"San Diego, California-based Deconstructive Media is a full-service video production company with credits. They’ve produced video content for some of the best-known brands in America including Google, NBC Universal, Telemundo, and many others. Their passion for quality at every level of production is evident when looking at the gear they use. RED cameras, iMac Pros, Premiere Pro….and Akitio Thunderbolt 3 storage.
“Because we shoot on RED cameras exclusively, often at resolutions greater than 4K, our need for fast, reliable storage is insatiable.” Explains Rafael Meneses, owner and principal producer at Deconstructive Media. “The Akitio Thunder3 Quad X has proven to be a worthwhile investment for us as we chose Seagate 12TB IronWolf hard drives, which gives us about 48TB of super-fast Thunderbolt 3-connected storage.
I also really like the DisplayPort on the Akitio unit so we can connect an HD monitor to it as these new iMac Pros have fewer ports on them and require use to have a rats-nest of cable adapters. While I wish the Quad X had hardware RAID like the smaller Akitio units, the Apple RAID software utility works just fine with it. If your studio has a lack of power outlets, you might appreciate the Akitio unit can also power some smaller devices.
If you haven’t played much with Thunderbolt 3 yet, you’re going to really love the raw speed. We can edit and playback up to 8K files in real-time from the Akitio unit and transferring files between two Thunderbolt 3 devices is very fast. You end up really seeing the limits of mechanical hard drives as they end up being the bottleneck. We experimented with WD and Seagate drives and found that Seagate delivered better performance in our particular workflow.
Back at NAB a few months ago, I saw a new 8-drive tower from Akitio called the OTTO and it has an option for a MINI-MAG reader in one of the drive bays. It’s not shipping yet, but when it does we’re going to get a few for the studio; as I mentioned before, we’re always in need of storage and as 5K and 8K become more mainstream we’ll effectively need to double our storage in a few years.”
If you’re in the Southern California area and looking for a solid production company to collaborate on your next project, check them out at deconstructivemedia.com.