Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “DASH Pictures Enhances Their Workflow with Kingston SSDs”.
Dash pictures is a production company. We’Ve been working on a number of different types of shows. We specialize in obviously like broadcast TV shows. We make lots of stuff for the global market, whether that’s in pre-production or production or post. We’Ve spent a long time kind of developing that workflow to make sure that we can execute those shows really well to a really high standard, but also cost effectively and in a way that also keeps the shoot really Pleasant and fun to be on Kingston Technology’s, been Making Flash media and computer memory products for decades now over 35 years, a lot of the stuff that uh I do working with Kingston is to help accelerate the media and entertainment workf flows.
Fantastic friends is a TR travel show that we developed with James and Oliver Phelps. They are the actors that played the Weasley twins in the Harry Potter movies. They came to us because they wanted to make a travel show. We knew we wanted to make something.
That was reminiscent of the films lots of their friends. Uh are from the Harry Potter, films as well that they wanted to go traveling with or had been traveling with so season 1. We shot with the same kind of cameras. We bought all the cameras with them. We were running two most of the times and then, when we were doing action scenes we would run three, maybe four GoPros one of the main things we noticed with the days getting quite long and us shooting quite a lot on those shows. We were still using standard hard drives and we would wrap the day.
We would have a days worth of uh footage that we need to back up and that job of backing everything up onto these uh traditional hard drives would take most of the night. It’S not a nice feeling starting another shoot day, not having everything you shot yesterday on three drives safe finished. You know it’s you end up just compound in your work. We could feel that was affecting the shows that we were making. What we were looking for is really a way to shift entirely to solid state on location, but then also when we come back into the office when Dash came to – and we you know needed to find out what their bottlenecks were, uh, what the limitations of their Pipeline and uh, where they their pain, points and and try and eliminate those. We ended up uh recommending the EXs 2000, which is a USBC drive, and so that has a 10 GB connection that is actually capable of uh having you know, uh multiple things go on on that bus, so you can be copying from the media, the camera media To multiple drives simultaneously, without taking a really big hit like you would with hard drives, it meant that then, when we did wrap, we still. Obviously you wrap. You have cards in the cameras. That process could be much faster because data’s become less of a problem. For us now we’re able to shoot more things shoot faster, get better picture like that’s. That’S made a really direct impact on the quality of the show. The next thing really for us to test was how we could speed up the process of getting it from the drives that we had on location to the servers that we have in the office. That would then mean our editors can start work so after they finished filming the first series of fantastic friends, they bring in the footage and we were struggling to get the footage in quickly to process it.
So we were like okay, we need to figure out a way that the guys can get their footage on the shoots onto quicker drives and then we need to be able to get those drives and get them off quicker as a post production Department. The way we normally work is we have a centralized Naas system with multiple spinning discs with Dash and helping construct a solution for their post- production needs. We looked at the size of the company, how many, how many many users they had currently and how many users they wanted to have in the future and trying to build the best solution that would last for a number of years and uh be expandable. And so we uh looked at applying our data center drives uh into uh a Naz, so we used qap in this case and dash was able to get more users onto the server simultaneously than they had with their previous hard drive solutions. So we took 12 of these SS d s plug them into a all raday qap, almost instantly.
We saw a change in our speeds. We now had a system that meant multiple editors could work from the same drive all at once. It meant that we were able to load footage onto the nas faster. It means that all the editors, the graphic designers, the Motion, Graphics, guys, the VFX people that we have come into the office are all able to work from the same server simultaneously.
It’S totally changed the way we work it. It means that we don’t have have to wait. We we don’t have any Dropout, we can online, we can bring in grades, it’s just a much quicker process.
The nice thing is, you can always add larger capacity drives to it. If you want, the ssds from Kingston has just enabled us to do that now we’re much Slicker. We just couldn’t have done that with the spinning discs.
We could do maybe two shows, but now our shows are overlapping. Having this new system and having these Kingston data center drives in our machines has really meant that we, you know, we worry about capacity, but we also have enough of that now as well and speed and bottlenecks and slowing down the machines really isn’t a issue for Us anymore, it means we can grow quicker, we were growing, we can grow quicker and we don’t have to worry. We know we can just take another one of these systems plug it in and off we go .