Cache-A Featured User Report

Cache-A is icing on Ace of Cakes and more at Authentic Entertainment

“The growth driver to our industry is continually finding ways to produce quality television faster and cheaper each year, and I believe that the Cache-A appliances are key to a production company’s success in achieving this feat.” – Will Pisnieski

“As we approached the new season of our hit Food Network series, “Ace of Cakes,” we were faced with the challenge of not only shooting in HD, but also trying to maintain the same style and feel that we had achieved for so many seasons with our handheld SD cameras. By changing to Sony EX-3 cameras that record directly onto Sony’s SxS media cards, we had to adjust our post production workflow; on any given week, our field crew will ship us 100+ hours of reality footage that has to be ingested into our shared media server. To stay ahead of the writers and editors and ensure that they had all of the material for “Ace of Cakes,” we turned to Cache-A’s Pro-Cache LTO archive appliance not only for its direct connect capabilities and larger internal hard drive, but its ability to be rack-mounted. Once we decided on the Pro-Cache, Key Code Media built us a self-contained digital workstation that could easily be transported in the field and around the office. This mobile workstation features a rack-mounted Pro-Cache, 4TB backup RAID and a slide-out MacPro laptop to control all of the appliances.

“The workflow we created involves direct connecting a Sony Mobile Storage Unit (Sony PXU-MS240) to the MacPro Laptop and using Shotput Pro software to migrate all of the files offloaded in the field to the mobile storage unit to both the Pro-Cache and the RAID for backup purposes only. From there, our assistant editor would backup all of the original XDCAM camera files to LTO tape and at the same time begin creating proxies that would be used by the editors for the offline editorial.

“Without the Pro-Cache, we would have had to use FireWire or eSATA external drives for storage of the original high-resolution camera files, which is expensive and unreliable. And remember, that there’s absolutely no money in the budget from the network to purchase even one FireWire drive; this all comes out of the production company’s pocket.

“We now create an LTO tape per day that stores all of the field tapes (SxS card media) for a particular series. When it’s time to rebuild an episode in high resolution (Apple Pro Rez), our assistant editors create a tape batch list and start retrieving files from LTO tape using the Cache-A appliance’s web interface to our Facilis Terrablock server and then relinking the sequence.

“The greatest workflow change for us has really come in terms of not having to shift video after it’s been recaptured in high resolution. That’s a very tedious process that networks don’t understand and don’t want to allow production companies to budget for.

“Today, our data storage requirements are growing so fast that we’re literally scratching at Cache-A’s door for the new Pro-Cache Library24, which I believe will revolutionize how reality television production companies shoot and store their media.”