Growth At Video And Motion Graphics Company Enabled By Switch To StorNext Pro Studio

“What’s unique about Platinum Platypus is that we have a lot of different disciplines under one roof. Motion graphics, 3D animation, 2D animation, shooting, editing, coloring—it really runs the gamut,” explains Pete Sussi, the company’s owner and founder.

Most of the early projects were short and at standard resolution, so files were comparatively small, and the creative team used portable drives or DropBox. But success meant they needed a faster, more scalable approach.

RUNNING OUT OF SPACE AND TIME

“At the same time, the work we were doing was attracting more potential clients—so we found ourselves with clients saying ‘can you do these movie scenes for us right now’ and ‘I’ve got a Fortune 500 client sending video from three continents, can you handle it?’ We wanted to say yes, but the backlog got so big and the delays were so long that we needed to do something different to be able to keep growing the business.”

QUANTUM HELPS LOOK AT ALTERNATIVES

Platinum Platypus called on Quantum to help.

“What I liked about Quantum is they took the time to have a real conversation with me,” says Sussi. “They went over my business, what my needs were, what kind of materials I was using as far as the footage, what size footage, how fat it was, how many people were tapped into it. They really took the time to put us on the right track.”

STORNEXT PRO STUDIO PROVIDES A COMPLETE SOLUTION

“After talking with Quantum, I realized that we needed a system that could work now but also give us scalability,” says Sussi, “so we picked a system built around StorNext Pro Studio.”

StorNext Pro Studio is a complete, appliance-based workflow solution designed for smaller media companies that need performance and growth. The Platinum Platypus Pro Studio solution included a dual-redundant StorNext M441D metadata controller and 96TB of high-speed QX-1200 RAID storage. The company added a Brocade Fibre Channel fabric and a Quantum Scalar LTO library.

SPEED BOOST AND DIRECT FILE SHARING IMPROVE WORKFLOW

“When we got the StorNext solution, it was amazing,” says Sussi. “We got the biggest, fattest file that we had—5K, RE raw footage. We dropped it on the StorNext, just to copy it over. I could swear it was faster than the Thunderbolt drives we used to use. We had ten people accessing it at the same time, opening up this video and playing it, and it was playing smooth as silk.”

Fast, shared access made a huge improvement in workflow since multiple editors could now work directly on the same files over the SAN.

“Having ten people working on a project where they can have the same assets has been fantastic. Everything from ingesting to actually working with files has been drastically improved. I can get more people involved, which is, obviously, something we need as the company grows.”

The Quantum solution also lets the team use the Scalar LTO library to protect projects and archive older work using a 3rd-party software application to manage the data.

FAST INSTALLATION KEEPS PRODUCTIVITY HIGH

Quantum managed the installation to keep ongoing projects on schedule. The Fibre lines were pre-installed, and racking, configuring, and tuning the system took only two days. Immediately, all the applications in the Adobe Creative Suite worked, and all the files were available.

“Once they tapped in the Fibre lines, we tapped it into the computers, and it was up and running,” Sussi recalls. “We had no loss of service, and it was really quick, painless.”

StorNext Pro Studio has become a key to Platinum Platypus’s growth: “It’s helped my company with speed and time and money—I really can’t see how the growth that we’ve had in the last year would have happened without StorNext.”