Steinhafels Furniture Video Production Department Uses Facilis TerraBlock

Facilis Technology, Inc., a supplier of shared storage solutions for collaborative media production networks, announced that the in-house video and graphics production department of US-based furniture retailer Steinhafels, Inc. is using a Facilis TerraBlock shared storage system to store, manage and share hundreds of hours of 6K video and over 750,000 images.

A family-owned business since 1934, Steinhafels Furniture is a furniture and mattress retailer. With 16 stores throughout Illinois and Wisconsin, the company attributes its continued growth and success to its 700 employees and their dedication to ‘doing it right the first time’. Over the years, Steinhafels Furniture has also made a point to continuously invest in the latest technologies and best practices. A few years ago, this philosophy led them to bringing all their video production facilities in house.

“While most people in Wisconsin may recognize the signature Steinhafels ads, few probably know that all our commercials are filmed in our Pewaukee HQs by our own in house video production team,” explains Ira Klusendorf, Steinhafels’ video production manager.

In an average year, Ira and his team shoot, edit and produce over 300 television commercials, staff training and web videos.

“We used to work with an ad agency and while they did a great job helping us create brand recognition, it made sense to use staff who live and breathe the company every day to make the commercials. It also allows us to save money and pretty much create content on demand,” adds Klusendorf.

“We have a big turntable that enables us to take 360 degrees panoramic shots of all our furniture from sofas to dining chairs so our customers can look online at all their options as if they were in one of our showrooms,” explains Klusendorf.

While DSLRs capture some of the content, many of the videos are shot in 6K with a Red Dragon camera so the team can share and re-purpose the high resolution content with the company’s in-house graphics and photography department that is responsible for creating all of Steinhafels’ print ads, brochures, billboards, delivery vehicle graphics etc. Shooting in 6K gives the whole creative department flexibility and removes duplicate effort, but naturally puts high demands on a storage system.

With hundreds of hours of high-resolution content and an ever growing photo library containing over three quarters of a million images, Kusendorf and his team needed a storage solution. Working with systems integrator Key Code Media, Inc. in Chicago, IL, Steinhafels decided to invest in two 48TB Facilis TerraBlock 24D shared storage systems that enabled both the video production and the graphics departments to organize all this data and also allow various team members to share and access it. Having dual connectivity to both FC as well as Ethernet is a major component of the system.

“Right now we have at least 8 people who need to access all this content at any given time, using a FC connection. We have created separate volumes for our training videos, for our TV commercial campaigns, as well as for all our graphics work. Using an Ethernet connection, we can also give access to other members of the marketing team who are located in a different building when they need to access images for publicity purposes or other creative projects.“

Using FastTracker, the Facilis system’s integrated tracking application, Klusendorf and his colleagues are able to catalog, search and view any media within the TerraBlock Shared Storage System. FastTracker offers the quickest way to find media, view it, and bring it directly into an editing application.

“This is just the right amount of media management for our workflow, because we didn’t want to take away time from creating content to manage all of our data. We needed fast, intuitive search with the ability to instantly view what we’ve found, and immediately access that on our editing systems. FastTracker has made us more productive. There’s no training required, it just does what you expect. I was surprised how easy it was to find a clip, and simply drag and drop it into my project with no additional steps,” said Klusendorf.

“The learning curve with our TerraBlocks has been pretty smooth and the support we have received from Facilis has been stellar. The systems are solid as a rock.They allow all of us to concentrate on our own tasks rather than worrying about the technology so we can get our jobs done right the first time,” concludes Klusendorf.