At the SMPTE Technical Conference 2014 (Booth #406) in Los Angeles, California, PostBox Systems will introduce and demonstrate their new RoguePro professional mobile studio. Engineered to meet the exacting requirements of Media Professionals, the RoguePro brings the power of the post-house to any location.
About the size of a piece of carry-on luggage, the RoguePro was designed from the ground up to handle the rigors of production and post-production life. Manufactured from extruded aluminum and assembled in Los Angeles, the RoguePro is light, rigid and highly durable. It has been specifically engineered to securely hold the new Apple Mac Pro cylinder and numerous Thunderbolt accessories in a protected and well-ventilated environment. The RoguePro has been rigorously field tested to ensure that all working components including the Mac Pro cylinder remain cool and fully functioning even in the most demanding of environments.
Martin Christien, CEO of PostBox Systems is extremely pleased with the early reception of the RoguePro. “We’ve been working closely with the production and post community for the last year and a half to get the features and design of the RoguePro perfect for their needs. What we know today is that projects are expected to work faster and more efficiently with smaller and smaller budgets. That’s why you’re seeing the lines start to blur, and jobs that were once only done in post houses are moving on set; supercomputing is finally accessible and we’ve designed a product to take advantage of it. The end result is an affordable, self-contained, and rock solid piece of kit that you can take with you all over the world. We’re really excited to see how the industry takes advantage of what we’ve built.”
Measuring just 22 inches wide, 11 inches high and 15 inches deep and costing only $12,500 for the base level system, the RoguePro mobile studio offers media professionals a cost-effective means to transport their Mac Pro and Thunderbolt peripherals in a single easy to carry, strong and secure case. Users will have the choice of providing their own Mac Pro cylinders or purchasing one at the same time as the RoguePro. If purchased together, PostBox Systems and its Resellers will install the Mac Pro into the chassis and test it along side optional peripherals such as hard drives, card readers, and PCIe accessories from companies like Sonnet, AJA, Blackmagic Design and Myricom.
The RoguePro will be available in many ‘mix-and-match’ configurations including additional PCIe slots or an 8-bay hardware RAID. Pricing and specifications for optional peripherals are available on the PostBox Systems website.
Neil Smith, CEO of LumaForge Systems is one of the first Resellers to sign up with PostBox Systems and help launch their new product, “We are witnessing a revolution in the M&E industry with the rapid adoption of digital acquisition and file-based workflows. As digital content professionals embrace the digital revolution the biggest challenge facing everyone is how to capture and process all the data being generated and how to move that data from on-site locations to facilities? And, to do all that in the most cost-effective and secure manner. There have been many approaches to mobile computing M&E solutions but none so elegant and affordable as the RoguePro mobile studio. We are delighted to be the PostBox Systems launch partner at the SMPTE Conference.”
The RoguePro equipped with a Mac Pro cylinder is more than capable of handling the most demanding HD, 2K and 4K video workflows. With Thunderbolt 2, USB3 and Ethernet connectivity for storage and I/O the RoguePro mobile studio allows media professionals to use their favorite applications wherever they want to set up shop. Adobe, Avid, Resolve, Autodesk, Colorfront, Final Cut, Scratch, etc, all run flawlessly on the RoguePro.
Josh Minney, COO of PostBox Systems notes that, “As soon as Apple released the first images of the new Mac Pro the emails started pouring in asking what we had up our sleeves. The laptop based workstations we’d been building up to that point were the fastest on the market, but the Mac Pro cylinder was a game changer for us. At NAB 2014 we demoed our RoguePro prototype on the show floor and waited for the feedback. What became immediately clear was that we’d created something far more exciting than the ingest/transcode station we’d originally set out to build. Over the following six months we collaborated with some of the smartest people in town, added a ton of useful new features and basically rebuilt the product from scratch.”
PostBox Systems will be working closely with selected and well-trained channel partners to deliver and support the RoguePro in the M&E market place. “We’re really leaning on our partners to help tailor the product to our customer’s needs,” adds Minney. “The DIT using this for dailies and video assist on a soundstage is going to have a different setup than the team heading into the rainforest for a month. Our resellers are the ones who can put together the right tech for the job because they’re closest to the customer.”
Value Added Resellers like LumaForge Systems provide additional services and technology solutions to compliment the power of the Mac Pro based RoguePro system. “At LumaForge, we’re continually on the look out for new technologies that leverage the power of Moore’s Law and deliver the ‘best bang for the buck’ to our customers,” notes Smith. “The incredibly powerful combination of the RoguePro mobile studio with our OpenZFS based LumaSTOR storage appliance and Myricom 10GbaseT networking means that M&E customers get the double benefit of a mobile computing supercomputer with all the reliability of an Enterprise worthy shared storage platform.”
PostBox Systems, LumaForge Systems and Myricom will be demonstrating variations of the RoguePro along side a 10GbasedT networked LumaSTOR shared storage solution that can easily and cost-effectively meet the high bandwidth and data security needs of M&E professionals working in the field, a hotel room, or home office and studio facility.
Come and see the new RoguePro mobile studio in action at Booth #406 at the SMPTE Conference in Los Angeles from Tuesday October 22 to Thursday October 24 at the Lowes Hotel, Los Angeles.
For more about PostBox Systems (formally known as DIT Station) go to www.postboxsystems.com
For more about LumaForge Systems go to www.lumaforge.com.
For more about Myricom (now a subsidiary of CSP, Inc.) go to www.myricom.com
For more about the SMPTE Conference 2014 go to www.smpte.org/smpte2014
