"Fast access to and efficient management of data, and hardware, and particularly software innovations, such as Tiger Technology’s metaSAN, are the catalysts for success in today’s collaborative, heavy-bandwidth work environments."

 

Robi Roncarelli, Market Analyst, PIXEL Inc.

"I am giving metaSAN five stars! If I ever end up working in another facility that needs to implement a SAN, I will definitely recommend it. I’d also recommend it to anyone involved in video that needs a file-level sharing SAN."

 

Joe Kirby, Assistant Chief Engineer, FOX 54 – WZDX TV

"With metaSAN/metaLAN in place, every artist has instant access to data by simply clicking on the local hard drive in “My Computer” – and all this without having to perform sophisticated network administration."

 

Alex Rizov, FX Supervisor, Topform Studio

"I recommend metaSAN to anyone investigating a shared storage solution, especially to anyone Final Cut Pro based production house wanting to maximize their multi-station editing workflow."

 

Graeme Nattress, President of Nattress Productions Inc.

"metaSAN is the ideal SAN management solution for Fibre Channel, iSCSI, and Gigabit Ethernet networks. So far, we have tested metaSAN with Huge Media-Vault and Fibrenetix Storage systems, Qlogic SANBox switches, and Atto Celerity host bus adapters and have never experienced any compatibility issues."

 

Jörg Hoffman, PSIBER GmbH

"I’m using an HP xw9300 with 4 x SATA2 drives and a Bluefish444 HD Lust board. Whenever trying to capture DPX files, the system would run for 100-250 frames and then drops frames. After installing metaSAN and using DDO and FSO the system can now capture DPX files without any problem!"

 

Gerbrand De Ridder, Trans Tec bv

"Our customers have been clamouring for tools that will help them add intelligence to their workgroups. We are very pleased to be working with Tiger Technology to address this demand."

 

Howard Solomon, President, Integrity Data Systems

"By turning off-the shelf storage and networking components into versatile, easy to support, and highly scalable shared storage workgroups, metaSAN is ideally suited to solve a wide range of workflow configurations at a great price."

 

John Connolly, Midwest Media Group President

"metaSAN’s unique ability to allow multiple cross-platform users to share content and collaborate efficiently while maintaining very high bandwidth will afford us a highly efficient, reliable, centralized and secure storage solution."

 

Michio Fujii, CEO and President, MIC Assosciates, Inc.

Broadcasting the Canadian Olympic Hall of Fame Induction Gala

metaSAN part of a champion behind-the-scenes team

The team that prepared the broadcast of the biggest Canadian Olympic Hall of Fame event for the English-speaking private channel CTV and the French-speaking V Tele had just 24 hours to cut down the material to a two hours master with commercial breaks, subtitles and packaged in two languages to air 24 hours after the event took place. Jean Lamoureux, the project's director known for it's work on Celine Dion's Las Vegas and tour DVDs, turned to Dominic Bourget of INSO Media for help. Dominic knew that a SAN would be required to ingest and edit the material from multiple workstations and that metaSAN was the only viable option given there was no time for a complex setup and no margin for error. He betted right. metaSAN turned out to be a reliable team-mate in this race against time.

All 10 camera feeds from the event at the Montreal Bell Center were recorded to 12 KiPros (AJA’s tapeless video recording device) for faster transfer speed. The ProRes files from the 12 swappable KiPro hard drives had to be transferred on two 16TB G-Speed XL FC plugged into an ATTO 8Gbs switch acting as the shared storage of the post-production SAN set up at the director's house.

That’s where metaSAN came in handy. metaSAN was installed on three Mac Pro workstations running Final Cut Studio 2009, all on a Fiber and GigE network managed by two other Mac Pro computers acting as metadata controllers that were also running metaSAN. The 36 hours of footage was all transferred to the SAN in less than an hour using all the workstations and two laptops each with two KiPro drives plugged in FireWire 800.

“This was the main bottleneck of the project and it had been amazingly well handled by the easily setup "home SAN" by the Inso Media tech team the day before.” says Mathieu Marano, technical director at Montreal's legendary Bureau de Post.

After the footage was transferred to the SAN it was ready to feed the 12 stream multiclips to the workstations for a night of heavy editing. At noon, the day after the gala, two HDCAM SR masters were sent to Karisma for audio striping and then delivered to CTV and V Tele for an 8pm broadcast.

“This wouldn't have been possible without the extreme compatibility between Final Cut and the KiPro, the quick ingest time provided by the segmented recording and the multi-station transfers and the media sharing capabilities of metaSAN.” concludes Marano.

Read the full story here.