Speaker 1: In a world full of noise and distractions, where every day brings new challenges and opportunities, there's a place where stories come to life, inspiring individuals to rise above their circumstances and reach for their dreams. With me today is Dan Schiffmacher, Productions Operations Coordinator at Goalcast. The creative force behind the scenes, weaving together the narratives that touch hearts and change lives. Dan, thanks for being here with us today.

Speaker 2: Hey, thanks for having me.

Speaker 1: You know, this past April, Dan joined us at NAB in Las Vegas to tell the story of Goalcast. But for those of you who couldn't make it, we have it here for you today. To start out, can you tell me a bit about your workflow before you rolled out Backblaze?

Speaker 2: Yeah, so before Backblaze, we had a couple different solutions. We had a network storage that we were putting files on. We had, I think we were using Dropbox. We were using Frame.io for review and approve, but also we were using it for its archival purposes. We were storing stuff on there as well. So we had files in different places. We had even a Google Drive that had a bunch of files on it.

Speaker 1: So files are all over the place and multiple processes overlap with each other. And of course, a ton of deadlines to get things out the door. What other types of challenges did you run into?

Speaker 2: So between having like our in-house storage kind of building up and from the production teams and the external drives and just having, you know, we'd have like these kind of receiving computers where we'd plug in the drives and transfer footage and make proxies and all that. And those, you know, all of those would be building up with hard drives, just external sitting out of it. And I'm kind of the one who manages a lot of it. So I'm trying to do that remotely and just trying to tell people, oh, OK, see all these different drives? They're starting to pile up. So the hunt began for a new solution.

Speaker 1: Tell me, how did that go and what led you to Backblaze?

Speaker 2: So Backblaze kind of came at a time where we were looking at different options for different things. So we already started using Lucidlink a little bit, which is kind of like a cloud network storage thing. For active projects and stuff, Lucidlink is great. But to store all of our data, like that essentially we weren't using anymore, we wanted to try something different.

Speaker 1: So we have Lucidlink on one end for cloud NAS flexibility, and Backblaze came into the picture as the long-term storage. What else did you tie into the workflow?

Speaker 2: We were also using Iconic, which is kind of a surface level media asset manager. And so they were able to scan Lucidlink and then you're also able to connect Backblaze to that too.

Speaker 1: So that's the trifecta. Store content in Backblaze, use Iconic to upload and review that content, then use Lucidlink for editing. And once the project is all wrapped, it goes back into Backblaze. So in the past, things were everywhere and it was a big mess. How are things now?

Speaker 2: So now, we're not waiting for external hard drives anymore. The footage just shows right up in Iconic.

Speaker 1: So from the technical aspect, it sounds great. Your editors get immediate access to the footage they need with a set of tools that are all tied together. How else have you benefited?

Speaker 2: Overall, it'll help us save money from not storing files that we haven't even looked at in a year. The turnaround time went from a few, sometimes depending on if we got the footage or not on the external drives, like a week or so sometimes, to relatively within one or two days of all the footage being up. Once the footage is all uploaded, we can almost immediately start working on the projects.

Speaker 1: You know, that's great. And I want to thank Dan for taking some time to share his story with us. If you want to read Goldcast's full story, check out the link below. And if you're ready to move your workflow to the cloud, check out Backblaze.com to get started. Thanks for watching.