SAN Solutions to Support Production of “Saturday Night Live”

SAN Solutions announced that its Video Production SAN is being used to support production of ‘Saturday Night Live.’

The weekly late-night sketch comedy show on NBC, produced by Lorne Michaels’ Broadway Video Entertainment (BVE), relies on the SAN’s fast, reliable centralized storage infrastructure to enable the very quick turn around required to get the show prepared and delivered to secondary markets with the utmost efficiency.

"Performance, reliability, and extensibility of our network storage infrastructure were key requirements as we sought to streamline our production operations and deliver finished media to our digital distribution partners within a very short timeframe," said Stacey Foster, coordinating producer at Broadway Video Entertainment. "After meticulous testing and analysis of SAN Solutions’ Video Production SAN in concert with NBC engineers, we determined that the system met and exceeded our performance and scalability requirements. To be dynamic creatively, we need to be dynamic technically, and our SAN Solutions system makes this possible."

‘Saturday Night Live’ airs live late Saturday night and is subsequently prepared for delivery to numerous other media outlets. With the implementation of the Video Production SAN, BVE was able to institute a streamlined, scalable, fully file-based workflow in place of the labor-intensive ingest and layoff processes previously required to complete an edit, or to repurpose archived material for repeats, ‘best of’ shows, streaming services, and other downstream revenue-generating activities. By supporting an end-to-end file-based workflow, from camera to edit to delivery, the SAN Solutions network storage infrastructure has brought dramatic efficiency gains to ‘Saturday Night Live’ production.

During the live show, feeds from seven cameras and the switched control room output are captured onto the Video Production SAN, which provides 40 TB of usable capacity for video production and 5 TB usable capacity for audio. Simultaneously, multitrack recording of every performer and instrument in the house and guest band, with 48 tracks for each, as well as dialog and audience response, is captured to the SAN. Editors working in Final Cut Pro, music mixers using Digidesign Pro Tools, and graphics staff working with Adobe graphics systems thus can begin their jobs immediately, working with content in a shared and cohesive environment.

Centralized storage of content not only eliminates time-consuming data transfers and other technical processes, but also reduces the risk of media loss and allows BVE to optimize storage space by working with a single copy of recorded content. The open architecture of the SAN Solutions system allows BVE to integrate and automate critical workflow steps, such as transcoding, and significantly improve time to market while lowering the cost of media transformation. Rapid delivery of ‘Saturday Night Live’ content maintains the timely value and topical relevance of the program as it is distributed to additional media outlets as a follow-on to the live NBC Universal network broadcast. With all of these feeds and tracks stored securely, BVE maintains a high degree of control in reassembling, editing, and producing the best possible content for secondary markets.