for all of the administrators like you, that's up to you. One very important thing to remember when mapping every shared folder is that the drive letters that you assigned need to be the exact same across all of the computers. Adobe Premier Pro will use this drive letter for its bats to link media, if I open up a project from someone else who has a different drive letter, Premiere will not find those media files and I will have to go and re-link everything. Now, on the Mac it's going to work a little bit different. Open up your Finder and from the Menu on top, click on Go and then choose Connect to server. Here simply type in the name of your NAS, if you forgot that in Synology Control Panel, click on Info Center, Network, you can find the server name on top. Simply hit Enter and then click on Connect, login using the credentials from one of the user accounts that we have created on our Synology NAS, and you probably want to remember this for easier access in the future. You'll then get a list of all of the available shared folders that we have created, which is not that important actually, just select one and hit OKay. In the sidebar you'll now see the NAS that we are connected to, click on it and from there you'll also see all of the available shared folders. Open wide up and from the pads bar, drag the drive to your favorites. Do this for every drive, and this way you can always open any of the drives and work from them, and if you're ever disconnected from the drive, clicking on one of the folders from your favorites list will automatically connect to that server again, and now that we have a bunch of shared folders, we are ready to start editing inside Adobe Premier Pro, but before we can do that, I have one more lesson where I'd like to talk about your Network Infrastructure. Because as we all know, that performance is limited by the weakest link in the chain.
8. Network Performance: You've heard me talk about the weakest link in the chain a couple of times throughout this class. As we know, our NAS is connected to a router or switch, and then we go to our computer. If your NAS has blazing fast 10 gigabit ports, but your router or switch only supports one gigabit speeds, then the maximum speed that you can get is that one gigabits, we're going to have to make a few hardware changes in order to enjoy that full 10 gigabit speeds. Let's have a look at it step by step, and the first thing is going to be the cables. Ethernet cables have different categories, also known as CATs. The most common is CAT 5 or CAT 5E, and this is also the cable that comes standard with every NAS that you buy. However, it is limited to one gigabit speeds. If you don't have a 10 gigabit NAS, then you're fine with these cables and probably with the rest of your infrastructure as well. But we as video editors need those faster speeds. With our tangy NAS, we need to look at CAT 6A cables. They look and work exactly the same. The only thing that you need to pay attention to is that it has CAT 6A printed on the cable. There are also CAT 7 cables, but that hasn't built today and had been approved as a standard yet. It also adviced to use a different connector with those cables, which we could not use on the NAS. So just the quick CAT 6A cables. This cable goes to your router and I'm pretty sure that your router does not support tangy as well, but hold up, you don't need to throw it out the window just yet. If you're on the verge of buying a new router, then you can look at a 10G supported router. But if your current router is obsolete yet, then I would advice to buy a switch, a switch that supports 10 gigabit of course. A switch is a very simple device. One cable goes into your router and all the rest gets connected to the computers, and of course the NAS, older connections that go through that switch enjoy those 10 gigabit speeds. Advisable is to make sure that you have plenty of ports available. Remember, one port is for the router, a couple hour for your computer's and at least one for your NAS. But keep in mind that you can also hook up to Eternet cables from your nest to the switch where even faster speeds, because we need to understand that every computer has its own cable once your connection goes through to switch all of those four computers in this example, have to go through one cable to the NAS, meaning that every computer has only 2.5 gigabit of speeds, and of course, this only occurs when all four of us transfer data at the same time. The more editors you have in your office, the more importance that second cable to your NAS becomes. Now working with two cables to the NAS is called link aggregation, and it requires some setup work, which we'll have a look at in the next lesson. Our NAS supports 10g the switch does and all of the cables do. Yes. Remember that you need to use CAT 6A for all of your cabling. The final component is going to be inside of your computer. By default, your computer's motherboard also has a normal one gigabit network connection. What we have to do is purchase a dedicated network cards. We have the ones from Asus, the XG-C100C. There's no specific reasons we have these, I just had to make a choice down the roads. However, we did have a couple of issues with these cards. If I could go back and fairly buy another brands. Technology also sell drone network cards, even with two Ethernet ports that also supports link aggregation. But I believe that Intel is the most popular brands for such network cards. They also started developing these among the first and have established a well-known trust. However, they are not among the cheapest. Another option is to work with a tundra bolt or USB 3.1 to Ethernet adapter, and this is especially useful if you're working on a laptop or do not have the ability to add a new network card in your system. Thunderbolt and USB 3.1 also have 10 gigabits per second speeds. Thunderbolt 3 even goes up to 40 gigabits per seconds, so you'll have plenty of Headspace. Just make sure that the Ethernet adapter supports 10 gigabits. That's it in a nutshell, how you need to adapt your network to 10 gigabit speeds, and you don't need an IT guy to do this. Everything installs fairly easy. In the next lesson, we're going to set up link aggregation to get even more bandwidth from our NAS. Thanks for watching.
