CREATIVE MEDIA GROUP UPGRADES WITH SMALL TREE STORAGE
With business growing, as well as the size of projects, senior editor Krisi Church Summers says keeping track of files was becoming a huge challenge. "If two people were working on the same project, we'd have to copy files onto two different drives and it was increasingly hard to manage," says Summers, who's been with the company for eight years. "I did a lot of research on storage networking systems before choosing Small Tree and not only has the technology made life a lot easier for our post production team, but it was also the best bang for our buck."
CMG installed Small Tree's Edge-corE ES4524D, a 24-port Gigabit Ethernet switch, along with its PEG6 six-port Ethernet card - both of which are a part of Small Tree's new GraniteSTOR product line.
CMG recently completed a promotional video project for the City of Salt Lake. Without the Small Tree installation, the studio might have had to pass on other revenue-generating projects.
"Because of Small Tree's shared storage equipment, we were able to finish the Salt Lake project in record time," notes Summers. "While I was using Final Cut Pro, two colleagues were working simultaneously on graphics using After Effects. This was an enormous change in workflow for us. Without the shared storage solution we would have had to copy the footage onto other drives and that would have been extremely time-consuming."
CMG's sister company Stockshotsnow.com will also use the Small Tree (www.small-tree.com) storage when in launches this month. Stockshotsnow.com will serve as a stock footage provider, offering 20,000 clips in resolutions ranging from SD to 4K.
IMAGE: Prior to the Small Tree upgrade, CMG used an assortment of external drives.