Post Magazine

Storage Supplement 2014

Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/283517

Contents of this Issue

Navigation

Page 10 of 15

at the same time. It stream- lines the process. You can buy a set of G-Drive evs for a project to use for field drives and as a way to dis- tribute final project files to a customer and keep for back up." Crosby notes that since G-Technology is part of HGST (Hitachi Global Stor- age Technologies) it can integrate innovative hard- drive technology in its products. "We're the only ones with a 1TB 7,200rpm hard drive; it's about 20 percent faster than the 1TB 5,400rpm hard drives on the market today." Both G-Drive Pro and G-Dock ev are formatted to work with Apple and Windows environment, he reports. In addi- tion, the Evolution Series is "ruggedized with an all-alumi- num enclosure built to withstand a one-meter drop onto carpeted concrete." All Thunderbolt solutions come with a Thunderbolt cable, which is typically a costly standalone item. And all G-Technology products have a three-year war- ranty, Crosby notes. FOX SPORTS REMOTE OPERATIONS Fox Sports Remote Operations handles live sports pro- duction in the field for the sports network, including 250 college basketball games annually, NFL football, the Super Bowl, the Daytona 500 and NASCAR season. "Everything is on 53-foot tractor-trailers, and we have a growing need for post production in the field," says Kevin Callahan, director of engineering for Fox Sports Remote Operations. "In the past we used standalone editing sys- tems with individual FireWire or USB drives. To get material from one computer to another we'd transfer over the 'net or walk the drive from edit bay to edit bay. So to get more efficiency in editorial and optimize the amount of editing time we looked for a shared-storage solution." After six months of research, Callahan selected the EVO RAID-protected SAN and NAS shared media storage server from Studio Network Solutions (www.studionetworksolu- tions.com). With 32TBs of raw storage, EVO made its debut at last Ju- ly's Major League Baseball All Star Game. It has since been deployed with the NFL crew through the Super Bowl and is now onboard for the NASCAR race season. EVO was chosen for its "feature set and price, as well as its scalability," says Callahan. "At some point we're going to grow, and we have a habit of not letting go of material. We can always add more storage through an expansion chassis." The Daytona 500 just launched the NASCAR calendar, and editorial was at work on-site, cutting driver interviews and interstitials to be used throughout the racing season. "EVO initially served as the landing spot for about 120 hours of raw footage shot by the features department on Sony F55, F5 and F3 cameras, Red Epic and DSLRs," Callahan ex- plains. "The material needed to be transferred, stored and available to four Final Cut Pro 7 editing systems on the road." At Daytona, three edit bays were in a single truck and one edit bay was in a second mobile unit. The EVO, located in the three-bay truck, was linked by a 10Gb connection to one of the three edit bays, a transcoding engine and the replay network. It was linked to the edit bay in the second truck by a 1Gb connection. The four editors were tasked with turning around fin- ished pieces in 36 to 48 hours, Callahan reports. In addition, the 10Gb connection to the replay network allowed in-race pieces to be cut. "Producers would select clips or media off the replay server, and they'd land on EVO for immediate ed- iting by any editor," he says. During the NASCAR season the features group shoots about 20 hours of additional footage each week, which is stored on EVO. "Some content shot in Week 1 will be used in Week 13 or 14 of the season," Callahan explains, "so we need to keep it around. We're on the air roughly 15 hours every weekend of the season." He expects the current capacity of EVO to be sufficient for the NASCAR season; the trucks also have 50TBs of NAS near-line storage for clips of the races, but it's not used for online storage for editorial. At the end of the season the complete NASCAR archive on EVO will go to Fox Sports' LA post production facility for archiving on LTO. "Our editors are happy and our producers are even more pleased," says Callahan of the EVO. "They're getting more productivity out of our edit rooms. No more time spent on ingesting and making copies to distribute to the other edit systems. No more producers deciding ahead of time what editor will cut what piece. Now, they get the media into shared storage and figure out who will be edit- ing it later." fox Sports uses Studio network Solu- tions' eVo servers in its remote trucks. Storage Solutions • March 2014 • 9

Articles in this issue

Links on this page

Archives of this issue

view archives of Post Magazine - Storage Supplement 2014