Operate Dynamic Link Across Multiple Workstations?

Question

Right now I'm in the middle of designing the workflow and post-production pipeline for my school's film class. At the heart of the pipeline site Dynamic Link, and its interaction with After Effects, Audition, and Speedgrade. My question whether it's possible to have a multi-computer setup and spread the DL assets across users. For example, User #1 is the Premiere editor, #2 is Ae, and #3 is Au. The editor creates a Premiere project with a separate sequence for each scene. She cuts Scene one, then makes an DL Ae comp for all of the vfx clips, before moving on to Scene 2. #2 then opens the Ae project on his computer and begins comping while #1 is working on the other scene. He finishes the comp, then saves the project and closes Ae. Meanwhile, #3 is working in Au for audio files in Scene 1 while #1 is cutting Scene 2 and #2 is working on comps for Scene 1. This process repeats for all scenes before approved Audio/VFX comps are approved and rendered losslessly to replace the DL's as intermediate files.
I apologize if this sounds a little complicated, a drawn graph would have worked better. But is a process like this possible, with storage options like a shared external closure in RAID 5 or 10 for hosting all clips and projects, with a separate per user disk for caching, etc, or is it just not possible with the way DL is currently set up with CC 2014? Thanks in advance for responding!
-Mike

Answer 1

R Neil Haugen wrote:
RoninEdits has done a good job of helping you through this... He/she has certainly been a massive help around here but I don't know the editing setup experience he/she has. I certainly learn a lot from reading through the comments!
I couldn't agree more, this guy has been a major help on pretty much all of my few threads
A standard problem in setting up any editing machine is the disc in/out read/write/cache is massive in PrPro, at times nastier in SpeedGrade, and beyond belief in Ae. Audition can be a hog at times but typically in my system is faster to process through something than the others.
So ... one oft uses say either 4 or more local discs past the system/OS disc, or a system/OS disc & maybe a second cache disc and then a 4/5 disc RAID array for high-speed throughput for the read/write/cache/database work. Follow?
Now ... lets put that over a single connection on a NAS. I don't have the experience that others have with this, but I wonder (from having read posts about NAS systems and lags in playback & such) ... will this be the best editing solution? I've also heard of editing houses where each machine has several hot-swapping disc options available, and people use the old sneaker-net system to move say the footage disc forth and back to various users. Or even say 3-4 discs of any projects contents.
If I understand correctly, this is pretty much exactly what I intended to do with my setup. Each machine (3 of them) would have an SSD for Windows/Apps, an SSD Cache drive, and a mechanical disk for storing data if need be. Then I would have a Synology DS415+ with 4x2TB WD Red Pro drives in a RAID 5. This would be hooked up over a Gb network (school owned) and would connect to the workstations with Link Aggregation (LACP) to achieve a theoretical 2GbE bandwith connection to each machine (roughly 250MB/s). The NAS would store all of the projects, source footage, audio, and other materials that could then be copied over to the systems' local drives, or have new materials copied to it. That way all editors would have access to all of the source material simultaneously versus having to have one external drive and keep swapping it out among editors to copy files. I was hoping that MPE/DL would work cross station through the NAS, but that doesn't look like that'll be the case, unfortunately.
RoninEdits wrote:
as long as premiere picks up the changes with a restart, or re-opening of the project, then no swap would be needed and all is ready for export.  if you are looking at having the ae editor do a separate render and bringing that back into premiere, you may also want to look at doing a complete non-dynamic link workflow, even if just to teach both ways. by keeping the vfx shots on another track, its easy to keep track of them. this also makes it possible to nest those clips and then use the project manager, selecting just the vfx nested sequence to consolidate and transcode. this way it will trim down the clip to just the part needed, but also should use the option to add handles.  in a few clicks all the vfx clips are ready made to be sent to the ae editor. can then use the offline/relink command to bring the new clips back in.
This was one workflow I was considering. I was trying to avoid having the main editor closing and reopening a project every time something was changed just to view it in the middle of their editing, but rendering intermediates looks like it's going to be the best bet. No full-res clips till they're finalized. I'm going to go through and do some personal practice just to figure out what feels best for the class, but non-DL looks where I'm headed. My main point behind using it was so that the Compositor wouldn't have to load a full clip into AE, where using DL it would have already been cut to the way it looked in Premiere and have a comp per shot in one scene file, but it looks like your idea would give the exact same result, just in a slightly different appearance in AE. By that I mean Pre-Comp each shot once AE opens and work from there. Thanks for the tip Ronin!