Media Distributors Moves Further into Production & Post

Tom Evans, Media Dis­trib­u­tors’ senior vp, mar­ket­ing, with the Archive Sta­tion

Although not attend­ing last week’s HD World Expo at the Jav­its, Band Pro and Media Dis­trib­u­tors held their own new prod­uct show, albeit on a smaller scale in their co-located offices at 645 West 27^th Street. Dur­ing the open house, Media Dis­trib­u­tors announced that it became one of the newest sys­tems inte­gra­tors for the RED Rocket, the real-time 4k play­back and pro­cess­ing card from RED Dig­i­tal Cinema.

MD is con­tin­u­ing its move from its tra­di­tional begin­nings just over a decade ago, when it began as a pro­fes­sional video­tape, motion pic­ture film, and data media reseller and dis­trib­u­tor. Over the years the com­pany has moved fur­ther into stor­age, video edit­ing sys­tems, rentals, soft­ware, disc dupli­ca­tion, pub­lish­ing sys­tems, and media acces­sories. That makes sense, since its orig­i­nal mar­ket is fast dis­ap­pear­ing as solid-state stor­age gains through­out production.

The RED Rocket is key to mak­ing MD’s recently intro­duced R-Series Archive Sta­tion work. What’s that? About the size of a small refrig­er­a­tor, the Archive Sta­tion is a new class of devices you should expect to see on many future pro­duc­tions. The con­cept is sim­ple: real-time backup. That’s nec­es­sary since you no longer have tapes or even opti­cal discs (ala Sony XDCAM series) to hold on to, as the solid-state RAM or hard drive recorders are part of the lat­est cam­era systems.

The RED card, announced ear­lier this year but just now find­ing its way into prod­ucts, is nec­es­sary since Red’s mas­sive 4K DPX out­put stream requires great bus band­width. You also need a fast RAID array (capa­ble of a least 500–600 MBps) to cap­ture that flood of data, so the Archive Sta­tion includes a Line 1 Media Fusion RAID array (four 1TB dri­ves). Data is then sent to either dual built-in LTO-4 tape back-up dri­ves, or split between an LTO and a built-in Blu-Ray burner. Also included in the upgraded pack­age: Con­stel­la­tion VCM asset man­age­ment soft­ware; UPS power con­di­tioner; a com­plete cabling bun­dle; and a cus­tom designed flight case. A Mac­Book Pro, also part of the pack­age, con­trols the setup. The sys­tem is very con­fig­urable, so just take this an exam­ple of a good, basic backup station.

Daily rental is $300, while one week is $900. It’s avail­able for pur­chase. This looks like a solid attempt at how best to han­dle a cru­cial task. Backup isn’t sexy—think how many of us put it off even with our home computers—but smart pro­duc­ers know this belongs as an inte­gral part of their next shoot­ing bud­get. You can find out more at www.mediadistributors.com, or call their local office at (212) 375‑1800.

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