Pronology and Small Tree Offering Integration

Pronology and Small Tree Communications LLC are announcing how their technology systems offer users in production, broadcast and post, and cost-effective integration and increased mobility, when working on high-profile, fast-paced projects.

Pronology’s mRes

Pronology’s mRes standalone multi-resolution encoder and Small Tree’s TZ5+40 portable servers work alongside one another to ingest live isolated and switched camera feeds of a production, and are able to write multiple concurrent streams of HD and proxy video to the Small Tree appliances from mRes.

Small Tree’s TZ5+40

“The benefits of a Pronology and Small Tree collaboration is that users gain a great amount of mobility between production and post production,” says Jonathan Aroesty, president, Pronology. “Since the storage solution is transportable, production crews can more easily access stored content due to its grab-and-go design. This collaboration is a giant step forward toward making our customers’ workflows more efficient and, in this case, more portable.“

Both solutions were used for FOX’s Grease: Live production and the 2016 MTV Movie Awards as storage for ingest, with all mRes media delivered to the TZ5s. For those productions, the camera feeds were encoded using mRes to multiple codecs at different frame rates.

Then, the production teams were able to use multiple TZ5+40 portable servers with two 10GbE SFP+ ports and two GbE ports, and five 8TB drives in RAID-5 to transport the media. The TZ5+40s were networked via 10GbE SFP+ connection points into the mobile truck’s 10GbE network fabric.

“We’re seeing a greater demand for our mobile shared storage solution as video continues to grow as an essential tool across all industries,” said Corky Seeber, president, Small Tree. “Our collaboration with Pronology is a win-win for customers, streamlining the post production process so that meeting project deadlines is easier than ever before.“

Pronology’s CenterPoint Core software platform is often chosen to manage the enormous number of assets typically created for hit live television shows such as the 88th Annual OSCARS and FOX’s Emmy Award winning coverage of the FIFA Women’s World Cup Canada 2015 event. The company recently introduced its new mRes standalone multi-resolution encoder, a critical component of fast-paced workflows. mRes, which was recently awarded NewBay Media’s Best of Show Award presented by TV Technology, records uncompressed video for each SDI input channel prior to compression and wrapping: a high-resolution media file, an edit proxy and a live web-streamable proxy that give users flexibility and ease of use at a low cost point and never miss a frame of action. A key feature of the mRes encoder is how it integrates with most storage systems, such as Small Tree, while also easily integrating with most of the NLE systems.

Small Tree’s TitaniumZ5+, part of the company’s TitaniumZ line, is a full-featured, high-performance mobile, all-in-one Ethernet-based video editing shared storage appliance with advanced file sharing capabilities. It is designed to let video editors edit their content immediately to meet schedule requirements and deadlines in a mobile workflow environment. The server, networking and storage are all accommodated within TitaniumZ5+’s desktop design, which supports 2, 3, 4, 6 and 8TB disk drives. Combined with the two GbE ports, the system is simple to set up and manage, allowing the storage to be available to users within minutes of initial start up. TitaniumZ5+ can also support up to two ports of 10GbE if users need more performance.