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Oscar’s Night Puts OWC Jellyfish in the Middle of the Action

The OWC Jellyfish Nomad is a crucial part of the Oscars’ social media team.

OWC Staff • Mar 06, 2025

Each year, the Oscars award ceremony presents a difficult challenge for the video production team at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences—particularly the group’s team of social media video editors.

During the ceremony, this team is tasked with ingesting, editing, and exporting the most important footage from the show and getting it posted to the Oscars’ various social channels—in real time as the show is live. To do this, the team leans on their OWC Jellyfish Nomad.

Let’s take a look at how the OWC Jellyfish makes this unique challenge possible each year.

Ryan Velasquez and Justin Chandra’s team ingested 4K multi-cam footage for editing, real-time review, and immediate upload to social media. All three video editors worked in Adobe Premiere leveraging Premiere Productions from OWC’s Jellyfish Nomad.

Post-Production Breakdown

This time-intense, online, real-time workflow starts when three video editors take to their behind-the-scenes edit suites to ingest countless cards containing 4K media.

"There is no time to transcode to proxies, so we work only with Original Camera Media,” says Jonathan Hensley, Lead Video Editor. With a multi-cam (four cameras) Adobe Premiere Productions workflow, the OWC Jellyfish Nomad was quickly set up for Sunday’s event and the team was ready to work, tuxedos and all.

“Only with OWC’s Jellyfish Nomad can we ingest, edit, review in real time with the producer, export on the spot, and immediately upload to our social media channels,” Hensley adds. "The Jellyfish Nomad was rock solid the whole time. Each video editor was ingesting media to the Jellyfish through either a connected OWC Atlas Dual SD card reader or an OWC Thunderbolt Pro Dock. Within minutes the media is on the Jellyfish Nomad, and we were all working in our Premiere timelines.”

Kieran Culkin sitting on the Academy’s Digital Team’s event-built stage after receiving the his Oscar for Best Actor in a Supporting Role for portraying Benji Kaplan in Jesse Eisenberg’s “A Real Pain.”

A huge factor in the Jellyfish Nomad’s success behind the scenes at the Oscars is the fact that it is performant enough to be able to constantly ingest media all while the team edits and exports.

“This kind of performance is necessary as we only have minutes to review the timeline with the Producer between Oscar award recipients walking back through the door,” Hensley notes.

The 2025 Oscars ceremony marked the third year in a row the OWC Jellyfish has played a starring role in the production of the big show. But Hensley says because the Jellyfish Nomad is so portable, performant, and quick to setup, the social video team now takes it to every event throughout the year.

"After working on OWC’s Jellyfish Nomad, there is just no way we could ever get this done by going back to passing drives,” he adds.

Learn more about the OWC Jellyfish family of storage solutions here.

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