When Trevor Stonebank and Brett Lindsay founded Brave Channels in South Africa, they had a bold idea: give editors the ability to work from anywhere without compromise. To bring that vision to life, they created EVA—a fully virtualized post-production platform enabling film and television teams to Edit Virtually Anywhere.
But delivering on that promise required a shared storage solution powerful enough to handle a wide range of video formats, resolutions, and workflows that their customers would bring to the virtual environment.
Finding The Best Workflow For Remote Production
Survivor South Africa was the first project that put Brave Channels and their virtual platform to the test. With editorial teams spread across Johannesburg, Cape Town, and a remote island, editors needed instant access to high-resolution media without shipping drives. They implemented a fully remote Avid Media Composer workflow—with bin locking so editors could collaborate on episodes—and successfully completed the project within budget and ahead of schedule.
While the flagship production was a success, there was certainly room for improvement. Brave Channels is always investigating and testing new software and hardware products to ensure that they can provide the best post-production solutions to their clients. That perpetual search for the best solution led them to EVO.
Virtual Post-Production Powered By EVO
To meet the demands of modern virtual production, Brave Channels turned to EVO shared storage for its performance, reliability, and robust feature set.
As CTO Trevor Stonebank put it: “SNS EVO is the only storage solution, manufactured bespoke for our industry, which offers all the aspects we require in our ideal workflow at a competitive price without any hidden costs.” CEO Brett Lindsay agreed, adding: “I would happily die on the hill with EVO.”
All media content is safely and securely managed within Brave Channels’ private cloud infrastructure. Customers have access to EVO’s built-in media asset management, proxy generation, and automation tools to keep projects moving forward from anywhere. To further add to the customer experience, Brave Channels even built their own custom workflow integrations using EVO’s APIs.
Most importantly, EVO’s support for Adobe Premiere Pro, DaVinci Resolve, Avid Media Composer, and other video editing tools ensures Brave Channels can accommodate a wide range of customer workflows within their virtual studio environment.
With EVO at its core, Brave Channels delivers a virtual post-production platform where editors can focus on creativity rather than technical complexity.
Q&A With Brave Channels
Here’s more from co-founders Brett Lindsay and Trevor Stonebank—in their own words—on why EVO was the best shared storage solution for their virtual production platform.
What challenges did you face before implementing EVO?
Lindsay: “We have always been looking for high performance storage at a price point that would allow us to scale. SNS seems to be in the goldilocks zone for performance and price while also giving us the confidence that we are investing in best of breed technology for our infrastructure.”
What led you to choose EVO for your remote editing setup?
Stonebank: “The list is long, but includes: service availability and support, operating systems and MAM functionality, expandable and fully managed volumes, versatility and compatibility, and integration with our existing software packages and systems.”
Lindsay: “SNS EVO allows for effective cross NLE use, which suited us perfectly as we work with Avid, Adobe, and Resolve across multiple productions. It was easy to set up and share volume access across different users.”
How does EVO support your remote workflow model?
Lindsay: “Our remote model works differently to most. We have users VDI (Virtual Desktop Interface) into our high-performance VM (Virtual Machine) environment. Within this environment the VMs are connected at 10Gb network allowing for fast access to media when and as they need. For ingest we would media manage into the EVOs.”
Stonebank: “For us it is mainly about the added value that SNS EVO brings to the party and the ease of integration into our existing environments. The SNS EVO allows us to effectively manage our users and other storage volumes from one space in the environment. The OS expedites our searches and helps streamline our workflows for our clients, creating a faster, more user-friendly experience.”
What EVO features do you rely on day-to-day?
Stonebank: “The ShareBrowser MAM functionality has obviously helped us and clients with storytelling and finding media, but the functionality is a win for us over other systems in that we are integrating our in-house developed logging system—EVA Story—with it. This gives clients a fully LIVE logging system that gets populated with the ShareBrowser thumbnails as soon as the proxy is made within the storage volume. This is a game changer for clients.”
Lindsay: “Being able to organize and locate media is really the holy grail to most unscripted reality formats or documentaries, so having ShareBrowser allow editors and executive crew to view media and make notes, check the quality of content, and get ahead of edits and storylines is great. We are constantly learning new ways to leverage the value of Slingshot for automating workflows. Users can be stuck in their ways but showing them better ways of working with new tools is always great, especially when they realize the value.”
What types of media and cameras do you typically work with, and how does EVO perform under that workload?
Lindsay: “We work on larger productions with many cameras. We strive for a common format, but with the diversity of cameras now from gimbals to drones and GoPros on reality or sports productions, it’s nice to know the EVO performs well with anything. Having ShareBrowser & Slingshot create viewing proxies is great.”
Stonebank: “We have many clients on many different formats. Each workflow is custom made for each client, so we have all three of the main NLE software packages using various codecs, wrappers, and resolutions depending on the show, bandwidth, and collaborative work. Our customers are editing with Avid, Adobe, Davinci, and Hedge—the EVO has worked seamlessly for this use.”
What other tools do you use in your workflow, and how well does your EVO integrate with them?
Lindsay: “We utilize most NLE software for the various productions we serve. We work with Hedge/OffShoot and FoolCat during production DIT and Media Management. We have spent some investment in our own online logging software (EVA Story), and through the API with ShareBrowser we are able to connect rich data logs directly to the clip metadata in ShareBrowser. For Adobe and Resolve users having the ShareBrowser panel access right there really helps.”
What advice would you give to post production teams looking to build or expand a remote workflow?
Lindsay: “Remote workflows can be tricky—users, computers, and most importantly media are often not in the same place at the same time. We feel that after significant investment and building EVA over the years, we offer an impactful value proposition to any production of any size in a number of regions internationally. If SNS EVO works well for us, and we’ve tried many many alternatives over the years, then explorers of remote production would do well to start with SNS EVO and discover how it could help them.”
If you’re interested in running a remote production without absorbing the overhead yourself, check out Brave Channels. If you’re looking for an in-house or cloud-based shared storage solution built for creative media production, contact SNS to see how EVO can help.