DaVinci setup in small studio

I've done a quick search on this, but couldn't find what I was looking for. Apologies in advance if this question is obvious, I'm quite new to DaVinci.

We currently use Premiere in our small animation studio. We use a NAS (FreeNAS) for working on projects, so we can all work with the same files at the same time etc. Premiere seems to be getting worse and worse lately, lots of really annoying bugs. On the other hand, DaVinci is getting better and better. I've used it for a couple of edits now and it's very slick. Hats off to the Blackmagic team.

Anyway, to the crux of this post. We need to be able to share projects from the NAS if we are to use DaVinci in our studio. The problem is, DaVinci stores projects in a local database, meaning we'd have edits for particular projects on specific machines, rather than everyone being able to access all of the edits. I know you can export an edit, but this seems to be a bit of a messy solution to me.

Would we need to go with the studio version of DaVinci to do what we want? If so, would we need a licence/dongle for each machine?

Thanks in advance for any thoughts on this, would really appreciate them.

Yes, I believe you need the studio version for each workstation. Others can answer this with more certainty.

I am curious how you are getting enough throughput with a NAS for shared storage? What kind of media are you working with? I am also working in a small studio and wish there was an affordable solution to have two workstations working on the same project simultaneously.

Thanks JP. Does the studio version still use a dongle? I'm wary about going for the studio version to be honest. Most of the features are high end and we simply wouldn't get any use out of them (stereoscopic editing etc). The main reason we're looking at alternatives is because it's getting annoying how bug riddled Premiere is (especially when they're releasing all these bells and whistles we can do without before making the core application more stable). I really want to push for us using Resolve at our studio, but buying three licences at £700 each is a push too far, especially compared to the £40 a month for the whole Adobe creative suite we're paying right now...

We're using gigabit ethernet to connect our workstations to the NAS through a switch. As the majority of our work is animation, we often work with image sequences, usually png. So, nothing too heavy really as we whack the compression to 100%. We work with video every now and then and, to be honest, we've not noticed any kind of lag there either (Footage is usually ProRes HQ shot on BMPCC). When you press play on the timeline, it plays straight away. It helps that FreeNAS is clever with cacheing, keeping recently accessed files in RAM for quick access. It also helps that we're quite a small company, only three of us at the minute. When we grow, we'll probably have to look into a better solution, maybe 10 Gbps connections, but it's definitely not worth the cost right now as we're getting speeds roughly double that of a USB 2 connection (Just ran the Blackmagic Disk Speed Test and I'm averaging a solid 100MB/s for read and write).

You should look into the App Store version of Resolve, which is $500 US and will work on up-to five workstations assuming they are all logged in to the same App Store account. There are some differences between the App Store version and dongle version, so you will need to confirm that this will work. This link is worth reading:

https://mixinglight.com/portfolio/davin ... d-to-know/

Thanks JP. Does the studio version still use a dongle? I'm wary about going for the studio version to be honest. Most of the features are high end and we simply wouldn't get any use out of them (stereoscopic editing etc).

There are actually some extremely useful features in Resolve Studio that I think everybody can use, particularly the noise reduction and the ResolveFX plug-ins (among quite a few others). I would strongly recommend going with it.

I would say when it comes to shared storage, a partial solution (more like a workaround) would be to use a RAID 0 SSD locally in the Resolve bay, and then copy to and from the NAS server as needed. It's fast enough that even if four or five users are hitting the server at once, it shouldn't slow them down too much. Drive i/o is a big issue for Resolve.

use the resolve studio, either mac or Linux with the external database and you can freely share projects.

we have 3 linux and 4 mac connected at work.

Thanks for all the information everyone.

JP, we do have an all mac studio, so the App store version does sound like a good way to go. Also thanks for linking to the article, very handy to know that you can set up the server for a shared SQL database. I am a bit hesitant after reading the negative feedback/reviews on that article and on the App store though.

That's true Marc, noise reduction would be handy with some of our renders. All I'm saying is that it's a bit steep considering the majority of our work is animation and not film (most edits are simply stringing together png sequences). It does make me think that we could probably get by with just one dongle though, simply moving it from machine to machine when needed...

Walter, from the article that JP linked to, in the comments, someone mentioned that it's quite hard to get hold of a Linux dongle without getting buying the Resolve Control Surface. Is this still the case?

Thanks again guys.

The control surface is the Linux dongle

you can have multiple macs studio with the database external (I believe)

Yes, a computer for the database alone needs no dongle.