Endemol Shine Achieves Seamless Remote Collaboration with Synology's Scalable Solutions

At Endemol Shine Australia, the post production team has approximately 250 connected Mac-based work stations handling over 1000TB of audio and video media. The media files are constantly turned over across Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, and even overseas.

To satisfy such massive storage need, the team has been in search of a cloud-ready solution that comes with simple installation and management, has portable design, and supports the backup solution that the team has been used to.

During the making of The Voice in 2012, Endemol Shine Australia needed a new archiving workflow to quickly transfer footage shot remotely in Fox Studio back to their primary facility. It was the first time they deployed Synology. With 2 DiskStation DS1512+, they were satisfied with the quick and effortless deployment process. This positive experience has convinced them to adopt more Synology solutions to bigger productions, such as MasterChef and Australian Survivor, where they previously would have spent a lot of time and effort taking the whole RAID/server combination back to the post-production facility.

Endemol Shine Australia later moved forward deploying more Synology NAS servers, including several RackStation and DiskStation, for their upgraded disaster recovery plan, which was previously dominated by LTO tapes. By integrating Archiware, a backup software application already familiar to the team, Endemol Shine can painlessly keep an online spinning copy of media on their Synology NAS for minimized downtime in their workflow.

More recently, Endemol Shine Australia has allowed employees living far away from the site to work remotely from the rest of their team. By replicating primary storage across WAN connections using Cloud Station ShareSync, staff working remotely can have the most up-to-date data on their DS3617xs and DS1512+ at home, while achieving seamless collaboration even far away from the office.

In addition, the low cost per TB for Synology NAS means that the production team can enable options that were previously out of budget – small teams working independently without the need for big infrastructure as well as keeping bulk media on spinning disk permanently, without having to send it off to LTO and retrieve as needed.