The NHL’s Pittsburgh Penguins are using an EditShare shared-storage solution (30TB in an 8RU frame connected via GigE) for its production activities. Prior to the installation of the EditShare storage system, the team’s production staff digitized specific game clips using an off-the-shelf storage drive. The game source material, acquired with Sony XDCAM gear, became isolated to either a specific editing workstation equipped with Apple Final Cut Pro or a compositing workstation equipped with Adobe After Effects.
Because certain media was housed on specific workstations and not in a central location, media had to be constantly redigitized to be available in multiple locations. There was also a constant battle to balance the media space per editing and compositing workstation, limiting the amount of material to work with for any given highlight or replay project.
To resolve the “silos of media” issue, the Pittsburgh Penguins installed the EditShare system to help mobilize media and turn around packages more quickly for commercials, scoreboard highlights and promotions (as well as the Penguins Web site). Another catalyst for shared storage was the increasing demand from the NHL for more online content. The EditShare system is helping to mobilize media and is also used for multiplatform and multichannel distribution.
The Pittsburgh Penguins post-production team, working on eight Apple Final Cut Pro workstations and two Adobe After Effects workstations, use the EditShare system for simultaneous project and media sharing while producing highlights and replays of the Pittsburgh Penguins hockey games. Editors record shows for the Web and scoreboard pregame and are able to pull up logged highlights of various talk shows on the fly using laptops, even as commentators are speaking, and use that media in real-time as B-roll.
For the Pittsburgh Penguins editors, sharing media is also emerging as a way to cut larger form material and could become more useful as they look toward adding live ingest solutions such as EditShare’s new Flow solution for creating in-game highlights packages.
