NAS For Delivering Footage to Editors over Internet?

[ShadowWolf810]

42 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

I'd buy a domain so you don't have to give them a ip. If you have a dynamic ip you can also have it automatically change the ip when your dynamic ip. 

Yeah I guess its not as expensive as I thought, the NextCloud website recommended one and it was like 15 bucks a year. 

 

Would you be able to help with setting up NextCloud? I'm on Windows 7 and I just wanted to see what it was like. They have a VM file you can download thats all preconfigured and runs scripts to install everything, so in VirtualBox I mounted the VM file and ran through the setup stuff. It assigned itself an IP and I got into the terminal for NextCloud but when I tried the ip in my browser it didn't work. I set the network interface in VirtualBox. For some reason it assigned itself an IP outside my network in my router. 

 

My router was set to 10.0.0.x with 255.255.255.0 submask but Nextcloud assigned itself 10.0.2.15 and a default gateway of 10.0.2.2. 

So I tried changing my router's setting to a 10.0.x.x with 255.255.0.0 and I changed the default gateway in NextCloud to be 10.0.0.1 as it should be. But I still can't even access it via my local network. 

 

Ugh I hate networking stuff. lol

[Eniqmatic]

8 hours ago, ShadowWolf810 said:

So my only knowledge about VPNs is that if you use one all your traffic goes to a VPN company and then is encrypted before it goes out to whatever website you were requesting, that's my understanding of it. How would hosting your own work. I'm guessing that's something this server could do? Or is that a router thing? And how would you go about connecting to it? I do like the added security but in my experience VPNs do slow everything down quite a bit which might not be ideal, and if it would be complicated to connect to it'd be hard to have clients use it. 

 

I could get around that with the suggested method above of downloading every clients footage through Dropbox, and then I could upload it myself to the server, and the editors could pull from the server, then upload a final product to it, and I'd have to upload it to Dropbox to send off. Which just sounds like a pain, it would be amazing if I could make a temporary account and password for the client, give editors permissions to see client folders, send a nice link to the client and have them upload their footage. Process needs to be extremely simple because a lot of people aren't that tech savvy. 

 

I'll definitely look into Owncloud like you guys suggested, but you think that'll solve all these issues? 

VPN's in the enterprise are much more commonly known for providing employees access with a secure tunnel into the business, as if they were actually in the building. It allows employees to work from home or other remote locations, anywhere with internet. Setup correctly, there is no slow down, and your only limitation will be the internet links, something you will always be bound by. It's the best solution IMO.

[Pixel5]

12 hours ago, ShadowWolf810 said:

Well this server isn't something I'm hoping for the editors to actually edit off of remotely, that would be great but I think the hardware and expense of something like that is a bit out of the budget for now. 

 

You think as only a delivery system it still wouldn't be viable? Currently my house has about 10-12 Mbit/s upload. And I anticipate with the work we'd be starting off with the raw footage will be in the 20-50 GB area per project, if that. So it'd be slow to download everything but not unbearably slow I don't think. But I'm also looking into the option of getting business grade internet at my house, because I don't want to run into monthly data cap problems because I can definitely see with 10 editors working on multiple projects a month going through more than 1 TB of downloads  

Lets say you have a single editor loading a 50Gb project from your server, that will take more then 9 hours where your connection is at the limit and nobody else will be able to pull any data without slowing everything down even more.

 

If you have 2 editors requiring files at once you will have one of them with a full day of downtime waiting for the other to finish, at the same time you will not be able to download files to your own server without slowing down your upload as well because even when you download your server is sending acknowledge packages back to where it is getting the data from.

 

Or just imagine having a project done and you tell your client to download it and he has to wait multiple hours for something else to finish or till his own download is done, you connection is the most important thing here, the server itself could be anything that can hold hard drives and has a raid card.

[ShadowWolf810]

13 hours ago, Eniqmatic said:

VPN's in the enterprise are much more commonly known for providing employees access with a secure tunnel into the business, as if they were actually in the building. It allows employees to work from home or other remote locations, anywhere with internet. Setup correctly, there is no slow down, and your only limitation will be the internet links, something you will always be bound by. It's the best solution IMO.

So is this something I can set up to run on my server for free, or is it done with a monthly payment to a service that then runs on the server? Or how would I go about actually setting it up. If its something that you could still couple with NextCloud then I don't see why not, but I'd definitely still need some way of setting up permissions to manage the folders, and NextCloud actually has a nice linking system that allows you to send a link to someone that basically only gives them a "Drag and drop files here to upload" so you could set up a folder for each new client/project and have them upload it without having to give them account credentials and everything. 

[ShadowWolf810]

8 hours ago, Pixel5 said:

Lets say you have a single editor loading a 50Gb project from your server, that will take more then 9 hours where your connection is at the limit and nobody else will be able to pull any data without slowing everything down even more.

 

If you have 2 editors requiring files at once you will have one of them with a full day of downtime waiting for the other to finish, at the same time you will not be able to download files to your own server without slowing down your upload as well because even when you download your server is sending acknowledge packages back to where it is getting the data from.

 

Or just imagine having a project done and you tell your client to download it and he has to wait multiple hours for something else to finish or till his own download is done, you connection is the most important thing here, the server itself could be anything that can hold hard drives and has a raid card.

I see your point, that is pretty long wait times, longer than I would have expected. There are actually places that provide 'co-location' services, meaning that they have one insanely fast internet connection, and a ton of businesses rent power and the internet connection from them each month. The one I looked at was 80 bucks a month and you got 2, 1000 Mbps connections. Which would be faster than the drives could output data so that's an option. I'm also looking into business grade internet at my house, but can't seem to find prices. A friend seems to think that a business line is more like 600 bucks a month though so I'm not sure yet