With its recent five Emmy Award wins and a record-setting 46 Telly Awards under its belt, the Rams Broadcasting Network (RBN) has a lot on its roster for the season. The production team at RBN, built in 2010, produces this award-winning content for the St Louis Rams Football team, including three television shows, web content for stlouisrams.com and all the in-game entertainment.
When RBN needed a faster, more efficient workflow to better manage their growing production needs, they looked no further than their own backyard to St. Louis based Studio Network Solutions (SNS) and SNS EVO Shared Storage Server.
Throughout the 20-week season, an enormous amount of footage is shot including each and every Rams game. Much of that footage is used for the production of RBN’s in-house television shows including the critically acclaimed Rams 360. The weekly documentary-style show recently won three Emmy awards including Best Show in Sports, Audio-Live or Post Production, Editor-Sports.
“EVO has been essential to increasing our productivity,” Stated Chris Slepokura, Video Manager. “Rams 360 has a very intensive workflow and we are a small team, seven people. We are often working on separate features of each show at the same time. EVO fit our budget and gave us the extra storage space to ingest and pull from so our team can easily access our media assets simultaneously.”
Focusing on a week in the life of a Rams featured player, cameras follow the player off the field, during practice via helmet cam and in “Mic’d Up” sessions throughout the game, all telling the story through the players’ eyes. The show is shot on a variety of cameras including RED Epic and Canon Cinema Cameras.
The footage is then ingested into the EVO to be edited into 22 minutes of content to air on RBN’s local affiliates. Prior to bringing SNS EVO on board, RBN was running external hard drives back and forth, which was both time consuming and hard to manage. When they made the full transition they were provided with a flexible solution that gave them enough storage space and a centralized access point for all their assets.
Adobe Creative Cloud handles all the post-production for RBN including Premiere for editing and After Effects for motion graphics. During an edit b-roll and graphics are added then exported, constantly working off the EVO. The final product is delivered via web or hard drive.
EVO combines a high-performance storage array with the most extensive connectivity options available in a single product – including 8/16 Gb/s Fibre Channel and 1/10 Gb/s Ethernet. And EVO offers a huge advantage in terms of connectivity and upgradeability since it integrates a NAS and a SAN into one system, giving the benefits of both file sharing and volume sharing.
SNS EVO Shared Media Storage Server is Available in 8 Bay and 16 Bay Configurations
“Our team is growing fast,” Added Slepokura. “Before bringing on EVO, if we wanted to bring on an additional 10 people to the production team it would have been almost impossible. EVO’s extra ports and ability to connect over 1/10GbE and Fibre Channel make it painless for us to expand our workflow infrastructure and not lose time or money in the process.”
When all the lights shut down in the stadium and there’s no more Monday Night Football, the production team at RBN is still busy at work producing some of the highest quality content in sports broadcasting.
SNS EVO’s high performance, flexible and scalable architecture is the perfect solution to protect RBN’s current and future media assets and support a more efficient workflow for this winning production team.
About Studio Network Solutions (SNS)
SNS shared storage solutions are at the core of optimized video workflow for professional content creation workgroups worldwide. The SNS EVO shared media storage server combines high-performance with extensive connectivity, including 10Gb/s Ethernet and Fibre Channel. With EVO’s included ShareBrowser asset management software, you can search, index, preview, tag, and verify video and project assets with no additional software required. NAS, SAN, or both at the same time, EVO is designed for online real-time video editing with leading video/audio applications including Avid Media Composer, Adobe Premiere Pro/CC, Final Cut Pro (FCP), Final Cut Pro X (FCPX), DaVinci Resolve, Pro Tools, and others.
Read more user stories or contact SNS now to see how the EVO shared media storage server can help your company.