Sonnet Solo10G Plays Crucial Role In Botswana Wildlife Documentary

A new wildlife documentary in Botswana has taken shape in post-production with help from Sonnet's Solo10G™ Thunderbolt™ 3 Edition 10GbE adapter.

Famous wildlife cinematographer Steve Lumpkin selected Sonnet's solution for work on his Endless Treasures of Botswana project, 'Speed Kills: Kalahari Cheetah Family'.

The 10GbE adapter was deployed to accelerate and streamline post-production workflows.

In partnership with the Government of Botswana, Endless Treasures of Botswana is a non-profit project to create both still images and films that showcase the country's success in protecting its diverse and protected wildlife population, including big cats, elephants, and wild dogs. Lumpkin spent 65 days taking still photographs and filming video in the bush, with much of the video shot in 4K.

Until recently, Lumpkin was struggling in post-production with a large performance lag while trying to transfer 4K video files from his QNAP TVS-882T NAS storage system to his iMac Pro®. He was only getting read times of about 100 Mb/sec from Thunderbolt, which made editing the 4K footage difficult. On the recommendation of Bob Zelin, video engineering consultant and owner of Rescue 1, Lumpkin installed the Solo10G adapter, which uses the 10GBASE-T standard and Ethernet cables to deliver lightning-fast connectivity between computers and high-speed infrastructure and storage systems.

"Products like Sonnet's Solo10G are critical for helping our team celebrate Botswana's recognition as the conservation leader of Africa," Lumpkin said. "Instantly after I connected the Solo10G, I jumped to a transfer rate of more than 880 megabytes per second, a nearly tenfold throughput increase. And now the system just screams – the Solo10G has accelerated every piece of my workflow, from ingest to 4K editing to rendering and output. Honestly, the Solo10G is a gamechanger for any editor that needs to connect to a storage array using Thunderbolt."

Endless Treasures of Botswana's newest title, 'Speed Kills: Kalahari Cheetah Family', is set in the wilds of Botswana's Central Kalahari Game Reserve, the second largest game reserve in the world. The film follows Diana, mother of two female cubs, as she roams from Deception Valley to Letiahau in the reserve. Lumpkin and his team spent 18 days with her and the cubs as they scratched out a living in bush thick with lions and leopards.

"For more than a decade, Steve has been traveling to the Republic of Botswana to capture and celebrate the country's diverse and protected wildlife population. His passion for these animals comes through in every one of his stunning photographs and films," said Greg LaPorte, vice president of sales and marketing, Sonnet Technologies. "We're honored that the Solo10G is playing such a key role in accelerating Steve's ability to tell the story of Botswana and its tremendous success in protecting threatened species."