Our first debut in broadcast market in 2004
Our first debut in TV station was at TV7 located at Wisma Dharmala (now Trans 7) in 2005 where we compete with AVID System in order to provide non-linear editing system for 24/7 operations.
We revealed that the client need a multi function non linear editing system that capable to work with analog and digital world, fast and massive storage capacity for a long form uncompressed workflow to keep the best possible quality video without introducing a drop frame. Other challenging point we must also consider was that the distance between the edit suites. We were sure that a single unit internal PowerMac G5s disc drive was not able to provide the sustain rate and capacity we were looking at, nor for the data protection.
As a result we built 2 unit Final Cut Pro edit suites utilizing PM G5, DeckLink, AJA Kona LH to hook up BetaSP and Digibeta VTR. For video storage we employ fault tolerant FC to SATA RAID sub system with Fiber Channel connection relying on ATTO Celerity 2 Gb FC HBA. Sharing the single unit raid storage that serve the 2 edit suites giving us much more advantages such as cost saving and easier maintenance. But this way editor could only read and write to the single assigned volume for each edit workstations, and editor absolutely cannot read the two volumes.
Having the two volumes exist in the single RAID storage but can not be recognized each other by the 2 workstations has lead us to the next level of storage solution.
We do a lot of search and experiment in meeting share storage solutions for multiple editing-workstations environment for Final Cut Pro. The first storage system we totally try out is a NAS solution at our office. With single DV stream video, the NAS BOX we try can sustain 3 edit suites playing back video concurrently, but when we do more things like copy some files TO / FROM the NAS as well as adding another capturing workstation to the NAS, we found that one or two workstations having drop frames. Since then we say good-bye to NAS solution.
Finally we found the answer SAN SOLUTION, but unfortunately Apple did not have a SAN solution yet at the time.
We learn some SAN solutions available and we finally meet FibreJet, a volume level SAN. We learn deeply and we do a lot of experiment with it. Combining FibreJet, Infortrend and ATTO indeed providing the highest speed volume level / server less SAN available.