EditShare
We just received a test unit of EditShare Field. It’s not very cheap, but it may be a brilliant product for reality/documentary productions in the field with neat logging options, raid protection and the possibility for syncing with a EditShare at home aswell.
I’m keen to know if the project sharing workflow actually works, or if it’s mainly media sharing and painful project sharing. Also the deletion scheme seems like a bit work for the sysadmin, but then again, I have never heard of a sysadmin that doesn’t have to spend a lot of time deleting material.
EditShare has had some problems earlier, which the salespeople doesn’t like to be reminded of. Some productions have suffered really fatal data corruption with an earlier version of a FC driver supplied by a third party. Maybe colored by this, my gut feeling is that Quantel, Avid, GVG and all but maybe Lightworks, offer more filesystem/project/database reliability. EditShare is now 5 years old, and may have matured enough to take the step out of smaller post-house environments into enterprise broadcast and larger postproduction facilities.
It works with both Avid and FCP in addition to some other NLEs with less clever workflow benefits. I’m going to test the unit with FCP, and already it has proved not to work with Thursby’s AdmitMac, so I had to use Apple’s own Samba implementation. EditShare recommends a certain version of Thursby’s DAVE, but that doesn’t solve my needs within the company so I’ll stick with Apple Samba.
I’m returning the unit in a couple of weeks, so I should write something more substantial by then 
