SVG Sit-Down: iodyne's Michael Gitig on Meeting a Team's Rising Content-Delivery Demands

The company's Pro Data portable storage unit enabled the Dallas Cowboys production group to reduce late nights at training camp

With the NFL regular season now a month old, team production groups are being asked to deliver more than ever. Live, social, streaming, and sponsor content is up 31.5% year over year, according to WSC Sports, but staffing and budgets haven't kept pace. Much of that added volume lands on the least visible parts of the operation: ingest, file transfers, storage, and access to footage.

Few teams feel that squeeze more than the Dallas Cowboys. The club's Creative Video Group has grown from about 200 shoots a year to more than 500, and training camp packs much of that work into a few weeks away from the team's home facility. For the past two preseasons, the group has run its camp production room off iodyne's Pro Data. It's a portable, encrypted storage unit that lets up to four editors work directly from the same media at the same time.

SVG spoke with Michael Gitig, senior director, strategic initiatives, iodyne, about how the Cowboys' deployment reflects the larger industry trends, why ingest is usually the first place that rising demand shows up, how fragmented storage quietly drains staff time, and one change that teams can make this season to grow output without adding headcount.

iodyne's Michael Gitig: We solve one specific problem. Ironically, it's the most obvious while, simultaneously, the most hidden problem: lack of time. For anyone who isn't familiar, what does iodyne do for sports production teams, and where does it typically fit in their workflow?

iodyne builds data solutions for the edge, which is our shorthand for anywhere your team works away from home. When a team leaves their home stadium, the workflow gets messy fast: bus-powered drives everywhere, people running around, quick setups and quick teardowns so everyone makes the flight home. The people doing that are good at it. The gear just wasn't built for it.

What those teams need in the field is what they already have at home: one place where media lands, with easy access for the rest of the team, without a person in the middle moving files around. That's the problem we work on.

Pro Data is a portable, encrypted storage unit that up to four computers connect to directly over Thunderbolt, all at the same time. The whole team works off one secure unit you can carry in a backpack and have running in about five minutes. It sits between the camera card and the timeline, which is the stretch that sets the pace for everything downstream. Card gets ingested faster, clip outs and edits get finished sooner, and we help keep the workflow moving and the data secure, so the team can focus on the job and not on managing data.

Can you provide an overview of the work you did with the Cowboys and how iodyne enhanced their production group's workflows?

Training camp is a stress test for any sports content team. You're away from home, working out of a hotel room instead of a facility. Sponsored content needs to be delivered. Players, coaches, and the team all need content. Marketing and social media are amassing material for [both] the moment and throughout the season. And on top of that, practice happens every day, and the reactive stuff has to go out fast.

All of this happens in a tight time frame. You have a few weeks to get all of it done before the season starts. The Cowboys' Creative Video Group has gone from about 200 shoots a year to more than 500, and camp is where all that volume gets squeezed into the smallest window.

For the past two seasons, they've used a 48TB Pro Data as the hub for the preseason video-production room. At this year's, which ran July 29 to Aug. 18, four computers connected to it directly over Thunderbolt. Shooters ingested their own media as soon as they walked in, and all the original camera files landed in one main container. From there, ownership moves to whoever needs it next, with one click to release and one click to attach. It's nearly instant, where copying to a shuttle drive can take a while.

Editors and other team members can also have their own individual containers, so the team can work in parallel. Finished pieces still go out through Frame.io, same as before, but now they get out faster.

Two other things made it work for the Cowboys. Both their IT team and the NFL require media to be encrypted in the field. Pro Data's always-on 256-bit AES runs in the background with no performance hit and nothing for anyone to manage. And, since everything was in one place with redundancy built in, they stopped running offloads overnight. They moved content to HQ in small batches during the day and saved the big transfer for the end of camp.

What problem were the Cowboys trying to solve, and what changed in how their editors work across locations?

Before Pro Data, every card went to a single ingest station. Media got copied to a spinning-disk RAID, organized, renamed and transcoded, then copied again to small drives so that different team members could start working on edits or clip outs. Finished pieces came back through the same RAID for delivery.

That's fine at a modest volume, but, at 500 shoots a year, the whole operation runs at the speed of that one station. For the Cowboys, it meant Director of Creative Video Drew Ferguson or someone on his team was handling a lot of it, and camp days ran from 8 a.m. until 2 or 3 a.m. In his words, We were actually being inefficient at the end of the day.

What changed is the waiting. There are no more small drives to shuffle around and track down and no more copying the same files over and over. Ingest is quicker, and the files are available sooner, so the team starts work earlier instead of sitting around waiting for data to move.

Nobody has to tr

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