Best practices for Studio | Revu 21

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Applies to:

  • Core
  • Complete

Practical Considerations for Large Project Collaboration

The topics and guidelines presented below are designed to prevent potential storage and performance issues caused by extremely large file collections in Studio Projects or Sessions, and to ensure the best possible collaborative experience. This information is based on the experience of our customer-facing teams that regularly assist hundreds of thousands of Studio users.


  1. What is a Large Project?
  2. Best practices
  3. Drawing Management for Studio Projects

What is a Large Project?

The size of a collection of project documents is determined by the following criteria:

  • The number of files or sheets.
  • The combined file size of the documents, markups, or both.

Examples of large document sets in Studio include:

  • A complete construction drawing or as-built set of 1,000 sheets.
  • A Studio Session hosting more than 100 drawing sheets. This can be composed of any combination of single or multi-page PDFs.
  • A Studio Session hosting more than 250MB of PDF files.
  • A Studio Session with more than 20 attendees likely to mark up the files.
  • A Studio Project with a total file size of documents exceeding 10GB.
  • A Studio Project in which batch processes are likely to be used on PDF files with a combined file size of more than 100MB or a page count of at least 250 pages.

Best practices

Design Reviews in Studio Sessions

Although the real-time collaborative capability of Studio Sessions greatly speeds up the design review process, the project will become larger and more complex as the number of sheets increases. Here are a few tips to ensure the quickest possible performance:

  • Use the fastest and most stable internet connection possible.
    While working with a large collection of documents or drawings, it is possible for a Studio Project to contain more than 25GB of data. Downloading and uploading this amount of data to and from the Session and each attendee requires the fastest and most stable internet connection possible.
  • Minimize the file size of your PDFs as much as possible.

    Before uploading your files, remove any unnecessary or unwanted content, such as Layers, file attachments, and unnecessary markups (such as SHX file markups, which store shape and font definitions compiled by Autodesk AutoCAD) included in PDFs exported from Autodesk AutoCAD. 

    Consider using the Reduce File Size feature in Revu.

  • Be careful when using data-heavy markups. For example:

    Grouped Markups – If you want to combine markups, you should ideally minimize the number of individual items within each Group. You should avoid using this functionality unless it’s necessary.

    Snapshots – We recommend using the “leanest” Snapshots possible, which do not include background content or data from the original document.

    To do this, capture the part of the original page you want to add to your document. Before you paste it into the destination file, you should first paste it into a new, blank PDF, and retake the snapshot from there. This second version of the Snapshot will be free of unnecessary data.

    Images and Videos – Whether you are using the Image tool or the Capture feature to add photographs or videos to a PDF in a Studio Session, it is important to remember that Studio transmits document and markup changes to each Session and attendee. Therefore, keep in mind that the resulting large size of files with high-resolution media could have an adverse effect on overall performance.

  • Upload your drawings to a Studio Project first.

    Storing large numbers of drawing sheets with various disciplines in a Studio Project ensures your documents and folders remain organized and intact. When you decide to collaborate on any of those files in real time, you can add copies of selected Project files to a new or existing Studio Session. Once the Session attendees finish working on drawings, you can use the Update Project Copy function to update the original version in the corresponding Studio Project.

    This has the added benefit of building a Revision History for any drawing that your colleagues work on in the Session.

Working with Large Quantities of Markups

If Session attendees are likely to simultaneously apply or edit large quantities of markups across multiple sheets, this could also impact performance. As the number of attendees in a Session increases, the amount of data transmitted between the Session and each attendee increases rapidly.

Document Preparation

Before uploading your drawings or documents to Bluebeam Studio, we strongly recommend performing the following tasks to ensure you won’t have to remove, correct, and reupload them:


Drawing Management for Studio Projects

Studio Projects is a document management system (DMS) for sharing information and files with collaborators, while maintaining file integrity with revision history that tracks activity and updates. For the best end-user experience, consider the following factors before uploading files to your Studio Project:

  • Network Speed – When working with a large collection of documents or drawings, it is possible for a Project to contain more than 25GB of data. Downloading and uploading this amount of data to and from the Session and each attendee requires the fastest and most stable internet connection possible.
  • Using Sets or Batch ProcessingIf the total file size of your PDFs is greater than 100MB, or contains at least 250 pages, we strongly recommend you run these CPU or time intensive functions before uploading the files to the Studio Project.

    Editing documents in Studio Projects requires extra time, bandwidth, and processing to support proper file access, document management, and version control. Additionally, new files that haven’t been cached locally require additional processing time during an initial upload or download.

How-To

Revu 2017 & Below

Revu for Mac 1

Revu for Mac 2

Studio Enterprise

Studio

The topics and guidelines presented below are designed to prevent potential storage and performance issues caused by extremely large file collections in Studio Projects or Sessions, and to ensure the best possible collaborative experience. This information is based on the experience of our customer-facing teams that regularly assist hundreds of thousands of Studio users.