Digiboyz Installs Portable Small Tree Shared Storage Solution

Digiboyz Inc., a post-production facility based in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, installed the Titanium Z-5 shared storage system from Small Tree Communications LLC. 

The portable and affordable Ethernet-based solution for video editing gave Digiboyz peace of mind by streamlining their workflow and allowing the team to plug in anywhere.

Best known for its work on the Netflix Original Series, Trailer Park Boys, as well as movies such as Lifetime’s Lizzie Borden Took An Ax, Digiboyz offers color correction, closed captioning and visual effects with a specialty in film and television. Additionally, the company features editing suites with non-linear online and offline capabilities to handle all types of frame rates and resolutions to fit specialized client needs. A Final Cut Pro X shop, Digiboyz is Mac-based, running the latest OS, Yosemite, across a Mac Pro and four iMacs workstations. For color correction, the agency uses DaVinci Resolve.

The company’s shift to Small Tree’s portable shared storage appliance was a necessity to keep up with ever-changing workspaces, an environment in which individual HDDs are not conducive. The lightweight Titanium Z-5 can be packed up easily, boots up in no time and allows for multiple workstations to get connected. The appliance can be used on-site and then brought back into the office the same day to allow for further editing, giving access to people on other systems.

“The Digiboyz team wanted the ability to pack up, move rapidly to another trailer and get the workstations up and running again,” said Jeremy Harty, president, Digiboyz. “It’s great to have the OS all in one box, so we can tweak something and have the RAID security and the safety net of knowing that no content will be lost.“

Titanium Z-5 is a mobile all-in-one Ethernet-based shared storage solution for professional video editors who require shared access to media files. The server, networking and storage are all accompanied within the Z-5’s space-saving desktop design. Supporting up to 2 ports of 10GbE, the Z-5 is simple to set up and manage, allowing the storage to be available to users within minutes of initial start-up. The system supports multiple editing software applications including Adobe Creative Suite, Final Cut 7 and Final Cut X in addition to other popular applications. The solution also permits Windows, Linux, Macintosh and Unix clients to share media files.

“It seems really easy for upgrade,” said Harty. “Our hope is at some point to pop some drives out, put others in and have the ability to jump between them relatively fast and seamlessly depending on the series or project. We like having something that isn’t dependent on being rack mounted and have enjoyed our content being centralized and speedy.“

Digiboyz is utilizing the Titanium Z-5 with 6TB drives and hopes to expand and upgrade in the future if necessary.