Speaker 1: Since I started my video production company, our workflow when it comes to storage has been pretty common to just about everyone else I talked to SSDs, lots of them. And you basically just keep collecting more and more of them until you have so many that you can't even keep track anymore of what's on what or you go the route that I did a couple years ago, which is you have a really big local hard drive and then you take your SSDs over to that hard drive and you share footage back and forth and you copy things and delete things and then you basically just try to keep as organized as possible and use this as your working drive. I did all that too. I made a video all about our workflow with storage and about two years ago, almost to the day I created the update video saying how we were using our storage workflow these days, but I kept running into a major problem that maybe you can relate to. I wanted to be able to have the option to have my editors remotely work wherever they want to because why all sit in an office with headphones on and edit all day when they could do that at their home or just about anywhere else? How could I film a bunch of footage locally, import it on my computer here, and then they just all have access to it. Now for a while I tried the Google Drive route or the Dropbox route where you import footage, you put it all on Google Drive, they download it from there, and then they eventually import it into their, you know, editor of choice, and then they edit some footage and then they have to edit things back to Google Drive. And it's a nice nightmare. All in all, it was quite the headache over the last bunch of years trying to figure out how to have a better solution for storage. And I thought to myself, there's got to be a better way with network attached storage, which I haven't gotten into much that allows me to truly have a single server here that everyone can access everywhere. Now obviously network attached storage is not a new thing being able to have a server that everyone accesses in real time. The problem that I had is that I didn't want there to just be a network attached storage drive locally where everyone could access at one time. That's obviously pretty common, but that doesn't really solve the remote capabilities. Then this showed up. Also, sorry for the box, my kid like destroyed it with like pens, I finally have a solution that works fantastic. And I've been testing it for six whole months to make sure that it actually is legit. And I can present it to you and say this actually works. You see, I didn't want to just make a video and say I just got this new server and it seems like it's working. Okay, I wanted to be able to test it. And I gotta say, it works. Now there were two big questions I had when it came to this whole idea of doing like a network attached storage route. I knew it existed. But how did it work for remote editors? And more importantly, it just seemed like a daunting task, the idea of taking all the footage I had, putting it all on a network attached storage drive, uploading it all and then having access for the editors to grab the footage from it and use it. It seemed daunting. To my surprise, it was actually incredibly seamless. The only thing that would actually slow down the process for you would be if your upload speed was a little slower than mine is. Now, it doesn't mean that it's not usable. It just means that the initial process of uploading stuff might take a little bit longer. But the process in general, once everything's up and running, it's really capable for anyone regardless of the internet speeds. What I liked about Sonali was the fact that they had a bunch of different type of setups, different sizes, different prices, and I could kind of have different ones in different place and let them all talk together. That was important for me because I don't necessarily need all of my editors to access all of the footage we have at all times. I want to be able to selectively decide who could access what and maybe I don't need as big of a drive at one editor's place than another. And maybe at my local place here, my home office, I want you know, the largest size drive that obviously holds all the footage. But that big drive, the main one I have might be the more expensive might be the one that needs the most space. And I didn't want to have to buy that and place that in every editor station. And they told me all about the different options and the different ones that they recommended. And then they got me a bunch of units and said, you be the judge, see how they work for you. And the setup is rather simple. I'm going to use my iPad here to explain it. At my home office, I have a single large system, I specifically have the 1621 plus disk station. So that is a six bay unit inside of that specific drive. In each six bay drive, I have 16 terabyte drives times that by six is 96 terabytes. Now it works obviously like a RAID system as well. So not all of that is usable. And depending on the type of RAID you do, you basically get about half the capacity. If you set it up as a RAID five or I forget, but you basically get half the capacity if you set it up that way. So I essentially have 48 terabytes of usable space on this specific drive. Now the great thing about that is 48 terabytes is plenty for most of the stuff that we're working on on a regular basis, we still use Google Drive to actually store all our archival stuff, we have about 80 terabytes or so in there right now. And once we are completely done working on projects, and we're not going to access them again, we put it in there for kind of long term storage. So 48 terabytes is still plenty for what we actually use on a regular basis. So my other editors have different units at their locations, they're actually using the 920s, which now have been