WASHINGTON, DC - BrainBox Productions, Inc. (www.BrainBox.tv), an independent producer of non-fiction television, recently turned to EditShare for a solution for storing audio and video media files in a central networked location. The studio is a major supplier of concept- to-completion programming for networks such as Discovery Channel, HGTV, TLC, History, Court TV and Style, and in the last year produced 26 half-hour shows of Small Space Big Style for HGTV, as well as 13 one-hour episodes of Roush Racing: Driver X for Discovery.
The two shows generated thousands of hours of high definition footage, all of which has to be accessible to more than 15 Avid editors and assistant editors, as well as to the producers and assistants who log the material.
“Going into the first of our two latest series, Small Space Big Style, we knew we had to establish a solid system for collaborative editing,” says BrainBox executive VP, Bill Davidson. “We were getting a ton of footage in that had to be digitized quickly and edited by several editors. But this problem got compounded by the addition of a second new series, Roush Racing: Driver X. That second show brought in an additional two thousand-plus HD tapes, and editors, assistant editors, as well as post producers, were going to need simultaneous access to the footage, sometimes around the clock.”
At the beginning, BrainBox was relying on two off-the-shelf NAS devices with one fixed 800 GB RAID and one 2 TB RAID with no metadata-sharing features. This caused problems such as time loss, corrupt Avid media databases and a lack of productivity.
“I began to look for a replacement for our original two NAS devices, at first to just give us additional storage space,” Davidson recalls. “The influx of a few thousand tapes in a short period of time meant we were going to need several terabytes of storage very quickly. We also needed something that was fast and that could support many concurrent clients over our existing Gigabit network infrastructure. Finally, we hoped for something that would allow us to share project/asset metadata, unlike our first NAS solution that just barely allowed us to share media files. EditShare offered all this in a uniquely affordable, yet robust central storage system.”
The 6.4 TB system BrainBox purchased also gave them enough space to store every second of video shot for the Roush Racing: Driver X series at 15:1 offline resolution. Not only was all this material available on the network, but with EditShare's Avid Project Sharing feature, BrainBox was able to create one giant Avid Project for the series that allowed everyone involved to access and use what everyone else was editing.
“This has been crucial in our success as it allows all the editors, assistant editors and producers to share one big project, giving us the ability to seamlessly share sequences, shots, graphics, music, and all other media assets,” says Davidson. “With an approximate three-week turnaround for offline per hour episode, we need to put so many editors and support personal on each episode.”