Bright Shadow Films

As a film production company you might deal with many clients everyday, ever since film production turn into a industry, people start to think about the idea of making everything faster, in this way you will have more advantage than others who don’t care about the communication. Nowadays, people try to make this better by digital revolution, all the stuff you heard of: google calender, skype, gmail, etc.

When it comes to the solid solution, a proper server always comes first, you might heard of server as a IT term, it’s not as far as you think in film production, in the big company you heard of: icon film, dreamwork studio, HBO, etc, that’s where the big server boxes can be founded.

So what exactly does it help in a production company?

Today, I want to show you a little bit of what a server can do in film production company.

1) Files Back up: now if you think your harddrive is stable enough then you should google “harddrive broken” and find our how many people suffering from harddrive everyday, we are talking about keeping you and your employee’s document safe somewhere else out of the computer, same logic for the post-production, footage, project files, all needs to be saved somewhere else as a back up.

Most server can run the back up with your LAN connected computer, daily, weekly or according to your schedule. Moreover, if you are running a linux server, the harddrive partition works better than PC, no worries for the maintaince, linux will take care of it.

2) Printer sharing server: printing is such a basic office work, if you have a printer with a net adapter then good for you, but if you don’t, server will take care of that, with a printer sharing server, you can share the printer all over the LAN, even with the VPN while you are miles away from the office.

One other thing you should consider as a good thing, printer is not consider as a healthy thing in the office, it polluted air as much as a mine powered car does(I guess), so keep the printer away from the person is the best thing you can do when you hope the office air gets better.

3) USB nanny: USB and mobile harddrive is everywhere nowadays, same as the virus, you can’t really risk your post production computer to have it, nor does your production office PC, so having a server could make it easier, normally a server with anti-virus software could help you avoid those virus, same time some 64 bits OS(WIN 2008, Linux, Mac) doesn’t have trouble with virus since most of the virus are 32 bits.

When the virus scanning is done(usually less than 10 seconds by Kaspersky), you can copy the file through the LAN to anywhere you want safely.

One more thing you should remember, Anti-virus software is not recommanded to be installed in PC, so having a server can save you from that awkward situation.

4) Internet Routing: this is a function which server can offer nicely, the server can simply control the bandwidth of your internet, especially stop the Bit-torrent, over-speed download. Server will simply arrange the speed for each computer in a average way or the way you want it to be.

5) Communication: it’s not ancient time and people no longer shout to each other in the office, you need a platform to organize a office, you can find so many server based communication software out there, such like IBM lotus, Microsoft ERP, etc.

For a production company you can easily have a platform between pre-production, management, post-production, or even with the creative guys, by having this platform, people no longer need to stick post-it everywhere, share the info by a few mouse click. The idea is share the info in group, the software in server usually offer some function like task map, status update(like twitter), file sharing, calender sync.

It’s one of the key function people looking for, a good platform now could work not only with Computer, but also with your mobile phone.

6) Website: website runs on server somewhere you probably never been to, but it could be closer! If you have enough bandwidth and one static IP(in China it’s expensive), set up a website on your server is just cool.  Even if you don’t have a website but you want to create one for the people in the company, you can do that, by creating a company wiki, you editor now could explain to most of people how to upload the footage from camera to the computer, and it’s only in your company.

Above are the 6 key functions I can think of how a server could help a film/video production company better, a little bit more:

A branded server usually cost you some money, to achieve the function, you might need:

XEON CPU*1, 2G Memory*1, Harddrive 2T to 10T or more, stable power supply with a UPS supply in case, a solid server tower case, a cool place to store it.

Usually it won’t cost you more than 2000USD for everything, depends on how big your server harddrive.

There are so many article out there introduce the server, but did you know you can set up a server with a old PC? We are going to show you how later this week how we did it.

If you have any comment or info want to share with us, feel free to leave them here, we really appreciate it.

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