UNC Football Taps Rimage for Affordable Archiving

Until a month ago, the football video staff at the University of North Carolina archived its coaches’ film on hard drives, but Chris Luke, director of football video operations, considered that a dangerous situation: if his server failed, the football coaches would suddenly find themselves video-less, a huge disadvantage in today’s coaching game.

“We were just putting content on terabyte hard drives or standalone, portable hard drives,” Luke explains. “I was looking for a hard-disc solution to archive all of my media so that, in the case of a server failure, I have the actual hard disc that I can put back into the system and keep everything together.”

Luke found his solution in perhaps an unlikely place. He purchased a 5400 automated on-demand disc publishing system from Rimage, a company that has made its name in the medical field with the Medical Disc System, which has been installed in thousands of medical and healthcare facilities worldwide.

“Sports video is a whole new industry for us,” says Jason Evans, sports video specialist for Rimage Corp. “We sold UNC a 5400 system, which is the best fit for the coaching-video market. They are using it to integrate into their DVSport editing and logging system. The 5400 can take media directly out of DVSport and copy it to DVD or Blu-ray for shelf archive.”

The 5400 is an automated file-based system that burns and prints CDs, DVDs, and Blu-ray discs for archival purposes. For Luke, the Blu-ray functionality was an important part of the sale.

“Blu-ray technology is ever expanding,” he says. “Right now, it’s 25 GB on a disc; with dual layers, you’ve got 50 GB. Somebody just came out with a 100-GB disc, so the disc layers are ever expanding. I wanted to be right there with it so that we could continue to archive our content in the future.”

With a PC built into it, the 5400 can network to multiple inputs, including cameras and editing stations, so that content can be archived directly from a camera, for example.

“Everything is file-based, and all of the metadata carries over to the content that is archived,” Evans says. “If they ever need to ingest back in, everything they need is right there.”

The Rimage system is intuitive enough to operate that after, just one day of training with the Rimage specialists, Luke’s assistant and IT support staff are running the 5400 on a daily basis. The system is fully synched with the DVSport editing system, and the automation makes copying content across multiple disks much easier on Luke.

“If I have 10 games on offense and only five can fit on each disc, Rimage will spread the content across two discs for me and know to write ‘disc 1 of 2,’” Luke explains. “This gives me the opportunity to archive content and put it in a safe place, in case something happens. I’m very happy with the system so far.”

The Rimage archiving system is priced at less than $12,000, less than $11,000 for publicly funded institutions. For more information, visit www.rimage.com.