Storage and peripheral company OWC has acquired shared storage manufacturer Lumaforge. The Jellyfish has a new home!
Dear Final Cut Community,
Sam here. It’s such a relief to finally be able to talk about this.
Figured I’d post this on FCP.co because in many ways LumaForge was built right here on this site for this community. As some of you know LumaForge has been officially acquired by OWC (Other World Computing).
Given the world situation at the moment, it feels a little ridiculous to scream from the hills about how awesome it is that your company got acquired, so I’m not going to do that here. Instead, I just want to take a second and give a heartfelt thank you to the community that was there with us from the very beginning and whose problems this company was brought into existence to solve… and that was the Final Cut Pro X community and Mac users everywhere… and FCP.co was here for it every step of the way.
We launched the company on FCP.co:
LumaForge introduce shared storage solutions for Final Cut Pro X
Peter got the first Jellyfish Mobile we ever shipped to review here (and there’s a hilarious story about the boot drive we shipped him that we will never live down… ask me next time you see me):
First impressions of the 'JellyFish' - affordable shared storage designed for Final Cut Pro X
Ronny Courtens changed the game for us at Swiss National Television and told that story here:
How Swiss TV went FCPX - Final Cut Pro X in National Network Operations
Over the years, we have told amazing user stories and helped improve the workflows of countless video teams around the world. Here’s just a few of those:
Off The Grid-WMM: A RED-FCPX-Resolve Workflow series* Part 1 Introduction and On-Set Editorial* Part 2 Organization* Part 3 Editing* Part 4 Group Workflow and Finishing in FCPX* Part 5 Collaborating with Color, VFX & Audio Departments
STV (Denmark): STV (Denmark) Case Study: We Publish the Presentation Videos from the FCPX Tour at IBC 2016 - STV Denmark & Coremelt
La Peste FCP.co: Cut With FCPX: The Prestigious Period Mystery-Thriller "La Peste" Surpasses "Game Of Thrones" To Become The Most Watched Television Series In Spain
James Tonkin: James Tonkin Tours with the Biggest Music Artists on the Planet, Creating Stunning Concert Videos from Tons of 4K and 8K Footage in Final Cut Pro X
Apple-LumaForge at LACPUG 2016 - Replay the Final Cut Pro X 10.3 Narrative Workflow Presentation From the Los Angeles Creative Pro User Group
Thrown in the mix along the way was workflow suites and Faster Togethers at NAB, getting on the the Apple Store, taking over the very last Supermeet and so many other memories when we naively thought we could take 20 grand and go start a shared storage company and try and compete with the big guys… except we did. And we were able to do it because of this community here and your support over the years. Community matters, now more than ever, and if it were not for this one, my community at We Make Movies, and Apple and the Final Cut Pro X team, I would not have a career at all most likely.
It has been an amazing journey with you, the FCP.co community. On behalf of the team at LumaForge, I’m also very excited to tell you that while this chapter may be closing, the book is far from finished. Our next chapter is going to be the best one we have written and i am beyond excited about what we will be continuing to create for you at OWC.
So why OWC and what’s next? It’s pretty simple. Larry O’Connor.
If there was a single person and a single company that’s more passionate about the Apple ecosystem, products, and peripherals than us… it’s Larry O’Connor and the team at OWC.
He knows more about Thunderbolt, Apple Macs, chipsets, hard drives, and manufacturing than anyone I’ve ever met and he is a true knowledge base for all things in the Mac ecosystem. Want to learn a couple things? Watch these videos:
FCP.co Live Thunderbolt 4: https://eshop.macsales.com/blog/66986-thunderbolt-4-larry-oconnor-fcp/Creative Summit panel: https://eshop.macsales.com/blog/69428-fcpx-summit-larry-oconnor/
I’ve been working with OWC for quite a bit over the last year and have gotten to know him and the team well over there. There is simply no better acquiring company for the LumaForge family than OWC. They’re really just a bigger, older version of LumaForge. They care about their customers, are not a soulless mega-corporation, are passionate about the environment (also watch Kiss The Ground on Netfilx that Larry helped produce and get some real hope about the environment future) and education (they’re building 7 OWC media centers this year for the Orphaned Starfish Foundation), and more than anything, they care about solving problems for their customers more than anything else in the world.
So how’s this all going to work and what’s next? You won’t see that in this article… but you will see it in increasing velocity over 2021 and beyond.
But if you want to know what the plan is? It’s SOLUTIONS across the entire ecosystem of OWC products. When you get a sense of just how big the OWC product lineup is and how Jellyfish solutions connect to all of that, you should be able to connect some of the dots. It’s going to be fun.
Anyway, from the bottom of my heart, thank you all for joining us on this amazing ride these last few years. It was unforgettable.
The good news for all of us, though, is that the best is yet to come. Onwards and Upwards!
For the official OWC blog on the acquisition, go here:
On Tuesday the 6th of October, we welcomed Larry O’Connor, CEO and Founder of OWC for our FCP.co Live Thunderbolt 4 special. What is it? What does it do and why is it better than Thunderbolt 3?
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A few months has passed since part one of the review of the QNAP TVS-682T. So after further tinkering and testing, how did it perform and will I be buying one?
One of the most competitive areas in the storage market at the moment is the desktop NAS. We test out a double Thunderbolt 2 equipped high performance QNAP TVS-682T - desktop shared storage at Thunderbolt speeds.
Back in March 2016 I took a prototype Jellyfish portable started storage unit out on the road for a broadcast Final Cut Pro X edit. A few months later, I took a shipping model out on another high pressure, quick turnaround broadcast job. What’s new, what's changed and how did it perform?
