Facilis Shared Storage for Pineapple Entertainment, Danish Production Company

The Danish production company Pineapple Entertainment chose a Facilis Technology, Inc. shared storage solution to enable a collaborative approach to media production.

Based in Copenhagen City with a staff of around 50 people, Pineapple Entertainment’s core business is TV programs; however, since its establishment, it has expanded to produce over 200 hours per year of fun, relevant and powerful content for all media platforms.

A change to Pineapple’s production portfolio meant that it needed to consider a more collaborative storage solution.

“Previously a lot of our programs, such as talk shows, needed only one editor, but we started bringing in more factual entertainment programs that required multiple editors working simultaneously on the same material,” said Christian Martens, head of production, Pineapple. “We had two suites connected with a NAS but no project sharing, and the rest was standalone storage, so we began looking at a suitable collaborative storage replacement.“

The team set three main requirements for their research: the ability to share files, a system that was easy to use, and one that was budget friendly.

“We looked at systems like Avid Nexis, but having talked to guys I trust about this kind of technology, they recommended that the Facilis Shared Storage system would be the best choice for us,” said Martens.

Stjernholm & Co A/S, Facilis’ distributor in Scandinavia, supplied and installed the system, and Martens found the installation process to be simple and painless: “Kristoffer [Laursen, Stjernholm & Co] handled this perfectly. We had very few issues integrating the system into our workflow, it worked really well.“

The initial system was subsequently expanded with two additional Facilis shared storage units that at first worked independently, but were then integrated with the first system into the main workflow.

“It was very easy to expand the system – Kristoffer came in and did some magic for a day and had it running perfectly in a short amount of time, with no disruption,” Martens noted. “We now have 12 edit suites all connected to the Facilis storage so we can move people around easily from one edit suite to another. All the editors are used to having a collaborative system like this, and they are happy with the way it allows them to work.“

The Facilis system has made a difference to Pineapple’s workflow, as Martens stated: “We could not do the work we do without it, both in terms of time saving and the end result. We definitely made the right decision.“