9. Link aggregation: Like I mentioned before, most nest systems have multiple Ethernet ports, which we can all hook up to the router or switch. Now in order to do that, we need to bind the connections together. And that is called link aggregation is fairly simple though. Insides DSM head over to network and from there click on network interface. From here you'll see the land ports that are connected to the network to bond stem in the menu on top, click on Create and then choose create bonds. You'll be prompted with a few options. And I would suggest baking adaptive loads balancing, which doesn't require any other settings in your router or switch. This option will automatically balanced a load over to two or more land ports. Hits next and check the land ports that you would like to bond together. Next, again, for network setup, if you know what you're doing in year two, you could assign your own IP address, but this means that you also need to set that up in your router. Otherwise, just choose an a medically and hit Apply and then choose yes. And this is pretty much it. After sociology has done processing this, you'll find a bond's connection and a network interface stamp which holds dose to land ports. Now one thing to understand is that even though that we have a theoretical speed of 20 gigabits per seconds now, we'll never actually reach deaths as the speed of the drives can't get so fast. So for smaller teams, link aggregation is mostly useful for when you only have one gigabit ports under Nas. Combining four of those gives you four gigabits per seconds, which is a noticeable upgrades above ten gigabits, doesn't make that much difference unless you have a lot more base, as we've seen previously, more drives in a rate gives better speeds performances. If you have a team of more than five people, paying attention to the number of Bayes becomes a lot more importance. Now we've done some tests with DS 2419 plus, which has 12 drives and we were able to get a stable speeds of around a 150 megabytes per seconds with four computers at the same time, which is enough to play back and edit 6K reds raw footage altogether. My DSH 15-17, which only has aids base, gives us simultaneous speeds of around 80 megabytes per seconds on all four computers, which is just not enough to playback 6K reds RA, all at the same time. That's why rack stations with 24 bays are very interesting for larger teams. You can also link multiple servers to get her to get even better speeds. But if you're at that point, I assume that you have more than ten people editing, which becomes a whole different story. And I advice to get some help from an IT company. And this is the last lesson about infrastructure networks. Open up Adobe Premiere Pro and see how we can adapt our workflow to work more efficiently and organized in your team.
10. Settings in Adobe Premiere Pro: We have set up our server and mapped a couple of drives which everyone has access to. We can now start working together inside Adobe Premiere Pro. But before we can do that, there are a few settings that we need to go over. When you have premiere open, go to Edit, Preferences and let's start with Collaboration. Here you want to enable projects locking. This allows for one user to work inside of a project and to lock it so that others can not make any adjustments to it. To see who is working inside of a project, type in the user's name, and this is a setting that you have to enable for every computer with has Premier Pro in the office. Next head over to Media settings disable to Write XMP ID to files on imports, Write clips markers to XMP, and clip and XMP metadata linking. XMP is a metadata, things like markers that you can create inside premier, time coat, or any other metadata are stored within clips XMP. But this could cause trouble when working with multiple people on the same project which is why that we're disabling these features and so that is pretty much it. Do this again for every computer in the network and then hit "OK." Lastly, go over to the Window menu, choose "Workspaces", and on the bottom makes sure that Import Workspaces from Projects is disabled. The arrangement of your workspace is stored within a project file. So if you open someone else's project, you will also take over that person's workspace. So to retain your own, keep this option disabled. These are few settings that we had to change. We're now ready to start creating a team project or another word, a production.
