Davids, Brian

Brian Davids is the VP of Technical Operations for Echo Entertainment Inc. and runs his own IT consulting business Converging Lines.

Brian believes that technology is here to help us. His focus and what drives him, is to allow technology to do the heavy lifting, making for better/faster workflows, easing the work of an employee, or helping with mundane IT tasks.

Brian has worked for his family typesetting business, the National Football League Creative Services Division, and Echo Entertainment, Inc. He has been working with computers since 1978 and takes pride in always looking for the next “best thing”! His years of IT knowledge has led him to building his own flexible workflows that work great for small and medium sized Post Production Facilities. He has 21 Synology NAS systems in Echo’s operation and well over 1 Petabyte of data available for editors, clients, and staff.

On a personal note: Something you should know about me is that I am a control freak. I want to know where my data is, and have full control over it. Cloud solutions just don’t give me that warm fuzzy feeling. Personal Cloud, Synology, gives me all of the best features. Full control over my on-site media and the ability to access this media remotely. Having setup my own cloud has been a game changer for the Echo team and it has brought a huge amount of flexibility to our workflows. I believe in Synology so much that I have my own Synology at home and I am currently working on digitizing and organizing old tapes, photos, and movies. It’s a ton of work, but the Synology NAS helps every step of the way.

 

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Some more info about me…

I started my business life working with computers in 1978. At that time it was a very specialized 64k computer in the typesetting industry. We used paper tape and 8” floppy discs in those days, but that was the beginning of my storage journey.

In 1988 I started working for the National Football League’s Publishing division. It was during this experience that the Internet came into play and I was a member of the League-wide Technical Advisory Committee where we focused on infrastructure and direction for the League. I was the only Macintosh operation in the League and my responsibilities as Director of Computer Operations and Information Technology were literally anything that plugged into a wall.

In 2004 I started working with Echo Entertainment and the transition from tape to digital changed everything. Being able to store the massive amount of data that was coming into play was where I started to cut my teeth on building systems. I built my own servers for handling media. Linux and Windows Systems were my primary focus with the largest drives I could put in them. These systems were ok, but management was tough and took a lot of my time. At Echo I’m responsible for storage, media archiving, on-site servers for production teams, editing networks, and streaming and SRT distribution, a vMix operator and I even edit from time to time.