London, UK - 23 September 2019 –ERA, the leading IT workflow systems provider for the broadcast, post-production and media sectors, is working with On Set Tech on the dailies and DIT (Digital Imaging Technicians) specialists recently opened facility. Work began earlier this year with the installation of a Tiger Store storage system with Mellanox networking. Further expansion is already being discussed, including the addition of a Seagate SSD Storage Array.
On Set Tech built its reputation working in studios and on location for film and high-end TV drama production, providing DITs and dailies services. Recent credits include ‘Rocketman’, ‘Paddington 2’, Netflix's ‘The Dark Crystal’ and the new Edgar Wright film ‘Last night in Soho’.
With the increase in its dailies work the company decided to create a dedicated facility and in January 2019 opened its own laboratory within the CineLab building in Slough. A critical requirement for this new set-up was a shared storage system that would allow users at multiple Mac workstations to access material simultaneously.
On Set Tech consulted ERA, which has a long track-record in providing network storage design and support for broadcasters, post houses and media organisations. ERA proposed a 720TB Tiger Store system, that can cope with the large amount of data generated when transferring and scanning image formats such as ARRI RAW, DPX and RED. Tiger Store managed system works in conjunction with a Mellanox high-speed Ethernet network and can act as both a SAN (storage area network) and a LAN (local area network).
The core Tiger Store installation went in earlier this year. A Seagate SSD Storage Array will be added to Tiger Store in the future to create a faster tier of storage. There are also plans to implement a feature to allow film negatives to be scanned by CineLab directly onto the OST Tiger Store, via 40Gb Ethernet.
"ERA installed all the equipment, integrated the Tiger file system, which is able to deal with huge image sequences, and provided us with sales and technical support, says Simon Chubbock, managing director of On Set Tech. "With their help we now have something that is logical and easy to use that gives us a great deal of capacity and capability to deal with the large amounts of data involved in large-scale productions."
Sean Baker, commercial director of ERA, adds, "On Set Tech came to us with very specific requirements for storage and networking. With our long background and experience in working with facilities throughout the industry, which need fast, efficient and secure workflows and storage capacity, we were able to specify something that has provided On Set Tech with the best tools for the highly demanding projects they take on. We look forward to working with them on an ongoing basis as their needs and premises grow."
