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R2C Group Adds Facilis TerraBlock 24D With 96TB

To keep creative rolling

Portland-based R2C Group is a transactional brand building, direct response agency.

Facilis 

The company creates, produces, distributes and measures messages that inspire consumer reactions to brands and products for clients like TaxACT.com, Humana and Bissell Homecare, Inc.

Unlike traditional advertising, where projects typically end at delivery, content for R2C Group customers is continually modified throughout each campaign based on real-time feedback. Each creative project must be accessible for several months at a time, which fills up the facility’s storage servers. To garner additional space for an expanding project load, R2C group director of post-production Brad Grove traded in a seven year-old TerraBlock system earlier this year for a TerraBlock 24D with 96TB capacity.

We need to keep a lot of media online, and because we’ve had a great experience with TerraBlock, the upgrade made sense. I could increase my capacity, and at the same time, I could ensure continued stability,” he shared.

The new TerraBlock joins three additional TerraBlock systems already in place at R2C Group, which together enable a workflow for 25 creative workstations. Between the agency’s post-production and duplication departments, all 25 suites are connected to TerraBlock via a combination of 4Gb and 8Gb FC and 1GBE. Artists run various applications, including Avid Media Composer, Avid Symphony and FilmLight Baselight for color grading.

TerraBlock is the heart of our workflow that just keeps working,” explained Grove. “And, there’s fantastic value in knowing that our shared storage is always functioning. Even if we have less than 4TB remaining on a TerraBlock, performance is solid; the TerraBlocks just work and work and work.

Every R2C Group project undergoes several stages of testing and multiple iterations, with clients receiving daily reports that showcase the results of the previous night’s campaign airing. As such, Grove’s team is tasked with modifying current content to reflect creative changes based on response-driven metrics, for which TerraBlock has become key.

We do almost everything in house, so we have to be fast and responsive, which means we store a lot of full quality footage on our TerraBlock for prolonged periods of time,” said Grove. “We’re not bringing in low-res proxies and up-resizing, but working with full broadcast quality media files and mastering from them the same day. It forces us to work at a very high finish quality for everything, so the speed of TerraBlock is incredibly valuable.

Allowing the creative wheels to continue rolling at R2C Group, the TerraBlocks foster a collaborative environment whereby multiple editors can work with the same media simultaneously, thus expediting project delivery.

We work in a fast paced environment where editors are constantly switching between projects and volumes. TerraBlock allows multiple editors to work at 220 DNx quality in real-time, which is amazing,” Grove expressed. “I can also easily structure partitions and projects on the systems to keep our media current and easily archivable.

Grove concluded: “The bottom line, TerraBlock is a lean and mean machine that allows us to work at the speed and quality we require to best serve our clients. It’s a hassle free system in a fast chassis; you can log in and start working instantly with no muss, no fuss.

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