Facilis Gains TerraBlock Shared Storage Customers

Creative shops around the world are turning to Facilis Technology, Inc.‘s TerraBlock shared storage to enhance project collaboration and boost productivity as evolving file formats and bit rates introduce new challenges to post production and content creation workflows.

A growing number of facilities from Norway, to the UK, Egypt, Canada and beyond are integrating TerraBlock into media pipelines to realize greater flexibility, speed and scalability.

In July 2014, Norwegian film production company Woldcam AS installed a 48TB TerraBlock 24EX in its Stavanger facility, which primarily serves five editing suites running Avid Media Composer. Four of the workstations are connected to TerraBlock via 16Gb FC, and the other via 1GbE for logging purposes. The company also plans to link the system to graphics workstations that run Adobe After Effects, Photoshop and Premiere. To enhance productivity and help reduce time spent transcoding and importing media during time-crucial assignments, Woldcam is also considering using their TerraBlock to store the last six months of camera footage.

“We run a tight, ten-person operation, so we had to find a perfect fit for all of us, and nothing else compared to TerraBlock; it stood out from the crowd with qualities that we highly value: high-bandwidth, 4K support, no per-seat licensing fees and the ability to connect up to 6 FC clients directly,” said Woldcam IT systems manager Espen Rønnevik. “A lot of our assignments require large quantities of media be available to multiple editors simultaneously for an extended time, and our TerraBlock gives us the storage capacity and bandwidth to do that.“

UK-based post production shop OutPost Facilities Ltd found itself in need of a high-bandwidth shared storage system to transcode and edit high-res footage for multiple TV projects at a time. On average the studio manages up to 400 hours of high-res footage including: ARRI ALEXA, XDCAM, ProRes 444, uncompressed DPX and TIF files. All project media is stored on Outpost Facilities 72TB TerraBlock, where it is accessible to the creative team. The system is connected via FC to a suite of 18 Windows workstations that run Avid Media Composer, Avid Symphony and Avid DS as well as two Mac suites.

“TerraBlock was an ideal match for us; it fit into our existing Fibre infrastructure, exceeded our performance criteria and offered an affordable solution with more raw bandwidth than anything else on the market,” said Nigel Gourley, MD, OutPost Facilities. “Our line of work requires constant collaboration, so having a TerraBlock as our central shared storage solution is essential, and we’ve been very pleased with its performance. It does what we need it to do and if we have questions, someone from Facilis support is readily available to provide an answer.“

Egyptian Media Production City (EMPC), an information and media complex located in Cairo, purchased and installed a 96TB Facilis TerraBlock for its editing facility and have found it to be an intuitive shared storage solution with advanced capabilities and bandwidth to support its network of NLEs. Currently EMPC is leveraging the TerraBlock to store RED 4K materials that its team cuts with Apple Final Cut Pro and color corrects using Blackmagic Design DaVinci Resolve.

A TerraBlock customer since 2005, Canadian arts and creativity incubator The Banff Centre upgraded its storage network earlier this year with four new TerraBlock systems and a TX-16 expansion chassis, garnering 300TB of capacity. The install was commissioned by the Centre’s Film and Media Department, with an infrastructure that includes 16 Avid edit suites and six Avid Pro Tools workstations connected to the TerraBlocks via FC.