DVS in Hannover

I've just got back from a training course in Germany with DVS - we sell for them in the UK and they have a great product range for standard and hi-def television as well as film DI workflows. We installed their SAN and two Clipsters at Midnight Transfer earlier this year. They present a very integrated solution if you are in the business of dealing with film dailies or grading and the Clipster is a solid "Swiss army knife" type gadget - it'll deal with every uncompressed image format used in film (typically DPX files) and every variation of video raster. I'd not used the editing and effects features before but really enjoyed three days of getting to grips with it and the v.2 software.

Stephan & Emanuelle from Post Logic, Chia from DVS (our trainer), myself and Ben (Root6) who enjoyed the fact that we got to hire a 5-series BMW!

We also got taken through the hardware of the Clipster from a maintenance point of view and spent the last day doing SAN configuration. Their SAN is based around ADIC's StoreNext file system and as such allows you to have clients using all the common OSes - Windows, Linux, Unix (variants as well as IRIX for SG) as well as OS-X Tiger. They use X24 raidheads to control the array and so the system is not burdened with RAID operations (unlike a Unity).

Hannover is a nice city - we trawled around the Christmas market and saw the statues of the three Nanas by Niki de Saint Phalle - many thanks to Chia from DVS for entertaining us!