When Trevor Stonebank and Brett Lindsay founded Brave Channels in South Africa, they had an idea: give editors the ability to work from anywhere without compromise. To bring that vision to life, they created EVA—a fully virtualized post-production platform designed to enable film and television teams to Edit Virtually Anywhere, as Studio Network Solutions (SNS) has claimed in a statement.

But delivering on that promise required a shared storage solution to handle a wide range of video formats, resolutions, and workflows that their customers would bring to the virtual environment.

Workflow For Remote Production

‘Survivor South Africa’ was the first project that put Brave Channels and their virtual platform to the test. With editorial teams spread across Johannesburg, Cape Town, and a remote island, editors needed instant access to high-resolution media without shipping drives. They implemented a fully remote Avid Media Composer workflow—with bin locking so editors could collaborate on episodes—and completed the project within budget and ahead of schedule.

However, there was certainly room for improvement. Brave Channels started investigating and testing new software and hardware products. Finally, the selected EVO.

Some of the reasons why the chosed this solution were “service availability and support, operating systems and MAM functionality, expandable and fully managed volumes, versatility and compatibility, and integration with our existing software packages and systems”, details Stonebank.

“SNS EVO allows for effective cross NLE use, which suited us perfectly as we work with Avid, Adobe, and Resolve across multiple productions. It was easy to set up and share volume access across different users”, adds Lindsay.

Virtual Post-Production Powered By EVO

CEO Brett Linday explains some of the challenged they had to face before implementing EVO: “We have always been looking for high performance storage at a price point that would allow us to scale. SNS seems to be in the goldilocks zone for performance and price while also giving us the confidence that we are investing in best of breed technology for our infrastructure”.

To try to meet the demands of modern virtual production, Brave Channels turned to EVO shared storage for its performance, reliability, and feature set.

Lindsay notes how EVO supports their remote workflow model: “Our remote model works differently to most. We have users VDI (Virtual Desktop Interface) into our high-performance VM (Virtual Machine) environment. Within this environment the VMs are connected at 10Gb network allowing for fast access to media when and as they need. For ingest we would media manage into the EVOs”.

CTO Trevor Stonebank continues: “For us it is mainly about the added value that SNS EVO brings to the party and the ease of integration into our existing environments. The SNS EVO allows us to effectively manage our users and other storage volumes from one space in the environment. The OS expedites our searches and helps streamline our workflows for our clients, creating a faster, more user-friendly experience”.

“SNS EVO is the only storage solution, manufactured bespoke for our industry, which offers all the aspects we require in our ideal workflow at a competitive price without any hidden costs”.  Lindsay agrees: “I would happily die on the hill with EVO”.

All media content is managed within Brave Channels’ private cloud infrastructure. Customers have access to EVO’s built-in media asset management, proxy generation, and automation tools. Brave Channels built their own custom workflow integrations using EVO’s APIs.

Additionally, EVO’s support for Adobe Premiere Pro, DaVinci Resolve, Avid Media Composer, and other video editing tools tries to ensure that Brave Channels can accommodate customer workflows within their virtual studio environment.