A leading medical training production company providing hours of online video content recently made a decision that nearly had their editing workflow on life support. Fortunately, the experts at Small Tree were on call and able to conduct a little known procedure that nursed Doctors in Training's editing workflow system back to health.
Featuring a team of six editors, Doctors in Training typically works with an enormous amount of content - up to 80 hours of media - when putting together just one of their online courses for medical students. In light of their continued growth, the company recently upgraded their editing software to help reduce the amount of time the editing team spent on exporting content. Unfortunately, after upgrading their editing software, the editing team was surprised to find that its workflow had slowed down.
To alleviate the "clog" in the company's workflow, Small Tree, who had previously provided an ST-RAID shared storage solution to Doctors in Training to give the editing team multiple access to files as well as critical data redundancy, worked with the post-production professionals to use Apple's Sparse Disk Images.
"The editing software Doctors in Training installed only likes to place projects and events on locally mounted storage, which can create a problem for editing shops where workflows exist across network attached storage," said Steve Modica, Chief Technology Officer for Small Tree. "Most Mac users are very familiar with the Sparse Disk Images files, as software is typically distributed in that form. A user can create their own disk image files, of any size, simply by opening the disk utility and selecting 'New' to create a new image. This is an extremely easy and convenient workflow for typical episodic content creation."
Once Small Tree assisted Doctors in Training in implementing the Sparse Disk Image solution, the prognosis for the post-production team was positive. Today, the company's editing team enjoys peace of mind in knowing that it has a reliable shared storage system that enables multiple editors to work on the same project simultaneously, which means increased deadline demands can be met more easily.
"Prior to installing Small Tree's ST-RAID, our editors worked with external hard drives and at the end of the day we'd have to sync their hard drives so that everyone was working from the same files," said Adam Fisher, video production manager for Doctors in Training. "This was very inefficient, so we were thrilled to be able to streamline the process with the implementation of Small Tree's shared storage to our facility."
"With the installation of the new editing software and subsequent difficulties we had with our workflow, we were fortunate that Small Tree took the time to walk us through how we could use Sparse Disk Images to maximize our efficiency," Fisher continued. "I'm not sure where we would have been without their help."
For more information about Small Tree and its shared storage and networking products, visit www.small-tree.com or follow Small Tree on Twitter @SmallTreeComm.
