It’s your first day as the head of a brand new video team. You can’t wait to get to work, but when you arrive, you’re immediately greeted by a shelf of external hard drives and a small server partition provided by the university’s IT department. To some, it’d be a little discouraging. To others, it’s an opportunity to start from scratch and build the workflow of their dreams.
This is what Chris Salters found when he came to TCU to run a newly founded video production team inside the University’s athletic marketing department. He was excited to take the department in a fresh cinematic direction, and he met his challenges head on.
Starting From Scratch
Chris was first introduced to post-production at Texas A&M University. He worked his way through school at the university’s in-house production unit within the athletics department. After college, Chris moved to California and spent six years honing his craft at one of Hollywood’s top trailer houses, where he worked his way up from an Intern P.A. to a full-time content editor. It was there that he became intimately familiar with the technology side of Post — shared storage, media asset management, LTO archives, and workflows.
When Chris laid his eyes on the shelf of hard drives and the data server that his inherited department was currently using, a shared storage and media asset management solution immediately leaped to the top of his priority list. “The biggest issue we had aside from adding more staff, is that we needed the speed to let everyone access the media,” he explains. “Our former server was designed for data, and it applies to 95% of the rest of the campus, but that doesn’t work for video. When we started going down this path, I showed my superiors what it was like to scrub through a video on our server, making my computer stall. That’s not workable.”
But building a new infrastructure for the team was not an easy task. Chris needed a solution that checked a lot of boxes. It had to have enough performance for 7+ editors to work simultaneously in Adobe Premiere, it had to be scalable, and it had to fit into an evolving media management workflow that included LTO archive.
A Winning Solution
EVO checked all of those boxes.
After months of research and evaluating products, Chris decided on the EVO 16 Bay Shared Storage Server. “EVO and its ShareBrowser software allows us to log our footage and add metadata, and it’s all searchable,” says Salters. Each EVO system includes unlimited licenses of ShareBrowser, an intuitive asset management software that lets search, tag, index, and preview media across all of their storage — something that was vital for Chris’s team.
When you’re implementing a shared storage system for your organization, it’s important to think about the long-term goals. For Chris and his team, it was on his mind from day one that he needed something that would be the backbone of an infrastructure. That means a growing team, a growing media library, performance for new high-end media formats, and seamless integration options for backup and archival solutions. EVO and ShareBrowser was a perfect solution for TCU, and the system now provides a reliable foundation for the team’s evolving workflow. “I’m excited to see what comes from this department,” says Salters. “We’ve had a lot of changes within the past year, and I think it’s only going to get bigger and better. It’s pretty cool to be a part of it.”
The days of choppy playback and workflow chaos are behind them. Now, they can focus on what’s important: inspiring fans, hyping the crowds, and creating amazing content for the TCU Horned Frogs.
About Studio Network Solutions (SNS)
SNS shared storage solutions are at the core of optimized video workflow for professional content creation workgroups worldwide. The SNS EVO shared media storage server combines high-performance with extensive connectivity, including 10Gb/s Ethernet and Fibre Channel. With EVO’s included ShareBrowser asset management software, you can search, index, preview, tag, and verify video and project assets with no additional software required. NAS, SAN, or both at the same time, EVO is designed for online real-time video editing with leading video/audio applications including Avid Media Composer, Adobe Premiere Pro/CC, Final Cut Pro (FCP), Final Cut Pro X (FCPX), DaVinci Resolve, Pro Tools, and others.
Read more user stories or contact SNS now to see how the EVO shared media storage server can help your company.