Facilis Case Study: Facilis Solutions Support Community Access Facilities
Norwood Community Media is celebrating their twenty-year anniversary in Norwood, Massachusetts. The current NCM studio was built within the sprawling new high school campus in 2013. The NCM facility provides public and student-run productions, broadcasting of government assembly, and sporting events. Executive Director Jack Tolman was NCM’s first hire in 2004 and has established a station and a staff that consistently produces high quality programming for the town of Norwood. NCM has been recognized at the National Level by being a five-time winner of the Alliance for Community Media award for Overall Excellence.
Of the six current staff members at NCM, four are graduates of the Norwood television program. “We have alumni in broadcast facilities all over the country,” says Tolman, “Our students work at Bravo, MLB, CNN, and they always tell us that their experience at NCM studios started their careers.” Norwood boasts the longest-running daily live high school newscast in New England, broadcasting every school day for over 10 years.
NCM has a Facilis HUB24 with 192TB of capacity. This is the third server generation they have purchased from Facilis since starting with a 48TB system in 2011. “We double the size of the server about every six or seven years because of higher bitrate video, and the amount of content we’re capturing.” says Tolman, “When it comes time to expand, we never think twice about whether to stay with Facilis. The HUB server is the center of our workflow, and amazingly in 14 years, I don’t recall any downtime.” The client workstations are Apple workstations, connected via Ethernet to the server. The application of choice is Adobe Premiere Pro. The editing workstations upload stories to a Tightrope playout system.
The server also has a Facilis Object LTO library, managed by FastTracker asset management. The library can back up the entire contents of the HUB24 server, with unlimited capacity when tapes are removed from the library for storage. “This system not only gives us a great way to work collaboratively, but it also serves as the historical archive for the town.” says Tolman, “We have digitized footage in this system that goes back to World War Two, and it feels great to have all that history safely stored.”
Franklin.TV is a mid-sized community TV studio serving thirty-four thousand residents of Franklin, Massachusetts. They began as a nonprofit organization in 2012. Their first few years were spent purchasing and renovating a five thousand square foot commercial building as a main studio. They constructed and operate community station Franklin Public Radio 102.9FM, on-air 24/7 and streaming online at wfpr.fm.
Peter Fasciano is the Executive Director of Franklin TV and Radio. A man of many talents and a long history in the industry, he oversaw the growth of the studio from the early days in a trailer to a professional studio space, where since 2012, all the magic happens. “Our main facility has two TV studios and two radio studios. We also have a TV kitchen for cooking programs.” Says Fasciano, “Because we produce both TV and Radio programming for Comcast & Verizon, along with stream, VoD and podcast distributions, our workflow accommodates TV interview programs that can also become radio podcasts. In the same way, radio programs can evolve to become TV programs.”
Franklin.TV runs four Blackmagic Design DaVinci Resolve on Dell towers. While also incorporating other image and sound processing on every system, timeline editing is the focus. Each edit system is connected via a direct 10Gb/s Ethernet run to the Facilis HUB16 system as both production storage and nearline archive.
“Many of our TV programs are recorded in bulk. That is, we apply the efficient Mon-Fri strip production approach of many syndicated programs.” Says Fasciano, “We shoot three to five shows in a sitting, then edit each as needed per their release schedule. Each program’s three to six camera multi-camera media, Zoom feed and line cut is ingested into our 96TB Facilis HUB16 server as a group of projects and then scheduled for graphics and edit.”
“Our entire operation is handled by five full-time staffers and a few free-lance production folks. At our busiest, we produce up to five hundred programs a year. We don’t have full-time tech support staff, so we rely on companies that offer timely tech support. Facilis has been very responsive with answers and follow-up if we have any questions, and it’s rarely needed as the system’s performance has been consistently solid. It just works!”
About Facilis Technology
Founded in 2003, Massachusetts-based Facilis Technology, Inc. designs and builds premium, turnkey shared storage solutions for collaborative media production across all content creation workflows. Their production-proven solutions are designed for use by the craft editor, facility engineer, and owner-operator alike. Flexible, scalable, and compatible with industry-standard creative solutions, Facilis’ products blend seamlessly into any network environment. https://www.facilis.com/
For more information, please contact:
Facilis Technology
108 Forest Avenue – Suite 200
Hudson, MA 01749
Kelly Taranto – Sales & Marketing Director
pr@facilis.com
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