FREMONT, CA – Blackmagic Design today announced that Tokyo based L’espace Vision has created the Mega MultiDock, an ingest system built around 20 Blackmagic MultiDocks. The system is able to import media from up to 80 SSDs simultaneously and is primarily used for ingesting footage from its live concert recording service, which uses multiple Blackmagic HyperDeck Studio Pro SSD recorders.
More details from Blackmagic (www.blackmagicdesign.com):
L’espace Vision is a post production company working in film, TV commercials and music videos. The company has been expanding its business, including film production and live concert recording, providing live and post production work for some of the world’s biggest bands. Applying file based workflows from very early on, L’espace Vision offers its clients a more efficient workflow, which also resulted in developing and selling its Rapid Copy Pro, a software that copies data and verifies data integrity.
One of the challenges L’espace Vision faced was ingesting massive amounts of footage from live concert recordings effectively. At every concert, the company uses up to 80 480GB Intel and 512GB Toshiba SSDs for recording a variety of footage depending on the scale of the production. Those SSDs are then sent to its post production facility where the footage is ingested using the Mega MultiDock. L’espace Vision’s Mega MultiDock includes 20 Blackmagic MultiDocks for mounting and three Mac Pros, all with Rapid Copy and Rapid Copy Pro software to provide control of the multiple MultiDocks, creating copies and verifying the data from the SSDs to 45 HDDs in RAID.
Kuniaki Miyake from the Editorial I/O Department of L’espace Vision explained why they built Mega MultiDock: “We offer a live concert recording service using more than 60 HyperDeck Studio Pros. We then started using the MultiDocks to efficiently ingest the live footage recorded onto the SSDs.
“After the concert, our clients want to start editing immediately. If they start later, they have less editing time, and we had to improve our efficiency to meet that demand. Also, if we have back to back concert projects, we have to format our SSDs as soon as possible to use them for the next project, which requires speed for a fast turnaround,“ he added.
Miyake continued: “The recorded footage is in QuickTime files, so we wanted to control everything from a Mac, such as editing metadata of QT files, including file and reel numbers. We chose the MultiDock because of its Mac support and because it can be daisy chained and rack mounted to fit in a small space.
Rapid Copy Pro is also used with the MultiDock system to control numerous MultiDocks more effectively. Kengo Sawatsu, a system engineer and IT manager at L’espace Vision who is deeply involved in the development of Rapid Copy and Rapid Copy Pro, said: “We programmed Rapid Copy Pro to allow the MultiDocks to batch copy, as we wanted to make copies of SSDs onto multiple MultiDocks in order. For example, if there are 40 SSDs, I can copy the first to 40th SSD in order with just one button click, which results in reducing labor time to change SSDs.”
Ko Utsumi, from L’espace Vision’s I/O department, added: “The benefit of the MultiDock is that it can be daisy chained so that all the MultiDocks can ingest footage simultaneously. As there are less manual operations by our staff, the number of human errors decreased. I feel the ingest time is now three to four times faster with the Mega MultiDock.”
“Our Mega MultiDock is now used on jobs other than ingesting live concert footage, such as copying footage for film production if we used SSD media. It is already rack mounted, and it is so easy to use that we use it for any job,” Miyake concluded.
