Post-Production House CrewCuts Taps XenData to Manage LTO Library

XenData Ltd, in digital video archive solutions to the media and entertainment industry, announced that Crew Cuts, Inc., a post-production house, has installed its SX-522 Archive Server managing a robotic LTO library to help upgrade and automate its complete workflow.

The new server and library have permitted Crew Cuts to achieve greater efficiencies and create a dynamic and collaborative environment.

With expertise in commercial and film editing, production visuals and sound mixing, Crew Cuts has worked with some of the biggest networks in entertainment. To keep pace with its customers’ increasing demands and level of production, the company chose to upgrade and automate its workflow. In doing so,it required a more centralized storage and collaborative production management solution that would eliminate existing storage silos that, in some instances, spanned several external and personal drives, making collaboration difficult and disjointed.

“My main objective was to look for a fully integrated and easy-to-use solution that would automate the workflow and enable us to seamlessly go from ingest, to edit, distribution and long-term low cost archival storage,” said Chris Keenan, CTO, Crews Cuts.

As a result, Crew Cuts needed a more adaptable long-term storage solution that would integrate with the new automated workflow. In addition, the new archival storage had to be a data repository for all projects previously housed on its external storage.

Striving to achieve its long-term goals, Crew Cuts selected an integrated solution with three main components: the XenData SX-522 Archive Server, a FilmPartners MXFserver collaborative post-production system and an axle Gear Media Asset Management system, all of these components supplied by T2 Computing, Inc.

With these three key components in place, Crew Cuts has gained:

• A simplified and effective project management process. Managing the workflow around human-centric projects stored in virtual containers that provide the collaborating post team access to all the needed materials. All materials are always protected against accidental or unauthorized deletion.
• A universal, virtualized storage server infrastructure that can support any of post-production applications and tools in the industry regardless of their manufacturer.
• Crew Cuts can reuse materials from older projects because it can now catalog content to make it easier to find digital assets and retrieve them when necessary.
• An archiving capability suitable for both current and old projects. Crew Cuts has the capability to archive complete projects on low cost storage and to restore projects or selected individual files.
  

“The key benefit of my new solution is its ability to support my production workflow in such a way that it becomes a natural progression of tasks that add tremendous value to the Crew Cuts brand. Gone are the many artificial steps that were forced by the limitations in our former environment,” said Keenan.

“It’s a unique scenario when you need everything in one place, so why not go for the best of breed to ensure your company assets will be always available and safe,” Keenan continued. “I did my research, and the best archive solution was from XenData which manages a robotic LTO library behind the scenes. This helps to minimize our total costs and allows us to focus on producing great content for our customers.”

“Crew Cuts works with some of the best names in the business, and we’re delighted that they chose our XenData SX-520 Series archive server as one of the key components in their state of the art end-to-end solution,” said Phil Storey, XenData CEO.