Seagate: Producing better media workflows
Posted on Sep 10, 2022 by Samara Husbands
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In tandem with VAN ROTHE, Seagate Lyve Mobile has taken its business solutions to another level – in terms of speed, technology and customer service
With the pandemic fuelling consumer demand for high-quality streaming content, VAN ROTHE leveraged Seagate Lyve Mobile to alleviate data processing bottlenecks on set and in post-production. This empowered the film consulting company to balance its operating costs, delivery schedules and technician work-life harmony.
Their problem: Industry growing pains meeting pandemic-era challenges
The challenges of Covid-19 put VAN ROTHE’s services in high demand. Inundated by growing volumes of data to process, VAN ROTHE technicians were spending up to 18 hours on set just to wrangle client data. Because VAN ROTHE’s clients often provided them with outdated technology, the process for offloading data was incredibly inefficient. Furthermore, VAN ROTHE could not train people fast enough to perform this convoluted set of tasks. Not only did this inflate operating costs and delay post production schedules, but it also created unnecessary security risks – a huge concern for major film studios, as they do not want their content to be leaked before scheduled release.
Taken together, these challenges made it difficult for VAN ROTHE to deliver on its promise of cost-effective products and services with fast turnaround times. To turn a profit, the company needed to make a lot of money back on the expensive equipment it was having to purchase to complete its work. Clients expecting fast and cost-effective solutions were met with additional charges for gear and overtime. With jobs piling up and technical specifications becoming increasingly complex, VAN ROTHE’s services were getting more and more expensive.
Their solution: Bypassing slow network speeds with high-performance mobile storage and data transfers
VAN ROTHE had been using LaCie® products for years and was confident in Seagate’s logistical and technical capabilities. VAN ROTHE relies on mobile storage to consolidate data on set and ingest it for post-production processing. But previous solutions were cost-prohibitive, due to unsustainable expenses associated with owning and scaling storage devices. With Lyve Mobile, VAN ROTHE saw an opportunity to grow its services faster, while reducing financial risk.
Their success: Managing to strike a balance between innovative services, resource optimisation and improved working conditions
With the help of Lyve Mobile mass-capacity edge storage devices and high-speed data transfers delivered as a service, VAN ROTHE’s business model has changed.
Seagate owns and maintains the devices VAN ROTHE uses for its client projects, while also providing right-sized data transfers with predictable, consumption-based pricing. Because of this, VAN ROTHE is now better equipped to scale its service offerings to meet rapidly evolving client needs, without having to make heavy upfront investments in infrastructure. This also enables the company to define the scope of a client project more easily, before the work begins. Service-level agreements that used to be impossible to establish because of unpredictable labour and equipment costs are now standard operating procedure. Furthermore, Lyve Mobile’s high-capacity storage devices and support for versatile interfaces have accelerated the processes of consolidating and ingesting high volumes of data from different storage devices. As a result, the company’s lead times are much improved.
VAN ROTHE’s modern film engineering solutions, combined with Lyve Mobile’s service model, have empowered the company with a more cost-effective approach to scaling its business. In fact, Lyve Mobile’s uniform form factor has enabled the company to automate processes on set for the first time. With accelerated transfer speeds and devices that can be operated without the need for advanced IT expertise, technicians are no longer burdened with the convoluted task of wrangling data on set and can focus on effective quality assurance instead. For VAN ROTHE, the benefits of the Lyve Mobile solution go beyond client satisfaction. When members of the VAN ROTHE team see happier technicians with improved quality of life, it lets them know they’re on the right track.
Originally published in the September 2022 issue of Pro Moviemaker.
