Avid Unity Isis Beta Sight

Optimus, a full service production and postproduction house with offices in Chicago and Santa Monica, Calif., chose an Avid Unity Isis system to replace an older Avid Meridien system. The system allows the editors to use the editing software of their choice.

At Optimus, we get to work with some of the best ad agencies in the business: Leo Burnett, Young & Rubicam, Ogilvy & Mather, Draftfcb, TBWA\Chiat\Day, and many others. We are constantly under the gun to produce top-quality commercial spots for national and international distribution. We pride ourselves on our award-winning creative content, and providing our editors with powerful and reliable editorial tools really helps them produce their best work.

Over the last year, we knew we had reached the end of the line with the older Avid Meridien hardware-based systems that we had been using in our Chicago and Santa Monica, Calif., offices, and we were ready for an upgrade. We wanted editing systems with more horsepower and the capability to easily work in HD to accommodate all the new media coming in on Panasonic P2, Red Digital Cinema R3D, and so on.

Because we support a huge editorial staff, 10 editors and 10 assistants in Chicago and five editors and three assistants in Santa Monica, we also needed a powerful media-sharing network that was rock-solid given the number of projects we push through. We often have three or four editors working on the same spot, and we need them to be able to share media simultaneously and see each other's work in progress.

Ideally, we also wanted our editors to have a choice of editing software. We have Avid Media Composer and Apple Final Cut Pro inhouse, and the editing tool is chosen based on each job. So we set out to find a shared-storage system with proven reliability, excellent media management capabilities, and support for simultaneous file sharing from multiple vendors.

We looked at a lot of different shared-storage systems before settling on the Avid Unity Isis. I don't think any other system comes close to what Avid does with media sharing. From an administrator's view, the configuration is simple to initiate and simple to maintain. From an operator's view, it is as simple as mounting an Isis volume and you are sharing.

In the Chicago office, we are using a 96TB Isis system, which supports 15 dual-boot Avid Media Composer Nitris DX and Final Cut Pro systems and five Mac Pro workstations running Adobe Photoshop and Final Cut Pro. It's terrific to have Final Cut Pro qualified to run on Isis. Our editors can share media regardless of the editing platform they use. This creates a smoother workflow for our editors, and it frees our clients from having to choose technology over creative talent. With Isis, producers don't have to schedule specific suites at certain times for an editor to get access to a particular editing system because the media is accessible from anywhere in the facility. It saves us time and allows us to be more responsive to our clients' needs.

Because we have 96TB of shared storage, we can give editors a ton of space, which makes projects so much easier to manage. We create a partition for every editor that contains 2TB of storage so we don't have to dole out chunks of media for individual jobs, which becomes a big management nightmare. Because of our company's size, we really go full-out and buy what we need to use, and editors have the storage they need for every job without thinking twice about it.

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Isis is robust and easy to maintain, so we never have to worry about diminishing our clients' experiences as a result of technology limitations. Adding a new editing system, reallocating storage capacity, or repairing drives is transparent to editors and clients. It is really easy to set up and maintain too. After the initial setup, I don't think we've touched it.

We also give each editor his or her own Apple MacBook Pro laptop loaded with Media Composer and Final Cut Pro software. We want to make it easy for them to work at home or on a shoot, wherever they want. They can take any job right from the Isis, move it to a laptop, cut wherever they want, and bring the project back to the office and plug it right back into the Isis.

Our Santa Monica office is transitioning to dual-boot Media Composer Nitris DX and Final Cut Pro systems. Those systems will be connected to an Avid Unity MediaNetwork with 16TB of shared storage. Because Final Cut Pro is qualified to run on the MediaNetwork shared-storage system, the editors will have all of the flexible file-sharing benefits that the Isis system offers on a shared-storage setup that is scaled to the needs of a smaller office.

Our new workflow allows editors to use whatever system they want, and it gives us the assurance that our systems are foolproof and easy to maintain, which we need. But I think the real key to our updated workflow is the open nature of the Avid Unity architecture. To be able to use Media Composer and Final Cut Pro systems together on the same shared-storage platform is phenomenal.

Using Avid Unity systems to support both Media Composer and Final Cut Pro projects is making our lives so much easier and making our editors happy. When they are happy, I'm happy, and everyone gets to focus on the creative work, which is what we're here to do.

Knox McCormac is the director of operations at Optimus, a full-service production and postproduction facility with offices in Chicago and Santa Monica.