DigitalWorks Relies on Facilis TerraBlock Shared Storage System

For nearly thirty years JM DigitalWorks, Inc. has provided production and post services to organizations such as parent company Jazzercise, as well as Google, Callaway Golf, CBS Sports and Boston Scientific.

Based in San Diego, CA, the company offers a slate of production services: scripting, production packages and crews and digital non-linear editing.

JM DigitalWorks GM and senior producer Jon Magnuson oversees all audio visual productions. Under his guidance, a team of three to four editors tackles a variety of projects – from dance choreography videos to promotional testimonials for Jazzercise. Constantly shooting and accumulating footage to deliver these projects, Jon and his team rely on the Facilis Technology, Inc.‘s TerraBlock Shared Storage System to store, manage and access media.

"Before TerraBlock, we had drives scattered everywhere. It was complete chaos," Magnuson said. "TerraBlock has restored order to our workflow, because we’re able to consolidate all of our hard drives into one unit. It’s as simple as storing your favorite CD tracks in your iPod and arranging the files by artist or song."

Since installing the TerraBlock in late 2011, Jon and his team have worked on three new home exercise DVDs that were sold on QVC, including one featuring two-time Dancing with the Stars winner Cheryl Burke (Latin Live, Ballet Body and Burlesque). For these kinds of projects the team works across three desktop edit bays connected to a TerraBlock 24D via 4Gb FC and two laptop edit bays connected via 1GbE. All three bays run Apple Final Cut Pro 7, Adobe Production Suite and Adobe After Effects, as well as CatDV for asset management.

Magnuson noted new workflow efficiencies while using the TerraBlock on these projects – a result of being able to access files simultaneously on all of the workstations.

He explained: "Before TerraBlock, our networking was really ‘sneaker-net.’ We had to wait for one person to finish with a drive before we could hand it off and move forward, which resulted in a lot of lost time and money. Now, all of our editors can work from the same hard drive footage at the same time, which has cut turnaround time in half."

"A couple of years ago, before we had TerraBlock in place, we lost a hard drive and weren’t able to recover it. It was a disaster," he added. "The great thing about TerraBlock is that you’re completely RAID protected. If a drive quits, we’re covered."

Magnuson concluded: "I would recommend TerraBlock to any facility looking to consolidate media storage in one place. The system is so user-friendly that it’s practically impossible to make a mistake, and we haven’t had any issues to date. Facilis has really stood by their promise to deliver."