Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/82522
Audio Storage Needs rent back-up and archiving system. When it comes to Internet-based storage, he's not convinced of its current practicality. "The problem with something external, like a cloud service, is that you have to have a server that is reliable. Unfortunately, right now, there are always outages on anything. If the service is down, and you're sitting with a client, then you're screwed. Storing the data on- site is our thing right now." PHILADELPHIA POST Scott 'Waz' Wasienko is owner/ mixer/editor/producer at Philadel- phia Post, in the City of Brotherly Philadelphia Post's Scott Wasienko: the studio has four Pro Tools suites networked via Ethernet to a central server. tion gets backed up to AIT 3 tape every night. "We do advertising, radio and TV, but mostly TV. So our sessions aren't that big," says Valencia. "We spend about two or three days max on a session." The central server is automatically cloned PostAd-2a-rev_Post Ad 5/23/12 12:31 PM Page 1 Music Zero Fee 42 to a "safe" back-up, which is a duplicate of the central server drive. When the central server drive is full, that means the "safe" back-up is full also, and both drives get replaced. The full drives are then labeled and shelved on-site. Currently, Tono Studios is using two 1TB Rocstor drives. Valencia uses the Mac's Spotlight feature to search the old drives when he needs to restore a session. The oldest session he restored, from three years ago, was problem- free thanks to Tono Studios' attention to detail and organization. All the sessions at Tono Studios live in "stand-alone mode," meaning there is nothing that is linked. Even the video files associated with the session are kept in the same folder. "We do that to avoid any problems because we're moving sessions from room to room. We don't have any media offline, and we don't have to look for any files. We want to avoid a situation where you open a session, and it says that you are missing 250 files." Valencia is satisfied with Tono Studios' cur- MEANS For Details CALL or CLICK www.ZeroFeeMusic.com 800-468-6874 Post • September 2012 www.postmagazine.com Love. Philadelphia Post (www.phillypost.tv) offers audio post for advertising, ADR, mixing 5.1 for broadcast, original music composition and more. They've recently recorded ADR sessions with Colin Farrell and Sigourney Weaver. Philadelphia Post has four Pro Tools audio suites networked via Ethernet to a central server that has two 2TB bare drives. Using ChronoSync, every night all the rooms are backed up to the central drive and a clone of that drive. "The key for us is utilizing the bare drives that we have in a dual sled," says Wasien- ko. "You can just pop the drives in and out as you need them. The same works for our sound effects database. It's on a 2TB bare drive that is connected to a computer at the front desk. Because it's connected to the network, it's accessible to every engineer via Soundminer. So we work locally, and then push all that data to the bare drives every night." The projects are organized by month and year. Every night, ChronoSync copies the ses- sion data from the rooms to a correspond- ing monthly folder on the central server. All the rooms are color coded, so if you were to look at the September 2012 folder on the central server, you'd see sessions that are red, gold, blue and olive. This makes it easy to see what room did what job. Also, Wasienko uses Google NO Cost to YOU for Your TV Show or Feature Film Music NO Master Use, Sync or DVD fees calendar to document each session. "With the Google cal- endar, you can do a search for the client name or project name and easily find it on the calendar. Inside the calendar event is all the information associated with the project: job numbers, PO numbers, spot titles, talent used, and the time involved that day. All that info is right in front of you so you can quickly refresh your memory and you can easily locate a ses- sion on a back-up drive." Wasienko is a fan of the bare drive because it has no case and no power supply. If a sled dies, none of the data is lost because the drive isn't affected, and the cost of a new sled is relatively cheap, around $40. "When a power supply dies, or if there is problem with the sled, who cares? It's easy to remove the drive. We just pop these things in and out." When the bare drive and its clone are full, they are removed from the sled, sealed in a container and labeled for storage on-site. All the data is cataloged using Google calendar, so finding a drive and copying a session is easy to do, unlike earlier archiving systems that Wasienko remembers. "There was a system called Mezzo, and that system is like 15 or 20 years old, and we've actually had to go back to the Mezzo and pop those old tapes into a tape drive. It was all proprietary, and it was horrible." Wasienko also has old DDS 2 and DDS 4 tapes that still work. Over the years, he's used eBay to track down working tape drives for $25. "I've collected a couple of these just in case, and I have an old Windows machine that still works, so if I need to I can grab something off one of those old tapes." When it comes to storing their data, Wasienko is pretty satisfied with the bare drive technology and ChronoSync. He doesn't see Web-based storage as a possibil- ity any time soon. "I don't know how I feel about a Web-based storage because it's my clients' business. Letting it out of your hands, making someone else responsible for that data… I don't know how I feel about that." BAM STUDIOS Brian Reed, president of Bam Studios in Chicago, is also a sound designer and mixer at the facility. Bam Studios (www. bamstudios.com) offers a large variety of audio services, from mixing TV spots and original music, to capturing location sound. Bam has three Pro Tools audio suites, Bam's Brian Reed: using Gig-E and RAIDs. plus one Final Cut Pro workstation to handle file prep. Everything is networked via Gigabit Ethernet to three separate RAID systems. Two RAIDs are used for back-up and archiving, and the third houses the facility's sound effects and music library. Pro Tools sessions are created locally on continued on page 47