Production Sound & Video

Spring 2021 – LOCAL695.ORG 29 As laborers in an industry that constantly pushes the boundaries of what technology has to offer, members of the IATSE have unique technological needs. Productions demand custom-fit solutions to the challenges they present, often preventing workers from buying off the rack as it were. Sometimes, artists and craftspeople encounter obstacles for which the market has not presented an adequate solution and when they do, they take it upon themselves to make their own. Such is the case with the new rNAS.m4 and rTB storage units from Pronology, designed by Local 695 member and Pronology President Jon Aroesty to address the specific challenges faced by 695 engineers and technicians. The story of the rNAS goes part and parcel with mRes, another Pronology product designed out of frustration with the lack of adequate workflow options. The mRes is a standalone server-based encoder capable of capturing multiple SDI inputs or IP streams and simultaneously by James Delhauer The rNAS .m4 and rTB from Pronology writing a high-quality deliverable asset, a ready-to-edit proxy file, and a proxy optimized for web streaming for each input in real time. In practical terms, this means that camera or IP-based media can be ready for every stage of review and post production as soon as the director calls cut. However, this workflow presents the challenge of immense data loads, especially when networking multiple mRes servers together. Moving that much media around in real time requires storage hardware capable of sustained high bandwidth reading and writing. Furthermore, production environments are often harsh, requiring equipment that can stand up to the rigors of day-to-day use. After experimenting with various storage options on the market, Aroesty and his team concluded that there was nothing available at the time that presented an ideal solution to these problems. "We couldn't find anything that could sustain the kind of write speeds we needed while also being portable and rugged enough to be practical in a production environment," Aroesty commented. "Eventually, we realized that we needed to build our own." After studying the shortcomings of existing network- attached storage devices, the first rNAS prototype was

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