COLUMBIA, SC — The University of Southern Carolina’s Gamecock Productions (www.sc.edu) is employing Archion's EditStor for the post production demands of all video content captured live across 21 different school sports teams. Archion Technologies (www.Archion.com) is a provider of high performance shared storage solutions for media workflows.
Paul Danna is the director of USC’s Gamecock Productions, the post production unit of South Carolina’s athletics department. Danna, a 10-plus year veteran with USC, oversees this post unit, which is comprised of four full-time employees and up to 18 student volunteers. His team spearheads the post production of all of the live video coverage of the school’s 21 different Gamecock sports teams. Gamecock Productions has won a number of wards for its coverage, including two Southeast Regional Emmy Awards.
“Our department’s motto is ‘To instill sights, sounds and emotions of Gamecock athletics in every fan with intimate and original videos,’” he explains. “And that’s really what we’re all about – we strive to capture the excitement of all of our school’s various sports teams. In addition to our doing the post for all of these games, we also produce a weekly TV series that covers our teams. During football season, the show is called The Will Muschamp Show, and after football season, we do a show called The Gamecock Insider. These shows are all 30-minutes long, and we produce 39 of them a year between late August and the following early June. That’s a lot of content which requires a great deal of storage capacity.”
Danna says the school first became familiar with Archion in 2008, when they acquired their Synergy product as an add on for their Avid server. “This bumped us up to 16 terabytes of storage,” he recalls. “Then in 2012, we turned to Archion again and acquired an EditStor. In 2015, we expanded the system so it would hold up to 96 terabytes of information. The EditStor is our lifeline for all of our sports teams’ content. We have 11 workstations connected to it. Everything we record, live games, ENGs, all goes through the EditStor.”
Gamecocks Productions’ work environment includes Adobe Creative Cloud. The team’s EditStor is connected to a Telestream Pipeline (recording device) and then on to the CatDV logging system. Gamecock Productions also relies on a wide range of cameras, including such 4K and 2K cameras as the Red, and Sony’s FS7 and FS5 cameras. They also use the Sony A7S, along with Cannon’s 5D and 7D.
South Carolina-based audio visual integrator ClarkPowell was key to the success of the EditStor install at USC. “Our company has been involved with USC’s Athletics department for over 20 years now, and when they needed to expand their storage back in 2012, we demonstrated the Archion EditStor for them,” says Ron Edmonds, account manager with ClarkPowell. “The EditStor worked like a champ during the demo, and has continued working flawlessly ever since.”