upgraded since I got those drives to the 923 pluses. But they are smaller versions of the same drive. So those are four bay drives. And in each one of their drives, I have two 16 terabyte drives. So they basically have 16 terabytes of usable space on each one of theirs. At all times, those drives are talking back and forth to each other. So each one of these specific drives is always talking to the home drive. And at any time that anything changes on the home drive, it then transfers that information to both of those drives at the same time. Now the great thing about the system is you don't have to have it plugged into your computer to do anything, it's always doing its job, it's connected to your actual router directly. And it is always doing all the file transfers and downloading of footage all the time in real time. So even when the editor is sleeping, or she's not using the drive at all, or maybe the laptop's not even home, and she's working somewhere else entirely on something different, the drive is still doing its job. And when she comes back and connects to it, or when he comes back and connects to his, it just shows up, everything works as normal. You connect to the drives wirelessly to use them, obviously just over a network, which is awesome. And then you actually can connect to them remotely through the web based interface that does all the talking to each other of what they're supposed to be syncing and the status of them in real time. And you can kind of see how everything's working. That's super useful, because it allows me to make sure that the drives are working and connected to one another. And I can change what is syncing to what, and I can do it all remotely, even when they're not even in front of their computers. Or those drives. So now what we do is I get back from a shoot, or one of my other shooters gets back from a shoot. And at our local drive here, which is this right here, we have, you know, the whole setup there with all the SD card slots and all that stuff. And they basically import all this stuff via SD cards, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom to the main drive on a library. And then once they are done importing it, and it uploads it, which it uploads very fast from my house here, then as soon as their servers download it fast enough, it's ready for them to access. Now, depending on the size of the files, obviously, is going to determine how long it takes this computer to upload it, and also their computer to download it. Now, as you know, in most places around the country, download speeds typically are way faster than upload speeds. So if you have really fast upload speed at a specific location, hopefully, that's the location where you do most of your filming, that's going to be the spot that you're going to want to upload everything. Because for the most part, their servers are only really ever uploading like XMLs, and the different small things that they're adding to a project like music or different assets from a client or whatever, they're rarely actually uploading footage to their specific servers, because that's usually done locally here. So my internet speed here is 500 upload 500 downloads. So it does everything pretty fast up to the server. And then their download speeds are obviously very fast these days, most people can get files or get something else that has, you know, a terabyte download speed. So they're able to download the footage very fast and really have no problems whatsoever. In the rare case, if we film something, and we import it to their computer, instead, let's just say that they film something, and they are just uploading their footage remotely, it might take them a little longer to upload than me, but then it just shows up directly in our drives as well. Now, the second part of this is going to differ depending on what video editing software that you use. So our editing software, our editor of choice for the last five years or so has been Final Cut Pro. A lot of people use Final Cut Final Cut, we really feel like works well for what we do, it's much faster, it's more efficient, it allows us to crank out content faster and more efficiently, which is important to us. But there's a major drawback with the way that Final Cut works, specifically in this type of context. One of the things that is most frustrating about Final Cut Pro is that Final Cut Pro uses like a very different way that they store all their files and even though they are the king of collaboration with everything Apple, they have no collaboration whatsoever when it comes to working with multiple people on the same project in Final Cut, which is extremely frustrating because they are so good at collab with everything else and cloud based stuff. So I don't know what they're waiting for and why it's taking so long. Only one person can be opening a single library at the same time on the server or else they basically will all open and then whoever quits, there's Final Cut saves an updated version, obviously, in real time, there's no like file save on Final Cut. So So if you're working on an edit, and then you close Final Cut, it basically saves all your stuff of whatever you did in real time. And then that's now the newest version on the server. And then if someone else already has it open, and then they close, there's just going to overwrite the preview. It's kind of annoying. Now, here's the way that we kind of get around this that works fine for the way that my company operates, we rarely are actually editing the server. same project at the same time. And even if we are using the same footage, we still can work our way around that because we can still access footage individually. So the way that we get around that here is simply that every single time we come back and import footage, we create a brand new Final Cut library