Emmy Award Winner's lightening fast GBLabs set up
Editology is a 9-time Promax and 4-time NY Emmy award winner for editing and design. As a dynamic and creative boutique post production company it has been highly successful over a 17 year period. Its client list including City Bank, the New York Giants, Google and Nickelodeon is proof of the quality of their output.
“Editology is well established and respected and as a result we keep on growing. But we came to a critical point a few years ago when data management became a real issue, a real hindrance to growth.” Comments CEO Ron Humer.
At the time Editology had multiple HD projects stored on individual Mac Pro workstations. This was a way of working with a serious downside. Sharing projects between team members, maintaining working space on each system and ensuring any level of data security involved slow, manual processes, with hours spent each evening consolidating projects.
Editology 2d / 3d animation from Editology Inc. on Vimeo.
“There was no natural solution out there,” says Ron. “SAN storage systems were complex and convoluted. They were OK for organizations with full time technical support that could run metadata servers, administer expensive client licenses and manage a fibre channel installation. But they were simply way too costly for us. So our time was filled with data copying and our family life really suffered.”
A visit to NAB and the subsequent acquisition of GB Labs Space network storage system changed everything for Editology. With the assistance of New Media Hollywood, the company installed a 48TB Ethernet shared storage device giving edit stations access to centralized media projects.
“It’s lightning fast and performs as well as it did during the demo we saw at NAB. When editing jobs arrive, we have stable power available on tap. We can simply pull up an Ethernet cable and the editors can start work. It really feels glorious.” Enthuses Ron.
Editology’s typical workflow centers on Adobe After Effects, Final Cut Pro and Cinema 4D. The team works either with ProRes HQ or uncompressed files for the ultimate picture quality, with Space supporting multiple users at full speed. “One of the things we also like about Space is that it’s Linux and Windows compatible. It’s comforting to know that any client workstation can just plug in to the data and get working with no loss of performance.”
As Editology moved from ad hoc data management to a centralized system, Ron was concerned to future-proof the network and ensure that it would be ready for a second phase which will focus on data security. “GB Labs have expansion units for our original system that just seem to plug in and work from the get go. They also have lower cost nearline appliances that are also Ethernet-based for media archiving and data back-up. We’re in the process of weighing up our options now.”
Corporate, broadcast and event work are all core Editology activities. “Content for a football game or Syfy Channel movie promos can have a very short deadline; work for fashion image campaigns like Argyleculture may have longer lead times. Central storage gives us the flexibility to work on all our projects concurrently without endless data shifting. Now we can do our work and still get home in time to see the family.”
Editology’s work is located at vimeo.com/editology. Visit www.editology.com for more details.