David Helmly, Senior Manager Professional Video for the Americas, has worked for Adobe for over 20 years and has specialized in digital video and digital imaging products for over 27 years. He manages a senior field team specializing in pro video/audio production workflows for film and broadcast in North and South America.
As part of Adobe’s pro video team, I’m constantly working to find the fastest, most powerful and streamlined workflows for my projects. At the center of everything, I use the Mac mini server with the LaCie 8big Rack Thunderbolt 2, which can handle everything from editing a new video for the Adobe Creative Cloud Learning or my DAV Tech Table channels to storing terabytes of RAW demo footage used in our tradeshow demos.
I’ve been using servers as a digital vault ever since the beginning: even the very first Premiere demo, which was filmed 23 years ago has lived on a number of different servers over the years, currently resides on the Mac mini. Regularly migrating large amounts of legacy data is a fairly common task because the pro video team upgrades our server as new hardware is rolled out. With the addition of the LaCie 8big Rack, we can easily move everything we need quickly and securely using the LaCie Little Big Disk Thunderbolt 2.
The LaCie 8big Rack is easy to set up, reliable, and helps to improve our team’s workflow. We’ve been able to get some peace of mind by reducing the number of devices that can fail over time. With 32 TB of storage on a single RAID 6 unit, the LaCie 8big Rack has allowed us to migrate six separate units (from USB 2.0 to FireWire to a few smaller first-generation Thunderbolt drives) into just one unit. The LaCie 8big Rack has indicator status lights and audible alarms that notify us if a drive needs to be replaced. Running our LaCie 8big in RAID 6 mode has the additional benefit of allowing us to edit 1080p video over GigE as a shared volume with a maximum of two to three edits on the volume.
LaCie was one of the first on the Thunderbolt scene and that institutional knowledge is immensely important to me as Thunderbolt technology continues to develop. I rely on Thunderbolt every day, whether I’m using a pocket drive, I/O device, or a large file-share server, and LaCie has done a great job providing the reliability, performance, and speed I’ve come to depend on.