The Los Angeles Greek Theatre knows its share of big moments, but few nights hit like this. What began as a one‑off tribute to the Garden State soundtrack became a flashpoint that pulled viewers back to the mixtape that shaped a generation. Director Kevin Garcia, who also served as the production’s co‑producer and co‑editor, brought a stripped‑down crew from MixOne Cinema and vowed to deliver a finished concert film in seven days.
That deadline wasn’t wishful thinking.
The team leaned on a tech‑forward workflow built around OWC’s Jellyfish Nomad and ThunderBlade drives. While the band played, editors were already stitching together multicam angles. By week’s end, the full performance was online, proof that smart planning and the right storage can turn a single night of music into an experience that lives far beyond the encore.
Here’s how they pulled it off.
Setting the stage
The Garden State: The 20th Anniversary Concert marked 20 years since director Zach Braff stitched together the original mixtape. Those songs feel like first apartments and long drives home for many in the crowd. Zero 7 climbed on a stage they rarely visit. Laufey filled in for Coldplay, easing into “Don’t Panic” with a string quartet that hushed the hillside. Yet the night was more than sentiment. Ticket and stream proceeds supported The Midnight Mission, an L.A. nonprofit fighting homelessness. Braff, Cary Brothers and Natalie Portman reminded viewers that generosity, not nostalgia, was the headline.
The show streamed on Veeps, Live Nation’s concert‑focused platform. Veeps’ music‑only approach made it the obvious home for a Garden State reunion that needed to feel personal, even on a phone screen. To capture that intimacy, producers turned to MixOne Cinema, a shop that shoots more than a hundred shows a year. MixOne’s crew had an impressive résumé, having worked with Alicia Keys, Pentatonix, Korn and Fall Out Boy.
When tackling projects like this, Garcia prioritizes authenticity. Garcia, known for treating concerts like documentaries, aimed to capture the truth, not the spectacle. The crew featured director of photography Gabriel Gely and Sebastien Paquet, who handled behind‑the‑scenes shooting and quick social edits. Post‑production leaned on colorist‑editor Jeff Meritt, who also worked as a DIT alongside Erick Wilczynski, offloading cards and building proxies in real time. Sam Shapiro served as the on‑site editor, allowing the cut to start before the first encore.
This lean crew, paired with Veeps’ always‑open stage, set the table for a concert film that felt both polished and immediate.
The production setup: Fast, lean and brutal
Garcia treated the event like a half‑festival, half‑award show. Eight ARRI Alexa Minis captured pristine skin tones on the main stage, while eight Blackmagic bodies covered cutaways. A DJI Inspire 3 drone snaked above the 6,000‑seat bowl, grabbing wides that felt cinematic rather than broadcast‑flat. All 18 cameras shot in RAW, a choice that paid off in color but punished any slow hard drive.
The Greek Theatre’s IMAG screens needed their own feed, so operators managed two separate cuts. One mix played live to the house. The other was captured like a traditional feature film and headed straight to post‑production.
Post-production in real time
Ingest without the bottleneck
At the heart of the tech stack sat a 64 TB OWC Jellyfish Nomad, ready to ingest 12 camera cards at once. Two 32‑terabyte OWC ThunderBlade units served as the main edit volumes, while pocket-sized 8 TB OWC Express 1M2 drives handled proxy files and quick mobile edits.
Six workstations tapped the Jellyfish simultaneously so editors could start cutting while the band was still onstage. As soon as the first cards cleared, proxies began generating and social clips went to the marketing team.
The pace never let up. Seven days after the concert, a finished show hit the platform. The heaviest lift, a full‑length, 20‑camera timeline in DaVinci Resolve, rendered in about 12 hours on the ThunderBlade array, closing the loop on an end‑to‑end workflow that ran almost in real time.
What the crew learned
Having successfully pulled off the Garden State: The 20th Anniversary Concert in impressive fashion, the crew learned some important takeaways from the project:
Real‑time ingestion saved at least a day: Instead of waiting for a tower of cards to copy overnight, Sam Shapiro fed the Jellyfish Nomad as soon as a camera stopped rolling. Twelve slots accepted every format the crew threw at them, so no one paced around the dump station. Editors saw new angles minutes after they were shot, which let them build a backbone timeline before the crowd found its seats.
Speed meant little without coordination: Shapiro labeled folders the same way the DPs labeled slates. Jeff Meritt could grade while Sebastien Paquet carved out social cuts because both were looking at the exact same files. Kevin Garcia floated between bays, calling out beats he wanted to emphasize. Everyone worked in near‑real time, yet no one stepped on another person’s edit.
Every frame lived on an OWC drive: Footage landed on the Nomad, moved to ThunderBlade arrays for creative work, then traveled on Express 1M2 sticks for last‑minute tweaks. Using a single hardware family removed needless conversions and the dreaded “drive not recognized” pop‑up that stalls momentum.
Redundancy served as silent insurance: The OWC Jellyfish’s ZFS pool guarded against single‑disk failure. The ThunderBlade drives ran in RAID, giving the team both speed and an extra layer of security. A mirrored safety copy sat off‑site and could be reached through a secure VPN. That setup meant a lost drive wouldn’t erase the show. Creative focus stayed on pacing, color and story beats, not on whether the next copy might fail.
Smart planning turns powerful hardware into peace of mind and lets artists chase moments instead of backups.
The night that hit its mark
The Garden State concert was a high‑pressure love letter to a film that shaped a generation. Every cue had to land, every angle had to connect and the finished cut had to appear in one week.
That deadline would have crushed a less‑prepared crew. Instead, clear roles, tight communication and a tech stack built for speed kept the project on track. At the center of MixOne Cinema’s setup was the OWC Jellyfish Nomad. With built‑in 10 GbE networking, it took footage from Alexa Minis and Blackmagic cameras and pushed files to six edit bays without throttling. Backed by two 32‑terabyte ThunderBlade arrays and OWC Express 1M2 NVMe enclosures, the system proved that the right gear can bridge ambition and deadline. In the end, the crew made art under pressure, and the hardware never flinched.
More importantly, the show offered a template for future live productions that need to move as fast as the social conversation. The crew’s mix of lean staffing, real‑time ingest and cloud‑ready backups showed that quality doesn’t have to slow down. Fans got a polished film while the excitement was still fresh, and The Midnight Mission gained visibility when it mattered most. For directors staring down impossible timelines, the lesson is clear: build trust, pick tools that disappear in the workflow and let the story breathe.
If you’d like to learn more about the OWC Jellyfish Nomad, OWC ThunderBlade, OWC Express 1M2 NVMe or OWC’s full line of storage solutions, visit owc.com.
