The Challenge
Pickathon is a three-day music festival taking place every August at Pendarvis Farm in Happy Valley, near Portland, Oregon, United States. The event began in 1998 as a bluegrass festival and has since expanded into a discovery festival for every type of music with hip-hop, punk, heavy metal, country and indie rock. Over the course of five days, including setup and breakdown, a massive crew collects thousands of hours of content. To handle that amount of content, Pickathon needed a storage system onsite that could ingest from the 240 camera cards captured a day and allow editors to start working on media right away without any lag. This same system would then be moved to their facility for the remainder of the year as the primary storage solution for the post-production team to work off of until the next event.
Having approached DigitalGlue late in the process, the system needed to be ordered, built, shipped, and installed in record time to be ready for the event. Pickathon was planning on purchasing and building a DIY solution. According to Pickathon’s Head Producer, Ryan Stiles, “This would have taken time, effort, not included customer service, and cost us an additional $3-4K for an equivalent system.”
"Our film crew of over 700 members operates 24 hours a day for 5 days capturing thousands of hours of content from over 200 performances and an additional 38 crews filming mini-docs, interviews and art pieces. There are over 240 camera cards being transferred daily and the same system ran smoothly the entire production." - Ryan Stiles, Head Producer
The Solution
Designed to empower creative teams to collaborate in real-time with high-resolution media, the //AUTEUR was the perfect solution to handle Pickathon’s live event needs. The system built for Pickathon was the entry-level //AUTEUR, which comes half-filled with 12 10TB drives for a total of 120 TB of RAW capacity and plenty of room to grow. The monitoring tools included in the creative.space web UI allowed Pickathon to monitor usage in real-time, quickly Identify any bottlenecks in their workflow, and keep production flowing efficiently. The //AUTEUR was provided as part of creative.space’s unique On-Premise Managed Storage (OPMS) offering, with hardware, software, and support as a monthly service. For Pickathon, this meant personal delivery and setup of a turnkey system.
Unlike purchasing or leasing storage, the OPMS offering empowers Pickathon to adapt to their changing needs. When they need to support more users or add capacity, they won’t be forced through a new acquisition process. Instead, they can augment their existing contract and adjust their monthly payment. As a service, Pickathon can write-off their creative.space storage as an operational expense on their taxes. Beyond the storage, the included support turns DigitalGlue’s team of industry-veteran engineers into an extension of Pickathon’s in-house team. As Ryan Stiles explains, “Our growth plan and onsite storage needs expand every year. Eliminating an in-house IT position and utilizing DigitaGlue’s personnel both by phone and the local rep will be our road to scaling for years to come.”
The Results
In regards to their experience with DigitalGlue, Ryan Stiles, Head Producer for Pickathon, explains, “Amazing. It’s not just the equipment but the service. It was set up for us and 16 systems started to pull and push to it within hours. Never had any lag or scrubbing issues with our video. Our discovery of DigitalGlue was late in the game for our present year needs. The team built and tested a system in a time frame that was unrealistic. At one point, the CEO was willing to jump on a plane to deliver us a system the same day. It was an absolute pleasure working with a team of this caliber to execute what is an incredible feat. Our film crew of over 700 members operates 24 hours a day for five days capturing thousands of hours of content, from over 200 performances and an additional 38 crews filming mini-docs, interviews and art pieces. There are over 240 camera cards being transferred daily, and the system ran smoothly the entire production”.
With the //AUTEUR, Pickathon’s post-production team was able to finish the ingest of over 47 TB of captured media within just four days of the festival’s end. Exceeding Pickathon’s expectations, ten machines were able to edit off of the storage during ingest without any lag or scrubbing issues. Pickathon was even able to use the additional bandwidth provided by the //AUTEUR to experiment with a new workflow. As Ryan Stiles describes, “During a live event, communications with dailies is limited, so creating a LUT to use while shooting was paramount to capturing everything right in camera. The ability to view and use not just proxy files but actual 4K RED RAW footage was absolutely a bonus for our operations.”
