Motorcar Parts of America Opts for Quantum Xcellis and CatDV

Quantum Corp. announced that Motorcar Parts of America, Inc. (MPA) has deployed a combination of Xcellis workflow storage powered by StorNext and CatDV Media Asset Management software.

The resulting high-output video production environment enables more agile collaboration and provides quick automated archiving and retrieval capabilities.

Video Training Makes MPA a Trusted DIY Resource
MPA is an international firm in the automotive aftermarket, focused on manufacturing and remanufacturing a range of products for cars and trucks. The company distributes its products across the US and Canada, and its supply chain, manufacturing and test facilities span the globe, while maintaining a quality standard throughout its operations.

One key to MPA’s success has been an early commitment to delivering quality video training, creating and editing its own content to help both professional mechanics and DIYers correctly install and maintain the company’s products. The company produced high-quality content on their Apple workstations, but when they struggled to share that content between editors and re-use existing material they decided to upgrade their production and editing systems.

Finding a Better Solution
The MPA team sought help from Sunset Studios, an integrator specializing in helping clients set up production facilities, to meet their media workflow requirements. The Sunset Studios team helped MPA create and modernize a studio that includes four-camera recording in a two-bay garage facility that is supported by a data sharing and archiving storage capability.

“Our phase two of this project entailed a FC network with media asset management software, as well as the need for a modern and full-featured production storage and archive solution,” said John Edwards, Sunset Studios principal. “At the end of our evaluation, we chose Quantum and CatDV.“

MPA’s system is based on Quantum’s Xcellis scale-out workflow storage and CatDV media asset management from Square Box Systems Ltd.

The Xcellis storage appliance is designed to give media production teams high-speed shared access to critical data to increase collaboration, simplify management and accelerate production timelines. The system includes an Xcellis Workflow Director for management and client connectivity, Brocade FC networking and Quantum QXS RAID storage.

The StorNext file system enables the entire team to continually share and access files from a centralized data pool. As MPA’s content repository grows, the team can add an archive tier of storage within the same namespace.

Integration Between Xcellis and CatDV
The Xcellis solution is integrated with the CatDV Media Asset Management toolset that MPA selected as their asset management and workflow control software. CatDV is an asset management solution that allows digital media content to be tracked, tagged, archived and re-accessed in a shared storage environment.

“CatDV enables editors to build custom tags for recalling the content that they’re looking for when they need it, and it happens very quickly over the FC network,” said Edwards. “We chose CatDV and Quantum because they are two proven solutions that work seamlessly together.“

Creating a High-Output Video Production Facility
The system simplifies edits in low-res proxy formats, which can make the initial editing faster and easier. Once the program is set, the CatDV system automatically pulls the high-res content from the Xcellis archive and builds the final version.

A second important feature for MPA’s team is the system’s ability to provide web-based collaboration for projects that involve private-label clients using Akomi software with CatDV.

MPA’s facility and its video capture, editing, storage and archiving systems helped the company launch its own YouTube Channel in 2016, and allows the team to more rapidly create even better content, and keep up more effectively with product changes and new customers.

“Basically, everything that we do now is going to YouTube because most installers, especially do-it-yourselfers, are going to YouTube to find a solution,” said Joe Micallef, multimedia production manager, MPA. “Now we can pull content from previous shoots and do it quickly using CatDV and Quantum. Having an advanced storage architecture powered by StorNext has really allowed us to collaborate like never before, and it’s made our training videos the talk of the industry.“

Motorcar Parts of America case study