Faced with having too much footage, not enough storage and no way to share the media between multiple users, Caipirinha Productions, Inc., an independent mixed media arts and culture company with activities in film, music and human rights, recently installed GraniteSTOR shared storage technology from Small Tree to facilitate workflow on the production company’s latest project, “Cultures of Resistance.”
Small Tree’s GraniteSTOR shared storage technology with its unique OS X networking capabilities supporting multiple Ethernet ports, tightly integrated with Apple’s built in file sharing system, provided Caipirinha editors with a shared storage Gigabit Ethernet network where all media is available to everyone simultaneously. The GraniteSTOR solution incorporates Small Tree’s PEG4, a 4-port Ethernet card with the Edge-corE ES4524D, a 24-port Gigabit Ethernet switch certified to work with Small Tree’s technology.
Prior to the installation, Caipirinha’s editing team, consisting of three editors, two assistant editors and interns, was utilizing multiple 2 TB FireWire drives during post-production. With 7 TBs of production footage and archival, keeping all of the drives up to date with each other had become an enormous challenge.
“Productivity has increased greatly [since the Small Tree installation],” said Jeff Marcello, a freelance editor and owner of Last Frame of Action who was hired by Caipirinha Productions as lead editor on the “Cultures of Resistance” project. “The network is so much faster and the fact that all of the drives are constantly up to date saves us so much time. We are currently trying to meet a late September deadline to enter the Sundance Film Festival, so increasing productivity has been imperative.”
Directed by Iara Lee and produced by George Gund, “Cultures of Resistance” is a film journey into the causes of contemporary war and conflict around the world, and an impassioned meditation on the apocalyptic problems facing humanity at a critical juncture in the history of the species. The film captures the stories of creative changemakers and international peace/justice artists striving to turn our upside down world right sight up.
Currently editing in Brazil for a month to work closely with the director while capturing final footage for the documentary, the Caipirinha team was able to break down the shared storage technology into a few different cases and easily reset everything up on location in Rio de Janeiro.
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 .
