An unscripted production company hired Ages Productions to provide media management support for the third season of a high-profile unscripted ensemble series.
The production was already operating with an established field workflow: five iMac workstations connected to twelve 12-bay Areca RAID systems over Thunderbolt. The show generated media continuously from a large multi-camera setup.
Camera packageThe production ran on a 24-hour schedule with two data wranglers on 12-hour shifts, but the media inflow was still greater than the workflow could comfortably handle.
The challenge was not only ingest speed. It was the need for a cleaner, faster, and more accountable media pipeline from set to post.
During the third season, Ages Productions helped optimize the production's existing workflow as much as possible within the limits of the current system.
After seeing the bottlenecks firsthand, Ages recommended a redesigned field workflow for the following season. The goal was to reduce hardware complexity, centralize media, increase ingest speed, improve QC visibility, and create a smoother post-production handoff.
For the fourth season, Ages Productions replaced the five-iMac, twelve-RAID setup with a customized field workflow built around a single Mac Pro with specialized high-speed field storage — fewer machines, more throughput, and one centralized place for media to live.
The new system let the media team ingest up to 16 cards in parallel and cut daily ingest from roughly 24 hours to 8. Once footage was verified, it was organized onto Field Master drives and scheduled shuttle drives for delivery to post.
Across the shoot, Ages Productions supported approximately 500 TB of original camera media in 8 days, protected the full show with two complete field backups, and prepared an additional 500 TB of media for shuttle delivery to post.
Beyond the numbers, centralizing the pipeline freed up real time on the wrangler bench for QC, logging, issue tracking, and a cleaner post-production handoff.
The rebuild also shifted the production off long-term rental dependency, helping the company transition toward owning reusable high-capacity field storage for future seasons and other shows.
A documentary production team was producing a global esports documentary series centered around a major international event in Saudi Arabia.
The series included global story coverage and home-follow shoots, but Ages Productions was responsible for the documentary media workflow at the event itself.
Because the event shoot would run for approximately eight weeks, the production needed a workflow that could handle large daily media volumes while still keeping the budget under control.
The documentary team was also much smaller than the larger live-event production operation surrounding it, which included multiple vendors, technical departments, control rooms, and buildings.
The production needed to capture and manage several types of media at the same time:
From the beginning, it was clear that the Softron HD ISO recordings would generate significantly more data than the traditional camera footage. During the first season, the production averaged approximately 10–12 hours of ISO recording per day.
The workflow also had to support post-production in Los Angeles while the event was taking place in Riyadh. Physical drive shipments could take approximately seven days by express shipping, so relying only on shuttle drives would slow down editorial access.
The challenge was to build a workflow that could reduce daily ingest time, contain equipment costs, protect media with redundant backups, and deliver AVID-ready editorial files to post without waiting for physical drives.
Ages Productions helped design and operate a lean documentary media workflow that merged multiple technical needs into a more efficient system.
Working with the Los Angeles rental house, Ages helped combine the 16-channel Softron MovieRecorder system with the documentary ingest station. This reduced the need for separate systems and helped contain rental costs across the eight-week event.
Ages also provided a technician who could serve in a dual role: Softron operator + media manager. This gave production one person who understood both the recording side and the media-management side of the workflow.
To reduce unnecessary ingest time, Ages designed the workflow so that Softron ISO recordings were written directly to high-speed field storage during capture. This avoided a large additional transfer step at the end of each day and created more time for proper media handling.
Because the post team was based in Los Angeles, the cloud upload workflow was critical. It allowed editorial to begin working with AVID-ready files without waiting for physical drives to arrive from Saudi Arabia.
For the second season, Ages Productions helped improve the workflow even further.
The original setup included a separate machine in another building recording 16 NDI streams. That media also needed to be transcoded and uploaded within the same general turnaround window.
To reduce physical movement of media between buildings, Ages worked with the event producer, vendors, and the event's IT department to create a network that allowed the documentary systems to communicate across three different buildings.
This improved workflow allowed media to be centralized into one main ingest system while still keeping local backups at each machine for safety. That redundancy mattered because power and network failures did happen during the event.
The improved networked workflow also allowed the media manager to remotely access and monitor systems from the main control room, reducing the need to physically move between buildings just to check recording systems or media status.
Ages Productions helped a small documentary team operate efficiently inside a massive international esports event.
The workflow gave production a practical balance of speed, redundancy, budget control, and remote editorial access.
Instead of treating documentary media management as a simple copy-and-backup task, Ages built a workflow that connected recording, ingest, backup, transcoding, upload, and remote monitoring into one lean media system.
A documentary production team was filming a fast-turnaround sports series following a professional baseball player through the League Championship Series and the World Series.
Because the project was scheduled to air soon after filming, post-production needed footage as quickly as possible. Depending on the city, post could sometimes receive drives the same day. In other cases, delivery depended on the fastest available FedEx option. Most of the time, the goal was for post to have the footage within approximately one day.
Internet delivery was not a practical option because the post facility's bandwidth was limited by another active project. That made physical shuttle-drive delivery the most reliable path for fast editorial access.
The production had to move quickly between cities while keeping the media workflow portable, reliable, and clean. The camera and audio package scaled up significantly between the two stages of the series.
League Championship Series packageThe crew was small and everyone had to stay mobile. Each media manager had to begin offloading during the games — often starting halfway through — so shuttle drives could be ready immediately after the game or by the following morning. For LCS specifically, the whole kit needed to be compact enough for carry-on travel whenever possible.
Ages Productions designed, sourced, built, and operated the travel-ready kits for both stages of the series — two media managers split across the leagues for LCS, then converged as one team for the World Series when the production scale jumped.
The LCS kit was a compact carry-on build using carefully selected off-the-shelf components. The World Series kit stepped up to a checked-luggage build with significantly more ingest performance to handle the larger media load, plus a Softron system added to record 16 broadcast feeds and camera angles.
Either way, the kit let media managers begin ingesting and verifying during the games, organize for post, and have shuttle drives ready for same-day or next-day delivery — clean QC, logs, and metadata included.
The result was a workflow portable enough to move city to city, powerful enough for high-resolution championship coverage, and organized enough to give post-production clean media inside a day whenever shipping allowed — without overbuilding the kit.