CASE STUDY
Fearless Films Finds Their Storage Backbone In Facilis TerraBlock
Toronto-based Fearless Films provides HD video finishing services and technology to a diverse client base. Throughout the last 20 years, the company has worked on several films, documentaries and television shows – including the popular animated series Johnny Test.
To ensure that day-to-day operations run smoothly, Fearless Films President Al Maciulis relies on a skilled creative team and strong technological backbone. The studio houses eighteen online and offline editing suites linked to three TerraBlock shared storage systems via Fibre Chanel. Each system runs creative applications ranging from Avid® Media Composer® and Avid® Symphony to Apple® Final Cut Pro® and more.
Fearless Films installed its first TerraBlock in 2007 to garner uncompressed HD throughput that would allow the studio to provide advanced HD online services to its clients. Within a year, Maciulis purchased a second unit. Today the studio houses three TerraBlock systems that have become vital to each project endeavor. Maciulis said, “Once we started working with Facilis, there was no reason to look back; the TerraBlocks have become central to all that we do. They give us amazing throughput without per-seat licensing costs.”
The TerraBlocks also provide Fearless Films with flexibility and freedom. “We’re able to choose the right creative tool for each job without having to worry about compatibility,” he shared. “We can also easily change the size of our volumes, and reliable mirrored and RAID5 data protection in TerraBlock allows us to swap out a drive without impacting our workflow.”
Since Maciulis’ team faces tight client deadlines daily, the ability to share media across each workstation is crucial to its operations. With the TerraBlocks in place, several team members can collaborate on the same project concurrently. “The TerraBlocks make a traditionally painstaking process seamless. When we’re in a time crunch, and we need to attack a project with multiple editors, we can do it with the project sharing features,” he expressed.
Regardless of how close the TerraBlocks come to reaching capacity, the Fearless Films team continues to work without interruption. “We can work for long stretches of time without having to think about the TerraBlocks,” explained Maciulis. “TerraBlock is everything you want in a storage system; it’s sporty and reliable. You get a lot of the qualities of an enterprise server at a fraction of the cost.”
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