Third Wave Makes a Splash at Bonnaroo, Austin City Limits Festival and Vegoose

Third Wave Productions capture summer festivals on Avastor drives

Chicago, IL -- December 1, 2005 -- This has been a busy year for Chicago based Third Wave Productions.  Taking time out from their busy Hi-Definition Television production schedule, they captured three of the nations largest major music festivals.

In Nashville, the Third Wave Productions’ crew captured every note at the Bonnaroo Festival from 75 full-sets, on 5 stages.  At the Austin City Limits Festival, they recorded all 3 days of performances from 4 stages.  In Las Vegas at Vegoose, 22 hours of webcasting was produced and delivered to the SBC/Yahoo Blue Room, which carried the performances of 19 different artists from 3 stages.

Third Wave Productions’ Managing Partner, Terry Fryer, tells why they chose Avastor HDX hard disk drives for these extremely demanding live productions.  “We have a number of considerations when choosing a hard drive solution,” Terry said.  “The first is rather obvious.  These are large-scale events that have 60 acts, 150,000 people and are held outdoors.  The weather is extreme, from driving rain and mud to 108 degrees and dust.  Threading your way through the crowds to get from stage to stage and back to our production compound is always challenging.  We’re delighted at the build quality of the Avastor drives.  They’re made like tanks, have on-board cooling fans and come with a rather weather-proof (and FedEx proof) lockbox.”

“The second is the physical size of the drives.” Terry continues.  “In prior years we’ve had stacks of clunky, plastic consumer enclosures that tend to fall apart, or some giant 6TB array that gets carted into the wilds.  After our last festival, Vegoose, we simply got on the plane with 6 HDX800-500GB drives tucked into our carry-on luggage.  That’s a solution that’s a lot easier on my nerves.”

“The third consideration is not as immediately obvious,” added Terry.  “Traditional festival management uses a pair of drives per act.  That has a lot of ramifications.  60 acts times 2 drives is an enormous logistic headache.  They have to be logged, they have to be transported, and then the big problem - we typically have a long production tail after the festival in which we produce digital downloads, radio broadcasts, CDs, DVDs, Hi Def TV shows and Cinema versions.  That means you have to spend a tremendous amount of time managing the physical reality of 120 hard drives. We’ve been using the Avastor 500GB HDX-800 and the storage capacity is amazing.  We can consolidate entire stages into a drive or two.  It has changed the creative product, allowing us to mix an entire project on one drive, rather than the tricky proposition of 20+ FireWire drives chained together.

Richard Wilson, Senior VP at Avastor, commented “We know we make the best products but it is extremely satisfying when very critical users put them to the test in extremely demanding applications like live concert recording and the drives perform flawlessly.  It’s meeting the needs of customers like Terry that make what we do worthwhile.”

About Avastor

Headquartered in Peachtree City, GA, Avastor was founded in 2005 to bring full-featured digital storage devices, with the highest quality and performance, to the professional audio and video marketplace. The company's flagship product, the HDX hard disk drive system, is produced in the USA with a mandate for superior build quality and 100% quality testing, aimed directly at the demands of professional audio and video applications.

Avastor and HDX are trademarks of Avastor Inc.  All other marks herein may be property of their respective owners.