The Slow Mo Guys choose SYMPLY LTO

How SYMPLY LTO has fixed a problem that's been building for the Slow Mo Guys' Gavin Free over the last 10 years.

Gavin Free started a YouTube channel in 2010 and has had almost 2.3 billion views and now has over 14.6 million subscribers.

Gavin started out in the industry as a Digital Imaging Technician (DIT) before specializing in the use of high-speed Phantom cameras. He later enlisted the assistance of fellow slow mo fanatic Dan Gruchy and The Slow Mo Guys was born.

A lot of the content that Gavin likes to shoot is captured at 90,000 frames per second, which stretches out one second of captured footage to one hour when played back at a typical 24/25p frame rate. This is perfect for the ‘offensively crisp’ slow motion footage that The Slow Mo Guys are renowned for, but less friendly to their data storage requirements. Gavin’s current camera of choice is a Phantom TMX that demands approximately 1GB of storage for every one-thousand frames it captures, which is 90GB per second (give or take). In Gavin’s own words they are left with “massive data storage needs.” 

Earlier this year Gavin contacted GTC Sponsor, Symply with a problem:

“I have a lot of redundancy with RAIDs but not a lot of actual backup capacity.” 

Gavin keeps most of the footage they shoot so after filming sessions he’s “left with an absolute wedge of data to deal with.”  And up until this point, all their data has been stored on hard drives. This is why Gavin has turned to Symply and the use of LTO data tape technology to fix a problem that’s been building over the last ten years. And will make the next ten years and beyond much more bearable.

More often than not, videos that The Slow Mo Guys put out will include throwbacks from much older footage and Gavin always prefers to edit in the original raw footage. Rummaging through his shelves and trying to find the files on whatever drive he happened to save the footage on was not only time consuming and cumbersome but also potentially unreliable, especially as a lot of the footage (and the drives it is stored on) are notably aging. Choosing to use a SymplyDIT LTO-9 alongside YoYotta LTFS software has revolutionized Gavin’s data management, providing him with a much more convenient and reliable long-term storage solution. 

More information can be found at: gosymply.com