out of that footage. So let's say for example, we're filming a new February promo for a auto body shop that we do work for, we'll create a new library with the title of that and what it is, and we'll put that in the server. And then whoever is going to work on that edit just simply has to open up that one library. So even if surprisingly, let's say they're working on a, an ad campaign or whatever it is, they don't have to open just that new footage right away, because that's on its own library. of just that client's footage, well, they can open up all the libraries for that client simultaneously, because no one else is in them. But it allows us to at least open up and work on the same client stuff at the same time, but not really the same time. Hope this isn't getting too confusing. Now the way that we try to keep organized and understand who's working on what is simply by having a Trello board that shows all the libraries that are actually on the server. And then whoever has a specific project up, taps on it and changes the tag to basically say it's in use by someone. And then that way, when you go to open a new library on the server, you don't open up one that's already in use by someone else. So you're able to kind of look in there and see all the different libraries that exist. And you're able to open them up and know that no one else is working on them. Now, ideally, it would be way better if you had a program that did much better sync. And that's obviously, what we still don't have a perfect solution for. But it's kind of our fault, because we still use Final Cut. Now, if you're using Premiere Pro, or even DaVinci, they actually have a significantly better real time collaboration. And this whole process would be even better for you, because now everyone's accessing the same footage from the same place on the same servers. But yet, you're not having to worry about whether someone else has the project open, because they allow you to actually open projects simultaneously and edit together. Which would be tremendous. Hopefully, Final Cut gets their act together and fixes some of that stuff. And if they don't, then we may switch soon to another platform as well, because the server really solved a major issue for us of being able to have multiple people in multiple places work on the same footage. But they can't really work on the same project at the same time. And that's not the server's fault. That's Final Cut's fault. Now, you may be asking yourself, Why am I using Premiere Pro? Why am I in the absolute middle of nowhere where there are Amish and buggies driving by? Because I want to prove something to you, this solution works even if you are not in the most ideal space and location, anywhere in the country, one of the biggest worries I have when I went to a server based setup is that if I have remote editors at a different location, how good does their internet have to be? Does it have to be as high quality and as fast as it is at my home storage for it to still work? And the answer is, it doesn't have to, obviously any internet these days can do a good job of being able to keep up with download speed. And if the upload is coming primarily from a place with a fast server, the download at most internet anywhere in the country is probably good enough. We're at one of my editor's house here. And it's kind of in the middle of absolutely nowhere surrounded by like nothing but farms really, no fence, just say, but it still works great. She's able to access everything wirelessly. So the server is set up over there. she can be anywhere in her whole house and edit off the stuff, no sort of issues whatsoever. In the past, her being over an hour away, she would have to drive all the way back to me, meet up switch drives. And you know how that process works. This has really, really helped the workflow a lot. And it's been pretty seamless. And the internet here is no different or superior than a typical internet these days anywhere in the country. So thumbs up from that standpoint. So yeah, it finally works how I hoped an ass would work. And I now have potential to have editors in remote places, which is huge for me, because not only is it huge, because I don't necessarily have to relocate someone to live here if they actually decide to work for me as an editor. But it allows me to just simply have them live where they want to live at the affordable rate that they choose to live at. And I can still have them work as efficiently as many of my other editors, which is so convenient and nice. And the great thing is I can just keep adding to this type of server workflow. Because if I hire a new editor anywhere in the country, I can send them their own unit, I can have them connected to the internet, I can sync the things together. And just like that, they're ready to rock and roll. And the setup has been seamless and incredibly easy, way easier than I thought, because honestly, that was one of the biggest hang ups is was this going to be hard to actually set up? And the answer is no, it's been awesome. Thank you so much to Synology for hooking me up with a rig. And hopefully if you follow my channel for a while, you know that I wouldn't bring this video to you if it didn't work. And that's why I tested it for six months, made sure it worked before I brought this video to you. But I'm happy to report it works. Hope this video is helpful. There's links down below to some more information about how they're not systems work and where you can buy them and all that stuff. You also can reach out to them and they can answer questions for you as well. I'm not tech support for Synology. So don't ask me those questions in the comments like a lot of people tend to do. They can help you with that. And they've been tremendous when I had had any random questions, but the process is super simple.