11. Starting a Production in Premiere Pro: We're all set, so let's start creating a new Premiere Pro project. There are three kinds of projects that you can create. The first one is the normal traditional project which we have been working with before. This is good if you edit alone or on smaller projects. When working in teams or on a larger projects like a documentary or a feature film, it is recommended to create a production. It's not on the welcome screen, so for that we need to go to the Menu, File, New, and from there choose Production. There is also a one last type called Team Project. This is specifically designed to collaborate remotely through Creative Clouds. This requires a different and more expensive subscription to Adobe as well. In my personal opinion, it has not worth it, but do check it out on Creative Clouds if you'd like to learn more about it. For now we're working with our Team on a local network. So we're going to choose Production. Give your project a name and also defined the parts where you want your production to be stored. Usually in a dedicated folder and of course, on the chair to drive from your ness. On the left side you'll see a new panel, the production panel. If you can't see it, go to the Menu, Window and from there select Production. Then what we can do is inside of the production panel is create projects and folders. That's exactly what we're gonna do right now. The organization of your project starts here, and of course, the way you structure that is a personal preference. Let's make an example structure to give you guys an idea. What we have right here are a bunch of media files that are sound effects, some music files and interview shots with multiple cameras and B-roll shots which we can use during the interview. What I'd like to do first is create a folder called Media, and I'm going to add a number in front of it for better ordering. Here, let's create several projects for the media that we have. Since there's already a default project, I'm just going to rename that to interview footage, then create a new one and call this one B-roll, also one for music and one for sound effects. Simply double-click on the project to open it. This works exactly the same as a normal project now. I'm going to load the dedicated footage in each one of these projects. These projects are meant to only store our media files in. Whenever we plan an extra shooting day, we can add to the extra shots into these projects as well. Or if we download more sound effects, we simply bring them inside here. The great thing about this is that everyone in your Team has up-to-date projects from which they can use media files from. You could also ask someone in your Team to work on these projects and for instance, clean up the media files like deleting all the failed shots, or maybe you where your accidentally press records. Next, I'm going to create a new folder called Graphics and inside here create a new folder called lower thirds and Logos. Next a bin called Edits and in here we can trade projects where every Team member can edit their part in. For instance, I want Lorenzo to start cutting interview, so I'll make a project for that. Then I want Josh to go through all of the B-roll, pick out the right shots. When they are done, we'll combine everything into a final edits projects. In the meantime, we can also have someone else on our Team work in the lower thirds project to create those graphics. Hence, Tim is great at color correction. So I'm going to have him work in the media projects with four people. We're now editing this same video project. And interesting is that when you're editing in a B-roll Edit project that you of course, don't have to load your media files in anymore. Simply open up the B-roll media projects and drag out anything from there directly into the sequence that you have created in the B-roll edit project. Premiere will make a link to those media files. While Tim is color correcting the B-roll shots, they are automatically updated while I am editing using those shots into B-roll edits project. So you can see how everything works together now. When someone is done with the graphics I can simply take them out of the lower thirds project, etc. This workflow allows us to work together simultaneously. Now inside the folder where we store the production, you'll find that same structure back which we created inside premier. Important is that you do not make any changes right in here. Your media files should also be outside of the production folder. In the next lesson, we're going to take a deeper look at this workflow and see how projects locking works.
