Meeting Growing Storage Needs of HD Production for ‘America’s Funniest Home Videos’ & New FishBowl Worldwide Media
Burbank, CA (November 10, 2011) – Vin Di Bona Productions, best known as the creator of “America’s Funniest Home Videos,” is now in its twenty-second year on ABC Television. Vin Di Bona Productions recently expanded its Avid Unity MediaNetwork™ for the third time with Archion Technologies’ Synergy high-performance storage system. Used by thousands of clients worldwide, Synergy integrates seamlessly with Unity and provides greater scalability and protection without compromising workflow and performance.
Last season, “America’s Funniest Home Videos” moved into High-Definition (HD) production, utilizing the 64 terabytes (TB) of Synergy storage to handle AFV as well as all of the content produced by FishBowl Worldwide Media, its new, next-generation studio founded in January 2010.
“We continue to add Archion’s Synergy storage to accomplish what we want without affecting our workflow,” said Sharon Arnett, Vice President of Post Production, Vin Di Bona Productions and FishBowl Worldwide Media. “Synergy has been a key part of our facility upgrade to HD and continues to be a cost-effective and highly efficient product for us, particularly as we expand into new shows with FishBowl.”
Arnett noted that FishBowl is now in production on a new TV series, “Treasure Chase,” for the Discovery Channel as well as new television shows for HGTV, MTV and truTV. FishBowl is also producing two hit web series, “Ultimate Proposal,” for Yahoo with 1.75 million views for the first webisode, and “Cute Win Fail,” currently in the YouTube Comedy Channel Top 20 with more than 10 million video views.
Key Code Media, an Archion reseller and one of Avid’s largest resellers, made the recommendation to Vin Di Bona Productions to continue to add Archion storage and then guided them through the purchase decision and installation.
“We have a strong relationship with Key Code Media and are also very happy with Archion’s very personal customer support,” Arnett added. “They’ve been great to work with; it’s wonderful to have them both working closely together as a team to satisfy our needs.”
“‘America’s Funniest Home Videos’ has been on the air for more than 20 years, and their library of content is constantly increasing in size, especially since they started broadcasting in HD last season,” said Zeke Margolis of Key Code Media. “Archion’s Synergy allows Vin Di Bona Productions to keep up with their growing storage needs by scaling their Unity in the most cost-effective manner possible. We have upgraded their Unity with Archion three times now, and each time the process has been seamless.”
“We are delighted that Vin Di Bona Productions continues to see that adding Synergy storage to their Unity MediaNetwork is their best option for improving their workflow,” said Daniel Stern, Archion’s Executive Vice President of Sales and Marketing. “Customers like these underscore our commitment to providing a compelling alternative to adding Avid storage or going through the expense and time of switching to a completely different shared storage platform.”
The Synergy Line
Archion’s line of RAID storage for Avid’s Unity MediaNetwork and Media Engine platforms has been proven with thousands of clients worldwide. The Synergy XTR™ extends the Synergy’s abilities to a full 800 MB/second and increases its capacity to an amazing 32TBs in a single chassis for Unity Media Engine (5.x). It is also certified for use with Unity MediaNetworks (v4.1x – 4.2x) and is fully compatible with other Archion-certified Unity add-on storage systems.
Synergy storage systems deliver 8-, 16- or 32 TB of storage in a compact three-rack unit design with a 16-drive chassis. With its built-in, highly intelligent hardware RAID controller to manage storage more efficiently, Synergy XTR automatically rebuilds a faulty drive so that the rest of the network is unaffected by the drive failure.
With the award winning and patent-pending Vdisk™ technology, Archion ensures compatibility between versions and that operation is transparent to the Unity system. Synergy XTR RAID controllers manage the disk drives, RAID sets and Vdisks in a more efficient manner, requiring far fewer drives than Avid storage subsystems to deliver higher capacities and resolutions.
White Paper on Hardware RAID Protection in Avid Unity Environment Available To summarize the benefits of Synergy, Archion has published a whitepaper – Uncovering the Full Potential of Avid Unity MediaNetworks: Realizing Greater Rewards without the Traditional Risks – that is available here on the Archion website. In addition, a comparison of the two add-on storage chassis — Archion Synergy vs. Avid XT — is available here.
About Vin Di Bona Productions
Vin Di Bona Productions (www.vdbp.com) is a television production company that was established by Vin Di Bona in 1986. The company’s first show was “Animal Crack-Ups,” which ran from 1987-1990. Its most popular show is “America’s Funniest Home Videos,” which premiered on ABC on November 26, 1989, and continues to air, now in its twenty-second year. In addition to “America’s Funniest Home Videos,” Vin Di Bona has been a television producer for many television shows, including “America’s Funniest People,” “MacGyver” and “Entertainment Tonight.” FishBowl Worldwide Media is an independent production company founded in 2010 by Di Bona and Bruce Gersh, with a creative team led by Susan Levison and a digital division led by David Beebe. This next-generation studio is a transmedia storyteller that creates content for distribution on multiple platforms from TV, the web, mobile, publishing, licensing and merchandising to DVD and games. www.fbwmedia.com
About Archion
Archion Technologies, based in Burbank, CA, is a leading provider of intelligent networked storage solutions specifically designed for post production and graphic professionals. Founded by a team of post production, technology and entertainment industry professionals in 1999, Archion set out to create a new standard of data protection and performance for those creating video, audio and graphical content. Since then, Archion’s high-performance storage technology has been critical to the success of hundreds of TV and feature film projects and is prominently used in Avid, Apple, Adobe, Autodesk and Pro Tools environments. www.archion.com
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