TITANIUM8 System Facilitates Event Coverage while Offering Tremendous Savings

High Impact TV (HIT), a leading auto show and special events production company, completed a whirlwind of production work at the Detroit Auto Show, including producing a 1-hour special for NBC Sports, as well as live hits on Fox News and 50 other TV outlets across the United States, and press event highlights on YouTube for the auto show (NAIAS.com). To streamline post-production for its team of editors, both on-site at the North American International Auto Show (NAIAS) in Detroit and back at High Impact TV’s facility, in Orange County, Calif., HIT is utilizing the TITANIUM8 shared storage, an Ethernet-based system designed and manufactured by Small Tree that can be used in mobile and studio settings. 

“At NAIAS, we are literally a 24-hour operation on the TITANIUM8, and to edit the NBC special, we have five editors by day and two overnight,” said Tore Dietrich, president and CEO at High Impact TV. “We have extreme time sensitive demands, so being able to access video files immediately is critical to what we do and how we do it.”

TITANIUM8 is a 2U rack-mount solution configurable up to 10 GbE or 8 10GbE ports and storage capacity from 8TB to 96TB, while delivering up to 24 streams of ProRes 422. The shared storage system works seamlessly with popular editing software such as Final Cut Pro, Adobe Creative Suite and Avid – providing tremendous flexibility for High Impact’s team during and after NAIAS.

“Before bringing the TITANIUM8 to Detroit, we tested the system at the Los Angeles Auto Show to assist with a project we produced for NBC Sports Network and it worked flawlessly,” Dietrich remarked. “For NAIAS, having to provide YouTube highlights from all of the press events within an hour of their completion, while also editing live television shots for the various TV outlets we were working with, we knew we would be compressed for time in turning things around. It’s wonderful knowing that the Small Tree system can easily handle the content, while giving our editors immediate and simultaneous access to the materials.”

In addition to its performance and flexibility, the TITANIUM8’s portability was extremely attractive to Dietrich. Fitting in a single Pelican case, Dietrich can store the TITANIUM8 on the plane when he travels rather than having to ship it out ahead of time. According to Dietrich, this is far more cost-effective than the solution the company used years ago.

“At previous shows we used a much larger system, which could cost as much as $12,000 to ship…per show,” Dietrich said. “Given the size of the system and the fact that we typically had to have it installed in a timely fashion meant we had to contract manual labor at the shows to set-up, which added to our cost.

Small Tree’s TITANIUM8 lets us have the best of all worlds – a system that we can use on the road at trade shows and other live events without having to worry about exorbitant shipping costs, while also being able to use the system in our studio back in Los Angeles.”
 
For more information on Small Tree's cost-effective shared storage and networking solutions, visit SmallTree.com.