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Next-day Signiant Media Shuttle file transfers transform Bunim Murray’s TV production reality Overnight Success WORDS Scott Carroll, senior manager of marketing and communications, Signiant
I t’s just after midnight on location in Thailand. And, following days of shooting the hit reality TV series The Challenge , a Bunim Murray Productions courier carries terabytes of content by hand to the editorial team in LA. They need a better way to move fresh content to their edit suites than babysitting drives on international flights every three days. Founded in 1987 in Glendale, California, Bunim Murray Productions is a pioneering force behind reality TV. It produces award-winning shows for networks such as MTV, E!, HBO and Nickelodeon including The Real World , Road Rules and The Family Stallone . Moving content from remote locations to editors in LA costs time and money. The Challenge might shoot in South Africa one week, Thailand the next and Europe after that. During peak times, up to 250 employees work on four to ten shows simultaneously from locations around the world. Transferring terabytes of footage as fast as possible is mission critical. With shrinking budgets and tight deadlines, time is precious. After experimenting, Bunim Murray turned to Signiant Media Shuttle to create a consistent, 24-hour turnaround. The hours they got back easily paid for the switch. “The time we saved, the hours we can gain back – it makes sense financially,” explains Daniel Shott, director of post technologies for Bunim Murray. “After a 30-minute training session, we were confident enough to build out for five different shows. The things we’d have
A GLOBAL FORCE Bunim Murray Productions staff members work on various acclaimed reality TV series from its California office – but also locations all around the world
relied on tech support to do with other solutions, we were able do ourselves in five minutes with Media Shuttle.” On a typical shoot, DITs collect 3TB of footage daily and load it on local storage. Raw footage is sent via Media Shuttle to Wasabi Hot Cloud Storage. From there, the editorial team uses Shuttle to get the content they need. “We found it a much more reliable solution for our production teams, which were already scattered and running long shifts,” says Shott. “We loved that, once we switched to Media Shuttle, we could put [Wasabi] in the middle and know
it would always be there, ready to go whenever we wanted to do a transfer. We live in that immediacy – and have come to rely on Media Shuttle to be our everyday solution.” Shott adds: “Now, when a show is scouting for a location, available bandwidth is the factor. We’re looking for that from day one, knowing this will be the workflow. Once we installed it, we started finding other use cases for it.” Learn more about Media Shuttle, the easiest and most reliable way to send any-size file, anywhere, fast: signiant.com/shuttle
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