The Challange
When the team in charge of creating and posting video for the company’s many online services realised that its legacy partner, Apple, was changing its approach to media workflow solutions, the team knew a change was needed to support Fairfax’s continued rapid growth.
“In the old days, the team started out with a few individual Mac edit suites,” explains David McMillan, Head of Production at Fairfax Media. “But we quickly upgraded to shared storage built around Apple’s Xsan to give better workflow, faster performance, and a more collaborative approach. We had to do that to keep up with the growth in demand for video content and to meet the short production cycles that always characterize a news-driven organisation.”
The system that Fairfax built was Apple to the core— Xserve RAID storage, Xsan on Xserves for high-speed collaboration, and Mac edit stations running Final Cut Pro as the primary production tool.
“The expanded system served us well and got us to a production system that could sustain production of 300 video clips a week,” says McMillan. “But we knew we were going to need more. So when Apple announced the end-of-life plans for Xserve RAID and changes to the roadmap for Final Cut Pro, we realized we needed to rethink our approach and look for additional partners with a firm, long- term commitment to supporting video production.”