When the founders of Sinking Ship Entertainment came up with a new approach for preschool television, little did they know that a few years later they would be creating ten original television series and operating two studio facilities in Toronto. However, with the success of its first series, "This is Daniel Cook," which they sold to Disney, Sinking Ship Entertainment has become a leader in preschool television with properties such as "Dino Dan," airing on Nick. Jr., and "Are We There Yet: World Adventure," a travel series distributed by National Geographic.
As Sinking Ship has grown so rapidly, so too has its need to meet deadlines. In trying to meet these increased deadlines, the full-service production company was frustrated by continuous workflow issues presented by its use of multi-port SATA boxes to share files among the company's editing team. To maximize productivity in its four editing suites while improving workflow speed, Sinking Ship recently installed Small Tree's 24TB GraniteSTOR ST-RAID Ethernet-based shared storage system. According to Matt Bishop, partner and producer at Sinking Ship, meeting deadlines since installing GraniteSTOR ST-RAID is no longer an issue.
"We needed to find a way to get people working together faster because we would have three series going to broadcast and our editors could not wait for media to be transferred from one workstation to another," said Bishop. "Small Tree's ST-RAID has been extremely effective in allowing our editors to work on multiple projects with little down time because they are not waiting for media to come to them...it is already at their fingertips."
In addition to enabling the company's editing team to access files immediately, the affordable pricing and scalability of Small Tree's ST-RAID system were attractive to Bishop.
"If we had to spend $100,000 on a Fibre Channel storage solution, the cost for that technology ultimately comes off the money that we put onto the screen and we would still be paying off such a solution," stated Bishop. "The nice thing about Small Tree's technology is that we were able to pay it off in about three jobs, so we can dedicate more of our resources on the shows. On top of that, with each show we develop we grow, but I cannot afford to spend money on shows that are three years away. With ST-RAID, I can continue to invest in the technology as it is scalable as opposed to making a one-time investment on technology that will rapidly deteriorate in value."
Offering real time editing for Final Cut users while supporting 12 streams of ProRes 422HQ with no dropped frames, ST-RAID provides consistent performance over Ethernet networks. The 2TB system is available in 8-, 12- or 16-drive configurations and can be expanded to a second chassis to double the capacity at a much lower cost.
Designer of simple-to-install, affordable Mac-based networking and shared storage products, Small Tree is the premier multi-port Ethernet networking technology provider for OS X customers, enabling cost effective Ethernet shared storage technology. For more information about the company and its products, please call 1-866-STC4MAC (1-866-782-4622), or visit www.small-tree.com or follow Small Tree on Twitter @SmallTreeComm.
