Video Production Skycar Creative Deploying Small Tree Shared Storage

Skycar Creative, Inc., a video production company out of San Francisco, CA, switched to Small Tree Communications LLC to streamline workflow and improve project management.

Skycar Creative is a Bay Area production company with a focus on cinematic live-action and design-driven motion graphics. Only a year old, Skycar has done impressive client work since its inception, landing projects for a number of companies, including Adobe Systems, Yahoo! and the Ad Council. The company’s core strengths include conception, design and execution for memorable storytelling. Even in its first year, Skycar saw potential for future growth and needed a solution to fit the current model, but also grow with the company as it expands.

“We had to find a system that would work for our budget, our current scale and be scalable for the future,” said Aaron Barry, creative director and co-founder, Skycar. “We’re a brand new company looking to grow and couldn’t afford something huge initially. Small Tree provided a perfect solution to fit our current and long-term needs.“

Skycar selected the TitaniumZ-8 due to its ability to support numerous multimedia content creation workstations with a flexible mix of 1GbE and 10GbE configuration options. The TitaniumZ-8 is designed and tested to provide performance for real-time video-editing workflows.

The TitaniumZ-8 has worked well, allowing workflow to be much more streamlined for their editors and other staff, as well as simplifying project management. Prior to installing the Small Tree solution, the company relied on external drives for data transfer, which were cumbersome and only allowed certain people to be editing at once.

“Today, we can hop on a Mac at any of our eight editing suites and the project loads up immediately,” said Barry. “The TitaniumZ-8 can have three or four people running HD or 4K content, either working with editing or color correction or motion graphics, and can transfer files quickly from project to project.“

Another benefit for the Skycar team is the willingness of Small Tree’s tech support team to help, even with non-Small Tree hardware.

“We’ve gotten to know and love the support team,” said Barry. “They’ve been great and super responsive. They’ve definitely gone above and beyond to help us figure out any performance issues.“