DC Collective Installed Small Tree Shared Storage

DC Collective, a live action commercial production, motion graphic design and post-production company, installed a Small Tree TitaniumZ-16 Ethernet-based shared storage system to meet critical client deadlines and future-proof its facility.

Tapped by ESPN to produce and edit time-sensitive projects for two of the year’s biggest sporting events – the Super Bowl and NCAA Men’s College Basketball Tournament – DC Collective transitioned to Small Tree’s shared storage solution offering a flexible mix of 1GbE and 10 GbE configuration options. As a result, DC Collective’s post-production team was able to meet urgent deadlines for each event.

During the two weeks between the Conference Championships and the Super Bowl, DC Collective was tasked with developing on air interstitials for Super Bowl XLIX. For the recently completed NCAA Men’s College Basketball Tournament, the agency worked with ESPN on a special featuring president Obama picking his March Madness brackets, which was captured on a combination of Sony F5, DVC Pro and Go Pro cameras.

According to Adam Corey, partner at DC Collective, with the first segment of the president’s picks scheduled to air just hours after the White House shoot wrapped, the agency had three edit rooms going simultaneously to ensure the segment would air on the midnight SportsCenter and that a number of tapes would be delivered to various ABC/ESPN properties.

“Working on the March Madness and Super Bowl projects was definitely exhilarating given the time frame,” Corey stated. “There were production challenges in both instances – including snow in Boston pushing us back a couple of days on the Super Bowl interstitials – but with Small Tree’s TitaniumZ we were able to hit our marks without a hiccup.”

Handling projects for a number of cable networks, including Discovery Channel, National Geographic, TLC and Travel Channel, DC Collective runs Adobe Premiere, Avid and Autodesk Smoke across Mac Pro trashcans and towers to its six workstations. To ensure workflow across these platforms, the company installed a TitaniumZ-16 rack mount system with 48TB of raw storage capacity, providing its editors with 10GbE performance supporting 4K projects and future-proofing the agency’s shared storage requirements.

TitaniumZ is designed and tested to provide performance for real-time video-editing workflows. With its direct configuration, it can scale to 288TB raw in RAID-5. With the addition of its cost-effective near line backup NAS configuration, the TitaniumZ can provide another 432TB on the network.

While impressed by the speed and performance delivered by the TitaniumZ-16, Corey was equally impressed by the system’s ease of use.

“We’re a small outfit, so we don’t have a full time engineer on staff,” Corey stated. “So I was worried that we’d have a bit of a learning curve to deal with when we first installed the Small Tree technology. I was pleasantly surprised to learn that it really was a plug-and-play solution for us.“