Using dozens of FireWire drives to store projects became an unmanageable project of its own for Creative Media Group, Inc., a Utah-based full-service production company specializing in commercials, direct sales, corporate, training and live event videos. With the size of its projects continuing to grow with the business, CMG installed cost-efficient shared storage technology from Small Tree, designer of simple-to-install, inexpensive Mac-based networking and shared storage products for professional video and audio editors, to maximize its people and technological resources.
“Keeping track of where certain files were saved was becoming a huge problem,” said Krisi Church Summers, senior editor and eight-year veteran at CMG. “If two people were working on the same project, we’d have to copy files onto two different drives and it was increasingly hard to manage. I did a lot of research on storage networking systems before choosing Small Tree and not only has the technology made life a lot easier for our post-production team, but it was also the best bang for our buck.”
To facilitate its workflow, CMG installed Small Tree’s Edge-corE ES4524D, a 24-port Gigabit Ethernet switch, along with its PEG6 6-port Ethernet card – both of which are a part of Small Tree’s new GraniteSTOR product line.
According to Summers, CMG recently completed a promotional video project for the City of Salt Lake that prior to the Small Tree installation would have taken much longer to complete, thereby preventing them from moving more quickly to other revenue-generating projects.
“Because of Small Tree’s shared storage equipment, we were able to finish the Salt Lake project in record time,” said Summers. “While I was using Final Cut Pro, two colleagues were working simultaneously on graphics using After Effects. This was an enormous change in workflow for us. Without the shared storage solution we would have had to copy the footage onto other drives and that would have been extremely time-consuming.”
Another major reason for choosing Small Tree, in addition to the many benefits that their shared storage technology provides to CMG on its production projects, was the robust archival and retrieval needs of its sister company, Stockshotsnow.com, which expects to go live in August and will host over 20,000 clips (4k, HD and SD) for sale to companies requiring stock video footage. With an abundant amount of large files on hand for in-house use and sale to other outlets, CMG needed a system that could easily house its files while providing immediate access for the company’s editing team.
Small Tree is the Mac Networking Expert, making networking child’s play. Small Tree provides a complete portfolio of Ethernet-based networking and storage solutions for Apple Mac OS X customers. Small Tree’s team of networking developers has extensive experience in high performance computing, and knows how to achieve the demanding application requirements of Mac customers. Small Tree also provides contracted programming services for the Department of Defense. For more information about the company and its products, please call 1-866-STC4MAC (1-866-782-4622), or visit www.small-tree.com.