Re-Focusing Storage With Small Tree's Ethernet-Based Network

Production company Creative Media Group (CMG; Orem, UT) switched to shared-storage as a self-defensive measure as the task of managing multiple FireWire drives among editors and graphic designers became ever more onerous. Senior Editor Krisi Church Summers settled on an Ethernet-based storage network, using the Edge-corE ES4524D 24-port Gigabit Ethernet switch and PEG6 six-port Ethernet card from Small Tree's GraniteSTOR line-up alongside the Evo2 HD Expando storage system from MAXX Digital. StudioBytes asked Summers to talk about the decision.
StudioBytes: Give us a brief overview of Creative Media Group.
Krisi Church Summers: Creative Media Group has been around since 1995 based in Orem, UT. We’ve got our own studio here. We’ve got three edit bays, which contain a total of five Final Cut Pro edit stations – plus two portable laptop edit stations. We’re a full video service facility. We shoot, mostly on the Red camera, commercials, corporate videos, direct sales, trade show and conference/convention videos. We’ve done a few videos for concerts as well, but I’d say corporate and direct-sales are our heaviest concentration.

What made you decide to rethink your approach to storage?
We found ourselves juggling dozens of FireWire drives. It started to get a little crazy. Since we’re a small company, we couldn’t justify getting a big storage networking system until we found out about Small Tree Solutions and Ethernet-based networking. It was actually affordable, and it would work at the speeds we needed it to work at. It would be a perfect solution for our small company.

How much research did you do to figure that out?
I did a lot of research on SAN systems and that one seemed to be the most reasonable for our needs. We had looked at fibre-channel and all the other options and it seemed like a big to-do to get all the cards working in the system. Ethernet was a much simpler solution, so we grabbed onto it. We were impressed that we could still maintain relatively high speeds.

Where did you get your actual disks?
We went through MAXX Digital and bought the Evo2 HD Expando, a 12 TB tower. We can expand and buy another one and continue to daisy-chain them. They had a partnership with Small Tree. We worked with Bob Zelin [Maxx’s chief video engineer], and it was a really smooth transition.

Would all five of your edit stations be accessing the same shared storage at the same time?
We haven’t had to do that yet, but we’ve had at least three working on them at the same time and it’s been smooth. We just finished a big project for the city of Salt Lake where all three of us were able to work on it without any issues, problems, or slowdowns. We were able to accomplish the project in record time.

Are you working generally in HD or SD?
Generally RED camera footage downconverted to HD 1080p. Sometimes we shoot on the Sony EX1, which is a 1080p camera. It’s rare that we do an SD project.

Would you do a 2K or 4K project for a trade show or large-scale exhibit?
We’ll never finish in 4K or 2K. We’ll always finish in 1080, but we’ll use the Red for almost every project we work on.

Anything else interesting that your new storage system enables?
Within Creative Media Group we have another little company called stockshotsnow.com. [The home page isn’t online yet. ‘ Ed.] We have shot so much footage throughout the years that we’re opening up our own stock footage site, which we’re hoping to launch this month or next month. Half of the footage is SD, half of it is HD, and a quarter of it is Red footage. We have over 20,000 clips, and we’re still adding to the library. That’s another reason we chose this shared-storage solution. We’ll be able to pull from our stock library for future projects, and we’ll sell images, too.

Creative Media Group
231 S. Mountain Way Dr.

Orem, UT   84058
801-221-9570
john@creativemediagroup.com
www.creativemediagroup.com