Bearcage Productions: Creativity on tap

Collaborative

Maintaining high levels of collaboration is crucial to the Bearcage workflow environment – an environment that at any one time is under pressure from an average of 30 projects ranging from 30-second commercials to hour-long programmes for government and corporate clients. Some of the company’s bigger projects, which can be six months in production, easily consume upwards of 5 terabytes of data.

According to Bearcage Senior Producer Doug Merriman, maintaining all the data for a single project on one workstation does little more than promote a linear production environment – precisely the type of non-creative environment from which efficient production houses are trying to break free.

Using the high-speed and high capacity file serve and sharing capabilities of the Apple Xsan, Bearcage’s project teams access all project files from a single source, regardless of the workstation at which they are working. "Due to tight time constraints, multiple staff members are often working on a single project at the same time,” Merriman explains. “So the ability for anyone within the company to pick up on the project is absolutely vital.

“With all of the Final Cut Studio workstations having four gigabit connections to the Xsan, people can quickly work on projects without having to transfer them across to their workstations. All editing is done on files that reside on the Xsan. As a result, everyone’s working on the same file; and modifications, rather than being isolated on separate workstations, are maintained in the one file at the one central location.”

Security. It’s also about reliability

Security is a key concern when dealing with content and information that can be of a highly sensitive matter; and this is something Bearcage deals with on a daily basis. But as the senior producer, Merriman regards security as a dual requirement. “Aside from the traditional concept of security – data security – there’s also the security that needs to be given to clients that their projects will be completed on-time and on-budget,” he says.

Integral to providing that secondary level of security is an IT infrastructure that is reliable and easily managed.

Proof of the Apple Xsan/Xserve RAID solution’s ease of management came in late 2006, when the company undertook post-production on a high-definition feature documentary – Across the Plateau – for Ronin Films. This project required an additional seven terabytes of storage.

After purchasing additional Xserve RAID drives, Gambale installed them himself and almost immediately, the required additional seven terabytes was available across the network via Xsan. “As far as everyone was concerned, it just appeared,” he says. “No-one had to log off, and everyone had access to the extra storage.”

The “no interruption” capabilities of the Apple storage solution were further demonstrated following a move to new premises early in 2007. During transport, one of the Xserve RAID drives was damaged, causing it to fail when the system was restarted.

According to Gambale, it was only an automatically generated e-mail that notified him of the problem. “No-one else noticed because every one of the RAID drives is fully redundant, so the data contained on the failed drive was rebuilt by the system on another drive without any data loss or workflow interruptions.”