Flame Distribution’s Head of Technical Services Jason Lee explained, “Storage tends to be one of the largest and most significant purchases at many companies. Not investing in the right storage can not only be detrimental to our workflows, but also to the focus of our end users. Our existing storage was not performing properly and was slow impacting on everything from QC playback to editing. So we began looking at Tier 1 storage solutions as the main work volume is compressed footage from HD to 4K and beyond and we wanted to utilise the best technology to attain maximum performance. We discussed our issue with Digistor and it was clear an EditShare EFS 200 storage solution was the best way forward.”

Flame’s existing server for the media side of their business was installed over five years ago and even with subsequent storage enhancements, it struggled.

Lee says, “Capacity requirements continue to grow with use of high resolution cameras, delivery formats and ability to find fee space for the storage. We needed new technology that would deliver efficiency in the way the team operates and give us the ability to deliver – that’s where Digistor and the EditShare EFS 200 came in. The additional server also benefits the footage side of our business in the processing and handling of the rushes we receive in order to derive clips - another growing requirement.”

Lee added, “We needed the new solution to be able to handle various formats such as DNX, ProRes 422HQ or 4:4:4:4 and XDCAM in various frame rates. It also needed to be able to deal with broadcast-type projects, work with Mac and Windows workstations, have integration with Adobe Premiere Pro and QScan and handle various workflows such QC, colour correction, VFX, transcoding and editorial. We also needed to have more than 30TB in volume space and be able to work with AI to help with closed captioning or metadata. On top of that the solution had to work with current backup and archive systems, offer great security and support for 10Gbe networking, offer remote collaboration and be able to work to storage devices as well such as Synology Server.”