“Hey, do you have that video editing project that’s due today for Human Resources open? Something weird just happened to the project on my computer. You didn’t just save it, did you? ” I glanced over at my lead video editor with some concern.
“Uhh, yeah, I was working on that interview sequence,” he replied. “Didn’t you want me to work on that?”
We stared at each other for a second, understanding what just happened and the mess we had created for ourselves.
“Not again,” I sighed, opening a previous auto-save of the project. “Whatever you do, please DO NOT save that project file now,” I pleaded to my colleague as I appealed to the media gods in hopes that my hours of meticulous editing work wasn’t done in vain… again.
This is how our journey to a better workflow began—a better workflow that we found with EVO.
Growing Demand For Corporate Video
Working in corporate video production at a large, multinational, Fortune 500 company, leadership realized how valuable an internal video team was. In just a few years, we grew from a single employee post-production department to a full-blown marketing video production team with 16 video editors, producers, and other collaborators, plus a half-dozen departments knocking on our door for new video content every day.
The way we were organizing our assets was becoming dangerously unreliable. MP4s, JPGs, PNGs, and other media were spread across multiple computers, random network shares, external hard drives, and memory sticks. It was a challenge to organize and secure all the media we had developed, like confidential quarterly data, social media content, HR documents, voiceovers, video clips, and deliverables.
Our USB shared storage workflow couldn’t keep up with the pace of our video projects. Endless complications forced us to make mistakes when it came to versioning and permissions on who could edit what and when. Those mistakes took time to correct; time we simply didn’t have.
My team scheduled daily meetings to determine who can edit what and when—a cumbersome process just to ensure we weren’t overlapping in-progress work. This tedious song and dance went on for months. Soon, it became impossible to juggle all of our assets using the “system” we created.
There’s got to be a better way.
Finding Our Solution
In April 2016, I attended the NAB Show in Las Vegas. I wanted to find a solution to our media management issues, so I went hunting for a fix on the tradeshow floor.
I remember the words on their banner caught my eye before anything else: Studio Network Solutions. We had a studio. We were having a problem with organizing and sharing our data over the network. We were looking for a storage solution. Let’s see what this product is all about.
That’s where I found the remedy for our media management troubles: EVO, a hardware and software solution made for media teams. A three-letter product that can resolve our three-letter file storage issues—MOVs, AIFs, PDFs, and all the other acronyms could finally be shared among our users intelligently with EVO!
Secure Media Storage
Everyone on the video marketing team knew that security is Rule Number One. Nothing moved forward without the Network Security team’s buy-in, no matter how much we tried. My first questions for the SNS team were all about meeting our strict network security standards.
SNS provided a security-specific white paper for our IT team, and Network Security authorized the purchase the very next day. Getting Network Security approval at all—let alone in a day— was no small feat, but EVO met all of the stringent data security protocols they required and then some.
Even after security approvals, it can be a challenge to execute large purchase orders in a corporate environment. We were grateful that SNS supported the process from beginning to end. They worked with Accounts Payable and IT to get our secure media storage system ordered and delivered, and they even provided the services to assist us with getting the EVO racked up and running.
Our marketing video team was not the most tech-savvy when it came to network technology, so we were relieved that someone was there to walk us through the process. Between the on-site and online support, SNS was there for whatever we needed during the installation and beyond.
Corporate Video Production Life With EVO
We installed two EVO 8 Bay shared storage servers for the marketing video production department: one for media and projects, and one for archiving completed projects.
I can say with 100% certainty that our video production workflow was faster and more efficient with EVO. Because of that new-found efficiency, we could increase the quantity of work we produced, which led to more projects and media that we needed to store, and a bigger archive to manage. Having a dedicated EVO for archived media was crucial for our team, and a huge improvement from the slow, 4TB USB external drive we were used to.
Using EVO was a breeze. It just kind of dissolved into the background of our team’s production workflow. It required no maintenance, and I can say that with the help of our UPS, we never lost access to the EVO—not even once, since 2016. It was the most reliable piece of equipment we used, and we used it daily.
I know first-hand how EVO and the EVO suite of included software helped my video team’s workflow. I know the limitations we had and how quickly they disappeared once we got EVO. And now, as the newest member of the SNS team, I get to help thousands of creative teams break down those same barriers in their workflow.
Corporate video production life pre-EVO was often messy with numerous external media shared hastily among my creative team. Hopefully, if you’re in a similar situation to what I was in, you too can look to EVO to simplify your workflow, secure your assets, and greatly improve your team’s ability to collaborate on media projects.
To learn more about EVO shared storage servers and the problems they solve for marketing and corporate post-production teams around the world, schedule a live demo today.
