The four-person camera crew, shooting mainly Sony EX3 camcorders, as well as Canon 5D MkII DSLRs for the ‘beauty shots’, creates a huge amount of HD data
Firecracker Films used DSLR post production
workflows on hit show My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding and needed more storage to handle the hours of footage. By David Fox
PRODUCTION COMPANY Firecracker Films’ My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding documentaries have been a surprising hit, with two series following Irish travellers in Britain and a spinoff series in the USA. However, it is not a normal
Make Space for My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding
programme. Because of the transient nature of the families and their unconventional lifestyle, content has to be constantly re-worked. Only when all legal consents are securely in place can a final show be produced. This can take up to a year, according to Alex Hay, editor and Firecracker’s post production supervisor. This continual state of flux also has implications for the technical team. The four-person camera crew, shooting mainly Sony EX3 camcorders, as well as Canon 5D MkII DSLRs for the ‘beauty shots’, create a huge amount of HD data for each day of shooting. The process of transferring SxS and CF cards to multiple external drives or ingesting directly into the server is time consuming. Equally, the reality of managing many terabytes of content is daunting and required a significant upgrade to the company’s storage infrastructure. “With as many as a thousand hours of footage for a six episode run, we knew we needed more storage. Our current primary shared system, a fibre channel SAN system, is up-to the task of handling the editing process,” says Hay. Its existing SAN has been in
place for more than four years and has grown with the company. This includes a MetaSan, MetaLan (seven licenses), three InforTrend Fibre 4Gb RAIDs, QLogic Fibre Channel Switch, and assorted Ethernet switches While the fibre connections worked well and the MetaLan