For Whom The Errors Toll

Coming in on a Monday morning to find this on your Shared media space is not what an editorial facility really wants.


For you non-vidnerds, we have to digitize all footage to cut with it. Now, audio files (real audio files, not your pansy compressed mp3s) are pretty big, but video, well, they are just huge. So you need big fast drives to handle that. We used to have separate drives for each edit station, but technology has advanced so that we can have one unified storage system. This means several avids can cut on the same material at once, which rocks. If an editor has clients, he can keep cutting and the assistant can load in another room.

The only problem is that all the eggs are in one basket, so once again, if you come in on a Monday and find this on your unity, its not cool.


So, this storage rack consists of 32 180 gig drives raided together. And one of the drives was acting up. We had to move a few projects around so that only the mirrored (the media gets written twice) projects remained on the faulty partition, which would get its drive replaced. But moving a terabyte is not a fast process, especially if you are wondering if the drive will make it.


And once the move was done, and we wanted to switch drives, we found that a few of them were quite dusty, so John did a bit of unity spring cleaning.


Fun, right?


Oh yeah, tons of fun to be waiting for all you media for every project to resettle in, at midnight.


The good news: after a few annoying hours, we placed in our replacement drive.


And everything was back to normal with no data loss.


Whopeee!


Hooray! (thanks jenna for the beautiful spin metaphor of happiness). Now, some people here are wondering if it is good PR to post that we had an error. Well, drives fail. There is no getting around that, it happens at every facility, and its how you deal with it that matters. In the two years we have had this unity, we have have lost only one day of editing, and we did not lose any media. So there, i think our track record speaks highly on how we deal with machine errors.


Anyways, as the spring keeps rolling, our flowers just get more awesome-er.


And on days where the real Sadie can’t come in, we all settle for the next best thing.


Which brings us to a new announcement, after a few weeks of looking for a new receptionist, PS finally found Stephanie. She hails from the great state of Ill-I-noise, and we think she is a fabulous addition to the team.


Welcome to the PS family, Steph!


Oh, Happy Cinco de Mayo!


Have some on Margaritas on us.