iPhone maker now selling $40K post production media servers
Today Lumaforge, purveyors of creative collaboration servers for TV and film have announced that their Jellyfish devices are now available from Apple:
- Jellyfish Mobile shared storage solution (it has a handle) allows groups of post production professionals to share 80TB of media on location. Four 10-Gigabit connections and four 1-Gigabit connections.
- Jellyfish Tower shared storage solution – 120TB of storage shared between 10 10-Gigabit connections and 8 1-Gigabit connections. The size of a high-end tower PC.
- Jellyfish Rack solution – 120-200TB of storage. Can be configured with up to 1PB of storage. Designed to fit into 19″ rack cabinets found at post facilities. Adding a switch to the cabinet allows multiple Jellyfish Racks to serve even more media content.
Looks like Apple will be standing behind high-end storage solutions that should be enough for any kind of media production. Jellyfish servers work with groups of Final Cut Pro X, Adobe Premiere Pro CC, Blackmagic Design DaVinci Resolve and Avid Media Composer. The client computers can run macOS, Windows or Linux.
LumaForge servers are already used by video teams all over the world:
including those at Activision, Adobe, BBC, CBS Interactive, Disney, Google, NASA, Pandora, Reuters, Sony and WeWork.
With this deal Apple are pushing for a share of the high-end storage market. For now Avid sell the vast majority of high-end media storage systems.
Steve Bayes was an Principle Product Designer at Avid from 1995-2003 where he worked on Media Composer and Symphony. He went on to be the product manager at Apple for Final Cut Pro, Final Cut Pro X and ProRes. LumaForge have announced:
world-renowned video editing expert Steve Bayes has made a significant financial investment in LumaForge and will also be the first member of its Board of Advisors.
Apple supporting those who support post production
Apple are showing that they are interested in the high-end storage market – and serving the post production industry. Selling this kind of product means that Apple thinks that LumaForge can make products for the post industry. More importantly that LumaForge have the infrastructure to support their use in media organisations.
I’m looking forward to seeing what kind of support Apple gives Apple Stores and third-party resellers to sell and support this kind of hardware and the workflows it fits into.