For many small production companies, the challenge in developing a growing business lies in the inability to afford the high-priced equipment required to attract larger clients, meet tight deadlines and maximize productivity. Facing the prospect of having to spend up to $40,000 for a storage solution that would enable his three-room facility to continue its steady growth, Jason Kalinoski, president of Emmy Award-winning Evolution Media in Tallahassee, recently turned to a shared storage solution from Small Tree that is becoming increasingly popular in small- to mid-size facilities looking to improve their workflow without breaking the bank.
Designer of simple-to-install, inexpensive networking and shared storage products for professional video and audio editors using Mac OS X, Small Tree provided Evolution Media with a bundled Ethernet solution reaching Fibre Channel performance. To facilitate workflow, Bob Zelin, a respected independent video engineer with more than 30 years experience, installed Small Tree’s Edge-corE ES4524D, a 24-port Gigabit Ethernet switch, along with its PEG4, a 4-port Ethernet card.
Founded in 2004, Evolution Media currently runs Final Cut Pro Studio 2 on Mac Pros in two of its three editing suites. As it continues to take on more HD projects, the company will look to run Final Cut Pro across all three of its rooms.
“We’re doing more and more HD work, so it was critical that we have technology that would enable us to work on large file projects simultaneously,” said Kalinoski. “Originally, I thought I would need to spend between $30,000 and $40,000 to achieve the performance I was looking for. However, after hearing from Bob on how effective Small Tree’s solution has been for so many other similarly sized facilities, we decided to give it a shot. We’ve definitely noticed a difference in our workflow and have had no difficulties running both rooms concurrently.”
Small Tree is the Mac Networking Expert, making networking child’s play. Small Tree provides a complete portfolio of Ethernet-based networking and storage solutions for Apple Mac OS X customers. Small Tree’s team of networking developers has extensive experience in high performance computing, and knows how to achieve the demanding application requirements of Mac customers. Small Tree also provides contracted programming services for the Department of Defense. For more information about the company and its products, please call 1-866-STC4MAC (1-866-782-4622), or visit www.small-tree.com.
