The situation.

A production company shoots in the field and edits in the office. Content came back on cards and drives, got copied by whoever was around, onto whatever was free, and occasionally a shoot was simply gone. Re-shoots are expensive and sometimes impossible.

The constraint.

Zero tolerance for corruption or loss, and the process had to work for people who are not technical, at the end of a long day, with no steps to remember.

What we found.

The losses were not dramatic drive failures. They were partial copies that looked complete, cards reused before the copy was verified, and no record of what had been ingested. The problem was process, not hardware, so the fix had to remove the process.

What we built.

A purpose-built ingestion kiosk. Insert the card, and the kiosk copies it to two independent local RAID5 arrays, computes SHA-256 checksums for every file, and then transfers the content encrypted to the networked storage the editors work from, verifying every byte on arrival against the source checksum. Nothing is marked done, and no card is released for reuse, until the copy on the editor storage is proven identical to the original. The kiosk keeps a log of every ingest. Finished work flows from the editors' storage to the client's CMS.

What changed.

Since the kiosk went in, no shoot has been lost. Ingest is a one-step job anyone on the crew can do, and the office knows exactly what has arrived and what has not.

  • 2x RAID5 local redundancy
  • SHA-256 verified encrypted transfer
  • networked editor storage to CMS

If this sounds like your operation, apply to work with us.

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