Overnight Success
Posted on Dec 1, 2023 by FEED Staff
Next-day Signiant Media Shuttle file transfers transform Bunim Murray’s TV-production reality
Sponsored editorial
Words by Scott Carroll, senior manager of marketing and communications, Signiant
It’s just after midnight on location in Thailand…
Following days of shooting the hit reality TV series The Challenge, a Bunim Murray Productions courier carries terabytes of content by hand to the editorial team in Los Angeles. They need a better way to move fresh content to their edit suites than babysitting drives on international flights every three days.
Founded in 1987 in Glendale California, near Los Angeles, Bunim Murray Productions is a pioneering force behind reality TV. They produce award-winning shows for networks like MTV, E!, HBO and Nickelodeon including The Real World, Road Rules and The Family Stallone.
Moving content from remote locations to editors in LA costs time and money. The Challenge might shoot in South Africa one week, Thailand the next and Europe after that. During peak times, up to 250 employees work on four to ten shows simultaneously from locations around the world.
Transferring terabytes of footage as fast as possible is mission critical. With shrinking budgets and tight deadlines, time is precious. After experimenting, Bunim Murray turned to Signiant Media Shuttle to create a consistent, 24-hour turnaround. The hours they got back easily paid for the switch.
“The time we saved, the hours we can gain back – it makes sense for us financially,” explains Daniel Shott, director of post technologies for Bunim Murray. “After a 30-minute training session, we were confident enough to build out for five different shows. The things that we’d have relied on tech support to do with other solutions, we were able do ourselves in five minutes with Media Shuttle.”
On a typical shoot, DITs collect 3TB of footage daily and load it on local storage. Raw footage is sent via Media Shuttle to Wasabi Hot Cloud Storage. From there, the editorial team uses Shuttle to get the content they need.
“We found it much more of a reliable solution for our production teams, which were already scattered and running long shifts,” says Shott. “We loved that once we switched to Media Shuttle, we could put that [Wasabi] cloud destination in the middle and know it was always going to be there, ready to go whenever we wanted to do a transfer. We live in that immediacy. We’ve come to rely on Media Shuttle to be our everyday solution and never have to worry.”
Shott continues: “Now, when a show is scouting for a location, available bandwidth is always the factor. We’re looking for that from day one, knowing we’re going to be using that workflow. Once we installed it, we started finding other use cases for it.”
Learn more about Media Shuttle, the easiest and most reliable way to send any size file, anywhere, fast: signiant.com/shuttle
Originally published in the Winter 2023 issue of FEED.
