On-location editing where the editor is the technician

A new case study from Peter Wiggins of fcp.co shows that editors can manage their own workgroup shared storage – setup and maintenance:

The job needed two edit machines, an ingest station, a graphics station and connection to the truck EVS system.

Hiring an ISIS system for the weekend would involve an engineer attending and that would blow the budget. So I suggested that I could supply and look after a newer, faster shared storage system.

He arranged to use a Lumaforge Jellyfish video workflow server. Read the full story over at fcp.co.

Peter’s conclusion:

I can see more jobs where the editor/s are in control of the technical aspects of OB post production. They know how things should be configured, how fast things should run (and why) as they are the end users. The Jellyfish is not only a fast shared storage box, it is very easy to hook up to each client. No IT or field engineer required.

And the bottom line really is the bottom line. If a client has a fully working, fast edit system on location on a tight budget, everybody wins.

Although in this case Peter was working on fast-turnaround on-location sports editing, this model would work well for other sorts of location editing.

Modern post-production: No need for support contracts

Lumaforge’s model is to make money on the hardware and making the system simple enough so there are no support costs. Good news for productions, not so good for those hoping to make money on service contracts and those companies competing for workgroup editing hardware and service sales. I’m interested to see how others compete with Lumaforge’s Jellyfish solution.