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January 2010 Digital Rapids StreamZHD Encoding System Boosts Editing-to-Delivery Workflow Efficiency for Renegade
www.getrenegade.com
by Brian Stetson, Director of Post Production, Renegade
"[StreamZHD] has given us greater efficiency in delivering our product, and saves us money by saving us time."
"I love its ability to support any input – from live sources to digital files – and its encoding speed is another huge benefit. This system screams!"
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 Based in Hunt Valley, Maryland, Renegade (www.getrenegade.com) is a content creator and advertising agency with in-house production and post production facilities. Our clients include Comcast, Time Warner, DEWALT, Ripken Baseball, Hair Club for Men and Women, Towson University and many more. Originally founded as a video production company focused on the cable industry in 1988, we now offer our clients a wide variety of services including strategic planning, creative development, production, post production, interactive design, training and more from our 25,000 square foot facility.
In addition to responsibility for running the Post Production department and daily creative duties, I also oversee our IT department and all of Renegade’s technological needs. In 2008, we began looking for a new encoding system that could produce high-quality MPEG-2 deliverables from any of our six high definition editing suites with much greater efficiency than our existing workflow. The solution was Digital Rapids' StreamZHD.
Our edit suites feature Avid systems (Windows-based Media Composer Adrenaline, Symphony Nitris and Media Composer Mojo SDI) alongside Apple Mac workstations running Adobe After Effects, Photoshop, Illustrator, Flash, Dreamweaver, and Apple DVD Studio Pro. One of our suites also features Final Cut Pro editing. All of the Avid systems are connected to a 24TB Avid Unity centralized storage system that houses all of our video footage and project information. The Unity SAN (storage area network) and all of its clients are also integrated with an Avid Interplay digital asset and workflow management system.
Our original encoding workflow used a dedicated hardware encoder card within one of the Mac systems. The SDI output of the Avid Media Composer was connected to the input of that card, with encoding triggered manually – essentially pressing "play" on the Avid, then pressing "encode" on the Mac, and finally stopping the encodes manually once the program was complete. While the encoding was performed in real time and the quality was acceptable, the Avid system was tied up throughout the encode, unavailable for what it was really designed for -- editing. Also problematic was that encoding could only be done within that one edit suite.
Seeking greater workflow efficiency plus encoding availability from all of our suites, I asked equipment supplier and systems integrator Digital Video Group about MPEG-2 encoding servers, and they recommended Digital Rapids. After researching StreamZHD, we chose it for its output quality, universal input and output format compatibility, ease of use and efficiency.
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