Corporate Video Team Carries Company’s People-Centered Culture Around The World With StorNext

Founded more than 125 years ago, Barry-Wehmiller today is a fast-growing $2.5 billion global powerhouse serving the packing, corrugation, sheeting, and paper conversion industries. Its corporate vision stresses the importance of team members’ contributions and creating a culture of communication and personal fulfillment. The company’s CEO, Bob Chapman, is co-author of Everybody Matters: The Extraordinary Power of Caring for Your People Like Family, which argues that companies ought to create a better world by building a broad community that includes team members, their families, suppliers and customers.

Communication Key to Corporate Culture

Maintaining that culture across more than 80 companies and 11,000 team members places a premium on effective communication—and Barry-Wehmiller relies on its corporate video team to play an important role. But the video team was hobbled by an aging infrastructure that wasn’t designed for video production, so they had a hard time keeping up with the demand.

Aging System Can’t Keep Up

“Our video production system used a share on the corporate NAS filer that wasn’t designed for video production and couldn’t keep up with what we needed to do,” says Chad Harris, Barry-Wehmiller producer. “The performance limitations made it feel like our team was running through molasses—and to collaborate on projects, we ended up passing hard drives around. I had to review footage in Final Cut Pro’s proxy setting, so I couldn’t really tell what it looked like.”

They decided to upgrade and called on 1303 Systems, an experienced integrator that specializes in video production environments. The needs were clear: increased performance, editing of files in place at native resolution, and direct file sharing. Equally important was making sure there was no negative impact on the corporate IT environment, and that system would be easy to install and maintain.

StorNext Pro Studio Provides the Answer

The team selected Quantum StorNext Pro Studio with 96TB of high-performance disk connected to a dedicated Fibre-Channel fabric. Pro Studio is a fully integrated turnkey media solution that includes Quantum’s StorNext software, an Xcellis Workflow Director, and high-speed RAID storage compatible with Apple environments. It provides high-speed file sharing over Fibre Channel that allows multiple editors to work on the same files at the same time at full resolution—dramatically decreasing the time required to complete projects. It also provides scalability and gives customers the option of setting up automated archiving.

“The 1303 team, which has been working with Barry-Wehmiller for several years, is experienced in providing StorNext support, and the service team at Quantum is terrific,” explains Thad Vaughn, vice president of operations and infrastructure at 1303 Systems. “They give corporate IT groups the same kind of backing that they give to specialized agencies, television production companies, and movie studios.”

Production Times Cut in Half, Improved Quality, and Important ROI

With the new system in place, work goes faster and editors collaborate directly. Projects that used to take 60 days are now finished in 25 to 30. And the days of looking at projects using grainy proxy settings are over—producers can see content in full resolution. “When we brought in Quantum, we were not only doing one stream of 4K footage, we were doing multiple streams of 4K footage,” says Harris.

“Since we’ve put the Quantum system in, we’ve not only been able to produce super high-quality production at a very fast turnaround, but we’ve been able to show management how important video is,” explains Elias Huch, Barry-Wehmiller video production leader. “And we’ve been able to show a really important return on investment.”