Case STUDY

DUDE Case Study

DUDE is an independent creative agency based in Milan, Italy operating in various European markets. They cover the entire creative design, production, and post production to delivery pipeline for their customers.

With over ninety employees in Milan and London offices, their creative resources and capabilities are substantial. In 2020 they embarked on a project of another kind, finding a new shared storage network to centralize all their creative assets, and expand access to their central library for all employees worldwide.

Antonello Di Vincenzo with Blutek Srl in Rome assisted with the research, and introduced them to Facilis Technology, a US company that Blutek has successfully deployed at several companies around Italy. 

The Milan, Italy location of DUDE has forty creative people assigned to several different active projects. The eight postproduction suites deliver editorial, motion graphics, color grading and finishing content for broadcast. The DUDE facility can expand as needed by adding post suites when a project requires more collaboration or a shorter deadline.

One requirement of the new network was large capacity, with the capability to segment the capacity for multiple projects and make it available immediately. “With Facilis, the process to create new spaces for upcoming project ingest is so simple.” Said Seba Morando, Post Production Supervisor at DUDE, “Not only is the volume created with proper permissions and available in no time at all, but it can be mounted to the workstations that need it without any help from the editor. It makes life so much easier when dealing with so many different projects in a single week.”

With the Facilis Shared File System, volumes are accessible by the Creative team to add or modify graphic assets in a shared folder with Editors and Motion Graphics artists. Each graphic rework now is updated in real time, directly in Premiere or After Effects project’s timeline.

DUDE has an extensive historic library, but never had an efficient way to ingest all the project media from years of production into a single location. With Facilis FastTracker MAM and Object LTO, high resolution camera media is ingested and sent to LTO, while low bitrate proxy files are created to be kept on active storage. This requires much less space on the spinning disk portion of the system and keeps the LTO files within easy reach if needed for projects in the future.

“When we explained the process to the team at DUDE, they thought it was wonderful that they could now have all that history saved safely on tape, and still be able to search and review all the footage as if it was still on the storage.” Said Antonello Di Vincenzo, Sales Manager at Blutek Srl, “Facilis assisted with the setup of the MAM and LTO system and in a very short time they were ingesting all their historic data from various sources and saving to LTO tape for the future. They can search FastTracker and see the media that was ingested, play a proxy, and even see the tape barcode in the LTO library where it now lives.”

Another reason for using the proxy generation in the FastTracker MAM is for members of the production team that access the server from remote locations. Moving large camera files through the internet is difficult, but proxy files are a small fraction of the size, saving substantial time when accessing by remote employees. Security of the source and proxy assets in the FastTracker database is provided by catalogs assigned to secure user accounts, where various projects can be made accessible or hidden.

“Our decision to purchase Facilis was the right one.” Said Mirko Mantellato, Digital Executive at DUDE, “When compared to our previous storage, it’s faster, easier to use, and includes many more tools for us to manage our projects. In the past to review or search footage and edits on the DUDE’s archive, each team needed to sit beside a post producer. Now we’re able to share DUDE’s archive with all our offices. Anyone can open FastTracker, search and view all proxies or edits from DUDE’s catalog. Facilis delivered exactly what they promised, and I’m excited to see how the technology will grow.”

All trademarks and copyrights are property of their respective owners. All rights reserved.