LOS ANGELES — Outdoor apparel company Patagonia (www.patagonia.com) has invested in a 384TB EditStor Omni storage system from Archion Technologies (www.archion.com). Patagonia makes clothes for climbing, skiing, snowboarding, surfing, fishing, mountain biking and trail running. The company promotes environmental causes around the world and has been producing a large number of original, feature length documentary films covering a wide range of environmental issues. The Archion storage solution has been used for a range of media needs, including features, corporate communications, branding videos, social media content, product videos, trade shows and in-store presentations.
The company’s recent documentary - Artifishal - details the fight to save wild salmon.
“Our video demands have been bursting at the seams these last few years, with our rapidly growing number of corporate communication pieces, product videos, social media content, and feature length documentaries,” explains Nate Ptacek, video producer & digital archivist for Patagonia. “Plus, we have finished assets going back 20 years. We’ve got tons of projects, with tons of data, and we were long in need of centralizing our workflows, and getting more editors in house for post. We had to get a better system up and running that would address three issues: First, we needed very fast storage dedicated to video use - we have six workstations in-house, and we need fast dedicated video storage that we can work off of for current, active projects, as well as to store our archival, finished projects. Second, we wanted to do cloud backups of everything. And, third, we wanted a media asset management system as a layer above everything so that we would have increased availability with raw footage and final projects. We had been using our regular IT (storage) servers, and it just wasn’t cutting it. We were always running out of space, it wasn’t fast enough, and it wasn’t optimized for video use.”
He reached out to solution architect and systems engineer Javier Lopez-Roman for advice and he recommended the Archion EditStor Omni. He then communicated with system integrator Cutting Edge, who worked closely with their IT team for the preparation and install.
The Patagonia production and post team is comprised of one full-time archivist, several editors, two full-time producers, a few directors, and a variety of freelancers. Patagonia’s workstations are attached to the EditStor Omni via 10gig Ethernet, and have access to Adobe Creative Cloud applications. Premiere Pro is used for much of their creative editorial, along with After Effects. Blackmagic Design’s DaVinci Resolve is used for both color grading and, increasingly, for editing. And Final Cut Pro X is even used on occassion.
Typically, they edit natively in resolutions up to 4K and 5K, while sometimes using an offline/proxy workflow, depending on total project size and acquisition codec. The high performance of Omni enables Patagonia’s editors to edit in raw formats without having to spend time transcoding.
“We’ve had no issues whatsoever with the Omni’s performance – it’s been fantastic,” says Ptacek. “In fact - surprising! I’m not used to things working so well. I’d recommend the Archion to others. It’s there, it’s fast, my colleagues and I here at Patagonia have had no problems with it at all, plus their client and tech services have been great. Smooth sailing with Archion!”
EditStor Omni delivers speeds of up 14,000MB/second. From 8K video to 4K playback of raw media files, the Omni video storage solution has the performance, scalability and functionality to handle demanding media workflows. EditStor Omni is part of the EditStor family, an intelligent 24 drive storage system with single server capacities of up 336TB per chassis. It features hot pluggable expansion nodes and a total expansion into multiple Petabytes. It is a complete turnkey collaborative storage solution that requires no third-party software or drivers to ensure compatibility with the prominent editing, finishing and visual effects applications, including those from Adobe, Apple, Avid, Autodesk, Blackmagic Resolve and others.