Ok, so Digital Asset Management is the topic. Some of you might be thinking “well that’s not nearly as sexy as having the ‘four A’s’ on stage at the same time like you did last month.” No, quite honestly it’s not but if anything, this month is even MORE important to the stability and longevity of your work. Whether you shoot / edit tape or digital cards, we are in a digital world and how you protect those digital assets for the long haul will literally make or break you.
As many of you know, I’ve been a forum host on the CreativeCow.net communities since 2001. If I had to pick ONE topic that comes up more than any other, year in, year out, it’s storage. In fact I believe I’ve tested and reviewed more storage products than anything else in the 10 years I’ve been writing for the Cow.
Post always starts off with, “I’m about to start a new project / build a new system / open a new facility and I’m just not sure what storage to buy.” There are literally hundreds of storage combinations out there these days, it’s a veritable alphabet soup of FW, eSATA, USB, SAS, iSCSI, FibreChannel, Ethernet, Thunderbolt and so on. 1TB, 2TB, 3TB spinning platter drives plus Solid State Drives with no moving parts. RAIDS that go from 2TB to 100TB and more. RAID 0, 1, 3, 5, 6, 10 hut one, hut two, hike! It always amazes me just how many people really don’t understand what any of this means, but they just go along with what someone else tells them is the best option.
You are going to have a very rare opportunity to meet the guy who in my opinion is simply the most knowledgeable person in the industry who not only understands the inner workings of that entire alphabet soup above, but also understands how to explain it to all of us. Steve Modica from Small Tree Communications is one of those guys who is a rarity in that he understands the inner workings of many of the computer models we all use and how best to pair up the right storage solution to give that particular system / facility the best performance. He just gets it and I’m so thrilled he’s going to be there.
He’s going to give a presentation that should help all of you better understand all of the various elements of the alphabet soup. From there you should be able to make very informed decisions moving forward as to what will be your best option for storage for your systems, from video editing to sound design to graphics and animation. This is not a sales pitch for Small Tree, this is going to be your opportunity to get that basic knowledge that you never get from a sales rep or an online forum or that latest email blast. In the long run, having the right knowledge before you purchase any storage system will end up giving you the best bang for your buck.
Now if you’ve been in the industry for even a little while, you’ve heard the name Quantum. They’ve been doing long term archiving since before it was cool. Everyone I’ve ever asked about fail safe, long term storage always points to Quantum and LTO. Now I know LTO is a tape based archive format, but that’s about the extent of my personal knowledge and quite honestly I really don’t know of any other options. Once again, this is going to be a GREAT opportunity to learn about long term archiving and what options are out there these days. Where is the archive industry headed moving forward?
Do you shoot with digital media these days? Are you absolutely, 100% certain that you will able to access your material 2, 5, 10, 20 years from now if you needed a shot for a project or needed to bring an entire project back? Remember, if you’re archiving camera originals, that’s it. Your shots are entrusted to the digital ether, either you protect correctly or it’s gone.
How many of you have have had a hard drive fail? Raise your hands, I’ve got mine up. It’s a fact of life, hard drive DIE. Often without warning and ALWAYS at the wrong time. This 2nd meeting will go a long ways towards giving you some great strategies and options to not only give you peace of mind for your main working environment, but also for the long term health of all those digital assets you’ve accumulated and will continue to accumulate moving forward. I’m actually really excited to have Quantum presenting because I really need to get up to speed on what the latest options are for archiving.
Beyond all of this we have two great presentations from Founding Members of the Atlanta Cutters.
Kris Merkel will do a DSLR Best Practices Workflow. Who doesn’t like playing around with the DSLR cameras these days, but how you handle the data can be the difference between losing information and safely protecting it for future use. This demo cuts across all NLE workflows.
Clay Asbury will kick off the 2nd half of the meeting with some Adobe Tips and Tricks from the Production Premium suite. He’s a certified Adobe Trainer and this will be the first in our series of quick tips and tricks for each meeting.
So sign up today as this is one of those rare opportunities to gain a wealth of knowledge in one of the most important aspects of all of our businesses. Protect yours and your client’s assets, you keep happy clients and grow your business. Oh and don’t forget, we have awesome food from Endive Catering so if nothing else, you’re gonna have a great dinner!
See you next week!
Hey Walter,
I live in Nashville and would love to hear what you guys are talking about. Is there any chance of their being an audio or video recording of the event?
Video is coming soon, we had a mixup on getting all the cards to me so I could edit them. Now someone else is getting them cut and will be up soon!
Awesome, thanks Walter!