In Broadcast - NAB Show New York 2019 - 22

22

www.inbroadcast.com | InShow Guide - NAB Show New York 16-17 October 2019

Facilis Technology Keeps
Running Man On Track
New York based, boutique post-production company Running Man has
attracted a wide range of top tier clientele and requires no-compromise
cost-effective storage systems...

R

unning Man offers everything
from
offline
to
finishing,
mastering and delivery to networks
at the highest standard. The company
has attracted a wide range of top tier
clientele including Netflix, HBO, TBS,
Comedy Central, FX, Showtime, MTV,
Facebook and many more.
With a 'kind of working' storage
system, the Running Man team looked
at many different storage options
before eventually choosing Facilis.
"There's quite a range of products
on the market, from big companies
doing very large installations to
people trying to put things together
with a simple NAS device," says Troy
Thompson, Executive Producer and
Supervising Colorist at Running Man.
"We took our time and made sure
our next investment was in the right
direction for the company. Facilis
offered a fairly large volume of storage
at a price point we couldn't reach
with competing systems, and with no
compromise in performance. Plus, the
flexibility of the system is second to
none. So, we're very happy with our
choice."
Running Man invested in their
latest Facilis system with the help of
Bob Spencer and Cliff Allen at VTG,
a NY area reseller which specializes
in shared storage, archive and asset
management solutions. The latest
system includes a Facilis HUB One
server that aggregates their existing
high-capacity storage servers.

Running Man
grading room

ability to project-share across multiple
edit rooms during the offline stage.
As a project moves to finishing, we've
connected those suites with 32Gb Fibre
Channel for maximum performance."
The finishing rooms can either work
in isolation or the team can deploy
all the rooms to finish a project. If
there are resource constraints and
turnaround time is pressuring the
team, it's easy to quickly change
configurations.
"We are actually doing that right
now with a couple of shows where the
project touches at least four different
people through the finishing stage. We
couldn't turn around the job in time if
we didn't have that ability to deploy
any project assets in any room," says
Thompson.
For offline, Running Man supports
both Avid and Adobe workflows.
"We have always been an Avid shop,
since we started in the mid-90s. For
finishing, we went with Nucoda from
Digital Vision. As a smaller company,

Speeds and Feeds
The core of the Running Man facility
is made up of four finishing suites
where both HD and 4K masters
are completed. "We strive to do
everything at a very high technical
level and consider ourselves a
competitor on par with any facility
in NYC or anyone doing
finishing
anywhere,"
says Thompson. "Facilis
has been a huge part
of our success. It's the
backbone of both our
offline and online
environments and it
provides us with the
'Game-changer' Facilis Web Console

Digital Vision is doing a lot of great
things. All of the finishing rooms are
Nucoda systems and everything works
very well with them. We work with
either 10-bit, 16-bit or 32-bit EXR files
and our Facilis system plays back all of
it flawlessly," he says.
Formats and Performance
Running Man sees a bit of everything
with Pro Res HQ being one of the
standard choices. Even when their
deliverables call for IMF, DCP or DPX
- Pro Res HQ is frequently part of the
request as well.
"We deliver over 100 episodes
annually of 4K IMF which are all
derived from uncompressed DPX
outputs coming off the Facilis,"
says Thompson. "We also play and
review all our DPX timelines directly
from the Facilis volumes. In the
mastering stage, we output either
a DPX or an EXR sequence from our
color grading systems and we pull
that into a mastering system that
wraps it into whatever format is
required. The Facilis system gives
us great flexibility as it allows us
to move over to another room if
a particular system is
tied up and pick up
the work immediately
since everything is tied
to the same storage
backbone."
The offline network is
tied together with 10Gig
Ethernet and the finishing

suites are connected directly to the
Facilis HUB One server via 32Gb Fiber
Channel. Those suites also share a
1Gig Ethernet connection to the Facilis
system.
Administration, Maintenance
and Security
Thompson, who has designed and
engineered all of Running Man, has
a lot of good things to say about the
Facilis Web Console for administering
and managing the system. "It's
fantastic. Using the Web interface
to control things has been a gamechanger for us. Deploying software
updates from the Web interface has
made upgrades much easier because
there's never a perfect time to do
that kind of work... We used to try
scheduling such things in the off hours
or come in early in the morning, but
now the upgrading and deploying
process has gotten so much faster
and easier, it's something that we can
schedule during lunch. We no longer
have to go into every room to deal with
permissions or any other management
tasks, it's all done from a central
computer."
Running Man is very focused on
security for their clients and it's a top
priority to make sure client assets
are protected. It was a big part of
the team's initial requirements when
vetting storage options. "We are
constantly refining our procedures
with regards to managing permissions
and making sure people aren't
given permissions for volumes they
shouldn't have access to," says
Thompson. "We wanted to make sure
we could deploy something that gave
us a level of confidence to not only
monitor what was going on and who
had permission to what, but to make
sure, as much as possible, that things
were being re-credentialed so that
we could ensure the security of the
content. Facilis makes that easy, and
overall we feel confident our storage
system is evolving on track with the
growth of our business."
See Facilis Technology at Booth
N136.
www.facilis.com
http://www.inbroadcast.com http://www.facilis.com
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