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We haven't been attending BVE this week. That's because we have been testing out the hottest new storage product from LumaForge called 'JellyFish.' It's small, fast and got GigE or 10GigE tentacles to share media across clients. It is also very affordable.
The problem with MAMs or Media Asset Management systems was that they were expensive and required a lot of hardware to service them. Not anymore. The newly launched KeyFlow Pro is $299 and can run on a MacBook Pro. A very interesting new app.
Everybody knows the next release of the the Mac operating system will be called El Capitan. But how many people have heard of the DLC that comes with it? What is it, what does it do and how will it affect editors?
XSAN is dead according to Sam Mestman. So how did they manage to replay 84 streams of 4K at the recent LACPUG meeting?
We are back from NAB2015 with a disk full of interesting storage and expansion products. From the thin flash drives right up to the old Mac Pro sized new Mac Pro enclosure, there was a lot to see.
What happens when you cross a Mac Pro with a RAID and a breakout box? The answer? The new Lightning Quad Tower from JMR
We are pretty excited about this one. After a few years of wishing this product existed, Accusys will be demonstrating the first shared RAID storage unit using Thunderbolt at NAB. This is the most interesting piece of hardware news this year!
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At CES in Las Vegas, axle Video announced Drive - a new low cost product that gives producers and editors remote access to media assets via a web browser. Could this be a cheap and secure way of getting online approval of productions?
Thunderbolt is becoming the interface of choice when it comes to peripherals. Lots of new boxes on show with Thunderbolt 2 connectivity now making the news.
We are in the process of writing up a 'Thunderbolt roundup' from IBC, but thought this was worth a special post. LaCie has released a drive that can convert into an HDD/SDD combination for faster speeds.
UPDATED
Filip Vandoorne has put together a very detailed guide on how to use libraries on an NFS filesystem. Could this be a much cheaper option to Xsan? Is desktop shared storage here?
It didn't take long for the peripherals to start echoing the Mac Pro design. G-Technology announced three new products at NAB2014, two of which were black, curved and fast!
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Featuring Thunderbolt 2, LaCie have published a sneak peek at their new products for NAB. Just check out that AJA speed test for 3,000 MB/s read and 2,750 write for three new 8big Racks into a new Mac Pro.
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At the recent Los Angeles Creative Pro User Group, Neil Smith from LumaForge explored the new Mac Pro's speed and its storage options. He also demos the new networking option in town, one that we are getting very excited about.!
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Promise Technology have announced a drive size update to their popular Pegasus R6 Thunderbolt RAID and they've also announced the new VTrak A-Class 'SAN in a box.'
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Another Thunderbolt product shipping and a brand new Thunderbolt product announced at the show for G-Technology. Seems Thunderbolt is becoming the only way to connect to local storage.
Straight on our Christmas wish list this year (After the Blackmagic Cinema Camera) are these two portable Thunderbolt drives from Promise, the J4 and the J2.
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Digital Rebellion have launched Video Space for the iPhone and iPad, a disk space calculator for media storage.
Two new products from Active Storage under the mMedia banner. The 48TB mRAID for online storage and the 108TB mVault for near-line storage.
With Apple announcing support for shared storage this week for FCPX, ProMAX have timed this free webinar rather well.
CalDigit have announced their ThunderExpress PCIe adaptor, their first Thunderbolt product. This unit allows you to connect one of their three PCIe RAIDs to any Mac, Windows or Linux machine that has a Thunderbolt port.
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You gotta love the Drobo, here at fcp.co towers were big fans, regularly backing up all of our fcp.co stuff onto one, so when we saw this story, we knew we had to share it with the world. You just can't beat free.
Editshare ups the ante as it introduces 'Energy', its new high-performance mid-range shared storage solution at NAB 2011. The beauty of ‘Energy’ is that it offers advanced project sharing with sequence and bin locking for Avid, Apple FCP, and Lightworks. If you want more than one FCP editor working on a project then this might be the answer.
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An old but excellent tutorial. Media managing is hardly the most glamorous side of editing but it has to be done. Even though disk space is becoming cheaper by the day, you can't keep every take of every shot. This tutorial from Peter Salvia brought to you by his second glass of Amstel Light during some downtime during his laundry, will show you how to condense those finished FCP projects down. We had this video up for publishing before the free webinar was announced, a good primer for that one and a half hours maybe!
Looks like this will be handy, a free webinar about managing media inside and outside FCP. The webinar starts at 10:00 PST 10th March 2011 and runs for an hour and a half. Sorry about the short notice, but if they would have emailed us we could have posted this a while ago.
It has been a few crazy days of Apple news and we've loved every leak, tweet and article that we have come across. However it is only now that we are coming to realise how massive the new announcements really are. Prepare for a shock...
A great video of Thunderbolt in action to finish off an interesting day. Apologies if the video above takes time to load, but hey that's Flash:)
There will be many products released soon that feature Thunderbolt, but LaCie has got in there first. Take a look at the tiny "Little Big Disk" 500GB of SSD.
Wow! Two great bits of FCP news in two days. The new MacBook Pros that have been released today feature 'Thunderbolt' Apples branding of Light Peak technology from Intel.
You knew something as important as the cancelleation of the XServe would end up like this. Worth watching just for the Mac Mini line.
Active Storage have come up with a Metadata controller that looks like the now defunct Xserve. They're very proud of their new baby especially its ''out of the box'' readiness.
Active Storage are teasing us with this countdown to Monday where a machine to replace the EOL'd Apple XServe might be announced. They have a pretty good track record too..
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