12. Team Editing: Project Locking: With traditional projects you can simply double-click on a project to start Premier and open that project. You can still do that from within a production folder that has been created. But Premiere Pro will automatically detect that it's part of a production and display the other projects in the production panel. On our way to open up a production is after that you've started Premiere, you go to the menu file and choose open production from a drop-down menu, choose your desired production. After you've opened one of the projects in your production, your name will appear next to it. This is the name that we've previously set from an e-collaboration preferences. It means that we are working on it. Other people can also see that so if Tim opens up a project we'll see his name appear next to it as well. Then this means that the project is locked or in other words, in use by that person. Now the great thing is that we can still open that project. We can read from the project but not make any changes. We can even drag out clips from Tim's project into mine. Anything is possible except for making changes. If I do like to make changes, I need to ask Tim to unlock his project, which you can do by clicking on the green pen in his project panel down here. For him, the project will now be locked and someone else in the network can now click on the red lock to make its writable to them. I can now go ahead and make a change in the edits and when I'm done, I lock the project again. Tim can then on his sir, make the project back writable for him. Premier Pro will then prompt that his project has been changed and if you wishes to reload that or not. If it was a mistake, then you can choose No, of course. But if Tim likes to update and see the changes I've done then he has to click on yes. Premiere will reload and Tim can now work further after the adjustments that I've done. So this is why we have to break down the production in different projects because we can't work with more than one person in a project, everyone has their task. While you're editing with multiple people inside of a production, try to make a habit of it to only have the projects open that you're actually working in. If you only need to read from another project then immediately lock it after you've opened it so that other people who actually need to make changes in it are able to do that. Or even better if you hold down the control key or command on a Mac while double-clicking on a project, it will automatically open a new project in reads modes. This is how project locking works and how you need to communicate to other team members. In the next lesson we're going to take a look at some organization tools and options which are really going to be important to not make any miscommunication errors.
13. Organization Techniques: I think that we can all agree that organization is key when working in teams and the production panel already helps with that, we have created a nice folder structure, we can see who is working in which projects, but now it's important that whenever I open someone else's projects that I understand what that person has been doing in there. If you are the lead editor, make sure to communicate to your team that everyone uses the same organization techniques. The first one is labeling. If you right-click on a clip, you can go over to Label and give your clip a different color. Now if you go to the menu, edit preferences and choose "Labels", you can actually change the colors and the naming for each color. Now what I like to do is create very specific labels, for example, color corrected and I'm going to give that a green color. Another one is graphic lock, which you can give a specific color as well. Let's change one more to bad shot, which we're going to give a red color. Now from the keyboard shortcuts we are able to assign a shortcut to these labels as well. It's important that once you decide a certain set of labels, that every computer changes them. Now I can go ahead and use these labels to communicate to the rest of in the team. For instance, the shots that had been color graded will get to the green color graded label. This gives an overview of where your colorist is at or the person that is editing the B-roll can label unusable shots with bad shots or the red label so that when someone else likes to go true to B-roll shots, they see instantly which shots are unusable. Then we've got Josh, our graphic designer who is making some lower third animations. Whenever he has a graphic that is completely done, he can give it a label "graphic lock", which means it's locked and he's not planning to make any changes to it anymore. This means that other people and a production can start copying those graphics over to their projects. Now these were just some examples of how you can use labels but see for yourself which naming and colors that you can use in your workflow. I highly recommend to working with these. Next up is metadata. For example in my B-roll project when I set the view to list, we get a bunch of columns next to the names with more information about each clip. Now interesting is that we can also create custom columns. To do that, right click in your columns, go to Metadata Display and choose "Add Property". For example, notes and for the type we'll choose text, integers are numbers real is time coat and Boolean is a checkbox. But we're going to choose Text, then hit "Okay" and you'll find it's back at the bottom of the Premiere Project metadata. From here you can also disable certain metadata fields if you like so. Let's hit "Okay" and the new column now sits all the way on the right. You can drag that more to the front if you like. Hence, as you can see, this allows me to add notes to a clip. For instance, the brand's name of this little pains bottled cannot be shown as a request from the client. If someone wants to use this clip, he or she needs to remove the logo. Now other computers don't have to create the notes property. That metadata is now stored within the clip. The only thing that other computers have to do is go to metadata display and enable notes from there. It's always very useful to have that notes column available for your clips, and don't be limited to text fields. You can also create check boxes to mark certain clips as well. This brings me to the last one. So far we've been working on multiple projects, but eventually everything has to come together into one project to export. For that I'd like to have one dedicated projects. The person who has been working on the B-roll has to communicate well with the person who has been editing the interview. They often need to look at each other's projects and copy certain editing blocks over. When they are finished, we can combine the two edits into one project. Here at Cynical we always say it's time to combine. Which is the code for the production is done. When everything is merged to total edit is viewed together with the elite editor so that any final adjustments can be made inside of the final edits projects. For us this combining technique has always worked out very well. We also use label colors to define the different scenes because that's always do multiple projects combine perfectly together. Those who have been working specifically on visual effects only have their shots done. When all the clips that need video vixen, a timeline have got a label for that, we can see instantly where those shots need to be placed. Think about the combining upfront and which labels or maybe even markers that you need to make that process go fast and easy. It's different depending on the type of work that you do. Feature films will have a different labeling and combining technique than instruction films or news reports or documentaries. In the next lesson we're going to take a look at some more technical options and preferences inside Premier Pro to solve problems and further manage your production. Thanks for watching.
