Tutorial: Connecting Content-Creation Workgroups with the ProMAX Platform Portable Y

Search Functionality

Now you'll see that there are fewer options available on the left hand side of Figure 19 (below), but one of them that's especially useful is the Search function. I can type in a file extension, and I’ll find all of the files that are on that hard drive that have a proxy file that have been created for them. The proxy file will be denoted by a little play button on the left. The platform creates a proxy file for all of the video files that are located on the mounted drives.

Figure 19. The Search option. Click the image to see it at full size.

This happens automatically in the background using the processing power of the platform. Search functionality is really useful when you're looking for content on mounted and unmounted drives. The proxy files reside on the Platform and you can play them in a preview window. You will notice in the preview window in Figure 19 that the display isn't showing a proper widescreen, so there is some cropping happening. Hopefully ProMAX will fix this in a future update.

Transfer Speed

Once you've located the file that you want to work with, if the file is mounted, you can right-click an open folder and locate that file on the hard drive itself. I'm going to copy this over to a new folder on my workstation itself so I'm working off of the Platform.

In general, you're limited to a gigabit ethernet connection speed, which is about 120 MB/sec. In addition to simply copying files across the network, you can also play back files from hard drives that are mounted directly to the platform. There's plenty of transfer speed to play back files that are up to 110-120 MB/sec.

System Utilization

When you're logged in as the administrator, you can navigate to the performance tab and view the Platform’s System Utilization (Figure 20, below). This includes tabs for the CPU utilization, the storage groups, which are the mounted hard drives, the connections, these are the ethernet connections, as well as on an individual user basis.

Figure 20. System Utilization. Click the image to see it at full size.

For more information on the ProMAX Platform Portable X and Y, please visit this tutorial’s sponsor, Videoguys.com.