Tired of sacrificing productivity from having to copy files from one editing suite to another, FOX Sports Florida located in Sunrise, Florida recently installed a cost-effective shared storage solution from Small Tree Communications to improve workflow among the four editing suites used by its in-house creative services department.
Designer and manufacturer of simple-to-install, inexpensive networking and shared storage products for professional video and audio editors using MAC OS X, Small Tree provided FOX Sports Florida with a bundled Ethernet solution reaching Fibre Channel performance. The installation was completed by Bob Zelin, a well-respected independent video engineer with more than 30 years experience in the television industry.
“Increasingly, small- to mid-size post-production facilities are beginning to realize the cost and performance value in installing Small Tree’s shared storage solution as opposed to traditional SAN technology,” states Zelin. “FOX Sports Florida is one of many facilities I am currently working with that has been pleased with Small Tree’s equipment.”
Utilizing the facility’s existing MAC Pro, Zelin installed Small Tree’s Edge-corE ES4524D, a 24-port Gigabit Ethernet switch, along with its PEG4, a 4-port Ethernet card. This solution easily handles the bandwidth requirements of Final Cut Pro, Adobe After Effects and Autodesk Maya running simultaneously across the four editing suites at FOX Sports Florida.
“As a small post-production department with four systems, Small Tree offered us an affordable and ideal shared storage solution for sharing media,” states David Piccolo, head of the creative services team at FOX Sports Florida. “The Small Tree system allows us to access any program at each of our workstations. This eliminates confusion surrounding multiple versions of the same project being created. To date, we’re very pleased with the system’s performance.”
Small Tree Communications 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.
