Apple hardware and software are proving their worth as the Sundance Channel kicks off the Sundance Channel Festival Dailies on Monday night. The “Dailies” are half-hour television segments produced by the Sundance Channel that give viewers an inside look into the Sundance film festival — all of the film crews have Macs and production for the show is done using Macintosh equipment.
“Everybody here has a PowerBook,” Phil Hack, Line Manager of Sundance Channel Festival Dailies, told MacCentral. “The whole facility is powered by Apple gear in one way or another.”
Hack said they built five fully functioning camera studios and separate production facilities. The edit suite features eleven dual 2.5GHz Power Mac G5 systems, with 23-inch Cinema Displays, running Apple’s Production Suite, which contains Final Cut Pro HD, Motion and DVD Studio Pro 3.
In addition, each edit system is fitted with Xsan, a fibre channel card and an Airport Extreme card for Internet access. The Xsan consists of two 5.6TB Xserve RAIDs, two dual 2.3GHz Xserve G5s, two Qlogic Sanbox 5200 switches, a gigabit ethernet switch, and 2gb/sec glass fibre and copper connecting all the equipment together.
“We approached Apple because we could get high-quality products without spending millions of dollars,” said Hack.
The Festival Dailies run every night from January 24-29, 2005 at 9:00 pm ET.