Creating stadium-sized video content requires digital storage with stadium-sized capacity and performance. imag8nineteen is a small, L.A.-based production company specializing in visual content for live entertainment events such as Justin Bieber’s world tour, JLo’s performance on American Idol, and a Stevie Wonder GRAMMY Special.
Even though imag8nineteen’s final products are astronomical in size, their equipment expenditures have to be down to earth. To work with visuals with higher-than-4K resolutions while keeping costs under control and avoiding workflow bottlenecks, they implemented a LaCie 8big Rack Thunderbolt 2 for their storage needs.
While the LaCie 8big is intended as direct-attached storage (DAS), imag8nineteen was also able to set it up as shared storage. They connected the LaCie 8big to an HP Z820 workstation via a Thunderbolt 2 add-on card. Next, they daisy chained two more HP Z820 workstations to the main one via 10Gbps Ethernet cards. Working from a single LaCie 8big shared drive, two to three users get excellent speeds, RAID 5 data security, and 24 TB of capacity.
Recent projects included a 2015 ESPN Super Bowl Party video with a working canvas of 12000 x 720 pixels, and a 2015 BET Awards video with 6200 x 1496 pixels. The LaCie 8big was a huge timesaver with these hi-res projects, allowing clients and artists to preview footage using Adobe Bridge Creative Cloud.
Using the LaCie 8big, imag8nineteen was also able consolidate footage stored on many devices with various slower interfaces, including USB 2.0, USB 3.0, and FireWire. That made organizing, accessing, and backing up assets much more efficient.
image8nineteen also takes advantage of the LaCie 8big’s dual Thunderbolt 2 ports to daisy chain smaller drives for delivery of content to clients. All in all, thanks to the LaCie 8big’s performance, easy setup, and solid design, imag8nineteen is better able to meet deadlines for giant-screen projects.