In the heart of Burbank, CA, MICDI Productions, Inc. has been the secret weapon behind unforgettable music moments in television and film. Working on hits like “Leave the World Behind” and “This Is Us,” the music editorial professionals at MICDI pride themselves on being creative collaborators. However, their workflow wasn’t always in perfect harmony.
Imagine shuffling hard drives around like backstage passes just to get the audio files you need. That was MICDI’s reality before EVO.
They spent an incredible amount of time backing up their media and worrying about data loss if they missed a step in the manual process. And their workflow wasn’t set up for remote production, so they had to do everything at the studio, or spend additional time preparing hard drives of media they thought they might need for an off-site project.
Chris Foster, co-president and supervising music editor at MICDI Productions, explained their old workflow: “It was classic ‘sneakernet,’ and it wasn’t working for us.”
Then they found EVO, and everything changed. [Cue upbeat music.]
Hitting All The Right Notes
“EVO solved our problems,” said Foster. “Now, we can access our files from anywhere, backups happen automatically, and finding the files we need is so much easier.”
Foster and his team work in Avid Pro Tools almost exclusively, and EVO is the perfect companion for their music editorial workflow. Designed with audio and video production teams in mind, EVO offers a secure, centralized hub for all your media. And it comes with the EVO Suite, an award-winning toolset to help your team manage, organize, automate, and collaborate on media seamlessly, turning any workspace into a symphony of productivity.
Wherever Creativity Strikes
MICDI works on music editorial projects for Amazon, Disney, and several other major studios, so it’s not uncommon for a project to require them to be on the video lot. “Before EVO, we often found ourselves limited by what we could bring physically to a location. With EVO, those limitations no longer exist.”
Adding SNS Cloud VPN to EVO lets editors tap into projects from anywhere in the world. “It’s a lifeline when you’re stuck outside the studio,” added Foster. “Having remote access to our EVO means we can act on our creative instincts every time inspiration strikes. We never have to disrupt the ‘lightbulb moment’ because we didn’t bring a particular hard drive. We can pull anything from the server, anywhere we are.”
“For example,” he continued, “we were on-site with a director who had a new idea during a session, and we were able to pull up the files immediately and work on it in real-time. EVO has allowed us to be more creative and flexible because we have access to everything, all the time.”
MAM For Music Production
Not only does everyone have access to their files from anywhere, but the entire team can also find what they need easily with ShareBrowser, the media asset management (MAM) system included with EVO.
“Everyone on our team uses ShareBrowser,” said Foster. “Each show has its own share, and our library has its own space. Everything is catalogged and searchable with ShareBrowser, so we always know how to get what we need.”
With up to 10 music editors and assistants collaborating both on-site and remotely, a MAM system helps keep everyone in sync. ShareBrowser lets music editors and collaborators organize audio files, preview tracks, and quickly search for the perfect sample based on file attributes and custom metadata like genre, tempo, and instrumentation.
“Metadata is huge for managing our massive music catalog. ShareBrowser makes everything searchable.”
Automatic, Systematic, Hydromatic
When the team is busy working on creative projects, the last thing they need is to step out of that creative mindset to manually back up their data.
EVO comes with a built-in automations engine called Slingshot that can automate repetitive tasks—like data transfers, transcoding, cloud backups, and more—on a recurring schedule. MICDI uses Slingshot to automatically back up media from EVO shared storage to nearline storage every night, and also to cloud storage for an additional layer of data redundancy. This fully automated, tiered backup workflow frees their editors from the manual processes that used to slow them down.
“EVO saves us several hours per week by automating the backup process,” said Foster. “There’s so much that EVO does so that we don’t have to do it ourselves anymore. It saves everyone time, so we can do our work a lot faster and keep the creative flow flowing.”
Collaborate And Listen
As leaders in music editorial for motion pictures, television, and new media, MICDI Productions trusts EVO to keep their workflow in tune.
“What makes us unique to other music editors and facilities is our ability to collaborate. EVO lets us work together in a much more seamless way than we could before, and it eliminates a lot of the inefficiencies that held our workflow back in the past,” said Foster.
“And the SNS Support Team is awesome,” he added. “They are patient, thorough, and easy to get in touch with when you need them.”
If your music production team is still shuffling hard drives from editor to editor, take a cue from MICDI and let EVO help you create your own award-winning sound.
Contact SNS for a demo of shared storage solutions for audio professionals.