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IBST Media Uses ProMAX to Manage their Media

Lagos, Nigeria. For most Americans, mention of this sprawling city conjures images of poverty, overcrowding, and desperation. The stereotype is true for many who live here today. But another Lagos is rising.

This is where Adaremi (Remi) Ogunpatin's business has relied on a ProMAX portable shared server for the last three years. But more about that after you know more about Remi.

When Remi was only six years old, his parents moved the family to London in search of education and opportunity. Remi grew up there, eventually joining the British Army.

“I was in an ordinance unit, where we were responsible for all the munitions,” Remi says. “But we were also responsible for making training videos. I wound up working in that unit. They sent me to university to study film and television, and that was something! I found what I wanted to do with my life.”   

By 1989, Remi was back in Lagos forming a video company with partners. As he gathered experience, opportunities came along. A high point was 2006, when creators of reality TV shows in the U.S. and other prime markets realized that these programs would play well in any country. They began licensing local companies abroad to produce knock-offs. Remi got permission to produce The Apprentice Africa, Big Brother Nigeria or Dragons Den Nigeria.

As he looked for a new opening for business, Remi recalled his early success making TV commercials. This ultimately led him to another opportunity: international corporate clients. Soon, his company—IBST Media—was receiving contracts from foreign companies doing business in Nigeria.

“This is a very strong niche market,” he says. “At first, most of this was long-form work on documentaries and live productions. We’d shoot for companies like the National Geographic, the BBC, and Steeplechase Films. Now we’ve shifted to making short films of all kinds for big companies, like Nestlé and Coca-Cola.” 

Which brings us back to ProMAX.

About three years back, Remi saw that working in a bigger arena would require sharper tools. A major problem was his storage system. Like many other video producers, he found his archive of footage resided in scattered piles of portable hard drives.

Video editors at IBST had been using Avid editing tools for years, but the market was shifting. Remi wanted improved archiving ability and more user-friendly software. That’s how he got to ProMAX.

“I liked very much that it is one unit, rather than three,” he says. “And I had decided to go with Adobe software. I knew this would be easy and workable on a ProMAX system. So John from ProMAX was working very hard to sell me, but I already knew what we wanted.”

Remi purchased the ProMAX Platform Portable, which has served him well. It can handle four work stations simultaneously. “And when I first plugged my RAID unit into the Thunderbolt connection, I was in business,” he says. “I said WOW! Oooo, man, did I shout WOW!”

But there is one aspect of the ProMAX unit that Remi has never tapped—its portability! This shared server has never had a reason to leave the studio.

One of the biggest challenges for the Portable came last year. Nestlé executives asked Remi if IBST could help produce 13 episodes of a new TV series the corporation was sponsoring in Nigeria. But there was a catch, the work had to be done during the same 13 weeks that shows were airing.

“We had to edit each program on the go so it was ready when needed,” Remi says. “We shared the work with each editor working on different aspects of each program. It worked because of our ProMAX, which could not have handled it any better.”