CVP UNLOCKS THE MEDIA VAULT
CVP is Europe's most dynamic broadcast and professional video solutions provider with offices and showrooms in multiple locations across the UK.
As a partner for CODEX in sales of ARRI Cameras and CODEX workflow products, CVP has been at the forefront of new and existing production technology in support of content creation. To help promote and market these partnerships, CVP has an in-house production team to capture and create compelling use case studies. In an effort to manage this internal content being generated daily, CVP turned to CODEX for a shared storage solution to help store and share the departments content across multiple projects. X2X had a chance to talk to Joe Cannon from CVP, to talk about their experiences with the CODEX Media Vault.
What workstation platforms do you have connected to Media Vault?
We currently have Media Vault hooked up to two custom Windows workstations, an Apple MacPro and a MacBook Pro.
What applications are you running on these platforms?
Generally, we spend the majority of our time in Adobe Premiere Pro and Blackmagic Design daVinci Resolve,
along with other applications such as REDCINE-X, Adobe Photoshop and After Effects are also being used daily.
How big is the CVP Marketing team and how does Media Vault fit into your workflow?
The CVP media and creative team is actually relatively small. Currently there are four of us who are immediately involved with creating and delivering content.
This includes everything from videos and photos to print ads and web assets. Where the Media Vault really plays a key part is in our video delivery workflow.
It’s actually become the central library for our video projects both ongoing and an archive for completed projects; a sort of hybrid solution for hot and cold storage,
although we do offload much older projects to other existing RAIDs. Although there are many times when we have to edit from mobile SSD’s for speed and portability needs,
all projects always come back to Media Vault as our centralized system – it is home to everything we do.
How important is it to have access to all of your content in one easy to access shared storage offering like Media Vault?
When we have multiple projects on the go, some with very quick turn-around requirements, it’s fundamental that we can all work collaboratively to complete the set-out tasks on time.
With the Media Vault you can have one person ingesting pick-up shots, another person colour grading b-roll, and someone else generating title graphics simultaneously.
The fact that we can do it all from one centralized location makes our workflow a lot more efficient.
How does Media Vault improve on your previous workflow?
I think it’s unjust to call our previous set-up a “workflow”. Due to it not working particularly well and because there was no flow. Critically that was a result of a set-up
that didn’t evolve very well from the onset as we went from one person handling and delivering all the media, to a small team of people collaborating on multiple projects.
There was no central shared storage system, or at least not one that we could all access at once. There was however a lot of plugging and unplugging of hard drives,
a lot of duplicating of projects, and a lot of waiting for things to transfer.
We spent several weeks exploring different solutions, exploring various desktop NAS and rackmount storage options, and reviewing the process we required. There were many boxes we were trying to tick, but we weren’t sure if we were looking at one or two solutions. We needed accessible storage that multiple users could access at once that was fast enough to handle multiple streams of RAW video. We wanted a solution for all of our live projects that were being collaboratively worked on. We also needed somewhere to archive completed projects in a way that still gave us quick access to them in case we needed to reference old files. When looking at rackmount storage options we realised that it wasn’t the most practical with concerns to space and noise. It was also a solution that seemed to require more specialist knowledge for server administration, something we didn’t have. We knew that could become a problem when it came to maintain any system further down the line. This is why we ended up choosing Media Vault, because it ticked all of the boxes, and it’s by a brand known for reliability and great support.
How easy is it to use Media Vault?
Media Vault has been a solution that’s resolved every problem we had with our previous set-up. Having a quick, reliable, high capacity, compact, centralised storage
system that we can all uncompromisingly work from has made our day to day way more streamlined. Our technical knowledge on networked storage was not that great,
which became even more apparent upon setting up Media Vault. Thankfully the CODEX Support team were very quick to assist remotely in getting us started.
Network attached storage is obviously not as ‘plug-and-play’ when it comes to attaching new devices, but with the way we are set-up with Media Vault
it’s never been something of a concern for us.
About CVP
For more than 30 years, CVP has been one of the leading Broadcast and Professional video solutions providers in the United Kingdom and Europe, with a comprehensive
UK sales and support infrastructure. The company prides itself on maintaining close relationships with key manufacturers such as ARRI, Sony, RED and Canon, and uses
its unrivalled experience to listen to customers, understand their needs and deliver the right solution with first class service. CVP offers creative consultation,
sales advice, technical service provision and training. For more information visit: CVP.com
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