Avid Technologies: Taking Storage to the Limit

Over the past 25 years, Avid has become the world’s leading provider of audio and video technology for media organizations and independent professionals
working in film, TV, music, and more. But storing all of that media presents its own unique challenges. In this post, Dave Tyler, Audio Solutions Specialist Manager at Avid, talks media, storage, and why the speed and efficiency provided by LaCie is an absolute necessity for his work.

As the media industry continues to evolve, companies face increasingly tight deadlines and budgets, so it’s critical that all of the tools that Avid recommends help to improve efficiency. Secure and reliable audio and video storage is important to our customers, which is why the Avid Storage Suite offers a range of shared storage solutions for small facilities up to large enterprises. But there are also times when local storage is needed.

My work involves demonstrating Avid Artist Suite audio solutions to our customers at trade shows, local events, and to individuals. I travel a lot and need a robust and reliable solution. My previous generation LaCie d2 drive has been with me to trade shows and events in the U.S., Japan, China, Thailand, and Germany. But I’ve recently upgraded to the new 6 TB LaCie d2 Thunderbolt 2 drive with the 128 GB d2 SSD Upgrade, using the drive for my extensive sample library and demo sessions.

I have the two drives formatted as a hybrid drive to give me the best of both worlds: high capacity and high performance. My sample library takes up around 4 TB of the drive, and it’s essential that these samples load as quickly as possible, especially when it’s a full orchestra! I also keep my demo sessions, which can contain up to 500 tracks of audio and HD video, on the same drive.

Pro Tools’ Disk Cache feature helps, as we’re able to cache the audio into RAM, but the media still needs to be loaded as quickly as possible, especially when we’re playing HD video directly from the drive. Recently, I tried playing one of our largest sessions with Disk Cache turned off and the performance of the drive was amazing. I also use Media Composer as part of my demo setup and the d2 works perfectly for local video storage.

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2018-09-04T16:46:49+00:00