14. Problem Solving: Say you've got an edit with clips coming from various projects and you have no idea from where. Well, at all times you could right-click on a clip and choose Reveal in Projects. It's as simple as that and I have a few more of those tips and tricks to solve issues or to manage your production better in general. Our sources are all coming from different projects but whatever I like to transform one of these projects now into a traditional project. Now this could be useful for if I'd like to take one of these projects home to work on. But to do that, select all of the clips on your timeline, head over to the menu on top, choose Edit and choose Generate Master Clips. All of these clips are now imported into the project and you can go ahead, right-click on your project in a Production panel and choose Reveal in Explorer. You can now make a copy of this project and take it with you home. Or this could also be interesting if you're running into issues like corrupted projects. Making master clips allows you to work in it like a traditional projects. Now the other way around, say that you'd like to add an existing traditional project into your production. Don't start copying files in you're Explorer or Finder, but always make sure to import them into the production panel. You can do that by right-clicking and choosing Import Project into this production. Another way is by dragging an existing project into the panel. From here it'll prompt you that will create a copy into its production folder structure. That is how you can go back and forward between a production and traditional projects. Finally, one last problem could be that someone is working in the project that is holding all the sorts clips. That person is color grading the clips, but I am working with those as well on my edit. All of these clips in here are coming from or are linked to the B-roll projects. Going into the master, I can unfortunately not disable the elementary effects or in general any other effect that has been applied to these clips. What I can do is for my program monitor, open the button editor and drag the fx button into the layouts. With that enabled I mute all of the effects, it's called a global effects mute. This is one of the ways to bypass that. Very useful for every colorist is using third-party effects, which makes real-time playback not possible. With these tips, we've also come to the end of the class. I've got one more conclusion lesson left for you guys, so stay tuned for that, and thanks for watching.
15. Conclusion: Hi, guys. You've gone through the entire class video editing with Adobe Premiere Pro for teams, right? I hope that you've gotten some new insights and learned how to work better and more organized with your team. Now it a biggest advice that I can give to anyone is to prepare from the start, but a time that you have your first project where you need to hire people to edit together which you want to be ready. Even if you're currently editing alone, it is good to think about and infrastructure and organization Premiere Pro already having a good basis allows you to upgrade more easily. That implies to small businesses too, think about the future and already think about how you can expand or build further on your current workflow. All the footage that we had been using throughout this class is available to download from the your projects at Skillshare. The same goes for all the projects and production structure. You can open it up in your computer to practice with and find a workflow that goes best for you using the best footage. Now, something interesting to know is that with one Creative Cloud subscription and you can have two computers using it at the same time. No need to purchase an additional license which helps a lot if you're just hiring your first editor. Now I wish you a lot of success in your career and in the future. If you have any more questions regarding this class, I'm always here for you in the discussion down below. Thank you so much for watching and like we always say, stay creative.
Jordy Vandeput, Filmmaker and Youtuber
