Creativity That Begins & Evolves With G-Tech

There are moments in life that can take your breath away and one such moment was experienced recently by G-TEAM ambassador Nino Leitner, while filming at the Shamwari Game Reserve in South Africa.

Watching two young elephants wrestling in a nearby lake, and recalling the prevalence of poachers in the area, Nino felt compelled to take action.

With the help of G-Technology and South African company Highspeedworx, Nino spent five days filming at Shamwari to showcase the glory and endangerment of Shamwari's magnificent creatures. The bad news was that he needed to present the finished documentary within a two week deadline, twelve hours away from the conveniences of Cape Town, and 8,700km away from his editing team in Austria.

In preparing for his trip, Nino faced a number of challenges. As with any filming job, his workflow would encompass data capture, backup, ingestion for editing, and export. However, the amount and types of footage he would capture, combined with the intensely short turn-around times for sending files to his team back home, required some rather notable work-arounds.

Over five days, shooting with cameras capable of 100+ FPS at 6K resolution and drones, Nino and his team collected over 30TB of raw content, copies and backup – putting a huge strain on their storage needs.

"You have to constantly offload that stuff in the field," says Nino. "This presents a problem because if you use a normal external hard drive, it will take a long time to transfer just a few shots. You're talking around half a terabyte most of the time. You have to select shots on the camera, otherwise, it's just too insane. Even still, you're left with a mountain of data, and then you need to find a way to deal with it."

Nino needed a storage solution with high capacity, reliability and performance that's optimised for the harsh, rolling plains of Shamwari.

Based on Thunderbolt 2 technology, just like all other G-Technology Studio solutions, the new G-SPEED Shuttle XL with Thunderbolt was the perfect solution. The drive comes in two models, each with eight bays, and is stocked with Enterprise-class 8TB drives. The first Shuttle XL model can hold up to 64TB of raw, RAID ready capacity and the second model places ev Series Bay Adapters in the last two bays. This leaves six bays for filling with Enterprise-class hard drives (up to 48TB with 8TB drives) and two bays ready to accept Evolution Series drive modules and readers like G-DRIVE ev RaW and ev Series.

"One of the big problems with hard drives and computers in general is that they're really not made for outside use," says Nino. "You always need to find just the right spots – level, shielded from the weather, and so on. Even if you can do that, it's still really made for office use. It can't take a beating. The entire concept of the G-SPEED Shuttle XL with Thunderbolt is that they look like jerry cans. You can carry them around with their top handle very easily. They're heavy, but they are also very robust, and there's even a Pelican case that fits perfectly around it. It doesn't get more rugged than this in a hard drive RAID."

As soon as camera operators arrived back at the lodge with mags or flash cards, the top priority was to back up their data. Software on Nino's computer copied files onto both G-SPEED Shuttle XL with Thunderbolt units simultaneously. Both units were configured in RAID 5, providing further file protection against the possible failure of any single drive in either enclosure.

Nino then began to export additional copies of the data onto a G-Technology G-DRIVE ev ATC – also perfect for out-of-the-office conditions with its rugged exterior.

There's satisfaction in a well-executed plan, but more deeply gratifying for Nino is the sense that his work may play some part in helping to raise awareness about the peril of poaching. For most of the world to appreciate beauty, it must be presented in a strikingly beautiful way, and that process begins with the creation and protection of that footage. For Nino, and countless other creatives, that protection begins, evolves and travels around the world on G-Technology solutions.

Image: Nino Leitner, G-Technology.

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(JP)