Picnic Post Builds a Robust, Collaborative Media Infrastructure With Quantum

In today’s post-production environment, creative excellence depends on a delicate balance between artistic freedom and technical precision. Picnic Post understands this reality well. Founded in 2020 as the union of three established companies—specializing in picture, sound, and visual effects— Picnic was created to meet the fast-changing demands of a booming Spanish production market driven by OTT platforms such as Netflix, Amazon, and Disney.

David González Lozano, Image Workflow Supervisor and cofounder of Picnic, explains, “We saw that many platforms were starting to produce content in Spain. They needed a different kind of service, and we knew we had to adapt.”

Designing for Growth From Day One
Picnic began modestly, initially equipping two picture suites and two sound suites when the team moved into its new facilities in November 2020. However, the studio was designed with growth firmly in mind. In just five years, Picnic expanded to more than 30 professionals working across different shifts, operating over ten fully equipped suites, all connected to a shared storage environment.

This rapid and sustained growth quickly tested the limits of Picnic’s original infrastructure. While the system was adequate at the beginning, it was not designed to scale alongside the studio’s accelerating workload and increasing number of concurrent users.

When Infrastructure Becomes a Creative Bottleneck
As projects multiplied and workflows intensified, performance constraints became impossible to ignore. Support for the previous system ended, licenses could no longer be expanded, and bottlenecks began to directly impact daily operations.

“We started seeing colorists leaving the suite and asking if someone else was doing heavy work, because playback simply wasn’t possible,” González recalls. “That’s especially difficult when you have clients sitting in the room.”

In an environment where timelines are tight and rendering or QC steps cannot be deferred overnight, these interruptions directly affected client confidence and creative flow. Picnic needed an infrastructure that matched not only its current size, but its ambition.

Choosing a Proven Foundation for Collaboration
When it became clear that an upgrade was unavoidable, Picnic evaluated multiple storage approaches, including NAS based systems and various networking configurations. Having already invested in Fibre Channel infrastructure, the team paid particular attention to predictable, certifiable throughput and separation between Ethernet and media traffic.

Working together with Trigital, the project partner supporting the evaluation and deployment, Picnic assessed which approach would stand up to real production demands, not just theoretical performance.

StorNext emerged as the clear choice. González notes, “StorNext is a proven solution. We had used it before, it performs, it’s rock solid, and we never lost data.” Reliability, stability, and long-term confidence were decisive factors.

Fast Deployment, Immediate Impact
Once the decision was made, deployment was straightforward. Thanks to the Quantum and Trigital specialists, installation and integration were completed in less than a week, with only a few hours of downtime. For the operators, the transition was almost invisible.

“A new drive appeared on the desktop, everyone started using it, and everyone was happy,” González says. The real impact became evident almost immediately. Storage-related complaints disappeared, suites stayed occupied, and the overall atmosphere changed. “The office being quiet is great for me,” González adds. “It means things are working.”

Enabling True Concurrent Workloads
Today, Picnic routinely runs multiple demanding workflows in parallel, including color grading, conforming, and VFX pulls rendering across different suites, all accessing the same shared storage.

“We might be grading in three suites, conforming in two others, and rendering VFX pulls in another at the same time,” González explains. “That’s a lot of data moving constantly, and the system handles it.”

With StorNext, QXS, and Xcellis as the backbone, Picnic gained the confidence to take on more projects simultaneously, without fear of performance degradation.

Visibility and Planning for the Future
Beyond day-to-day performance, Picnic also benefits from improved operational visibility. Built-in forecasting tools provide insight into future storage consumption, allowing the team to plan archiving and project cleanup proactively.

“We used to do this on paper,” González notes. “Now we can clearly see how we’re growing and make better decisions about when to archive or expand.”

Technology That Serves Creativity
With a stable and scalable infrastructure now in place, Picnic is already looking ahead. Future plans include expanding online capacity, adding nearline storage, and eventually integrating LTO®-based long-term archiving. This will give the studio greater flexibility to manage content throughout its lifecycle while ensuring creative teams always have fast access to the projects they’re working on.

However, for González, the ultimate value of the system is on the creative side. “We need to use technology in a way that gives us more time to make creative decisions and leave technology a little behind,” he concludes. “You work better when you’re comfortable knowing everything will work, quickly and reliably.”

Conclusion
By partnering with Quantum, Picnic has built an infrastructure that delivers performance where it matters most today while providing the flexibility to manage content more efficiently as projects move through their lifecycle. The result is a collaborative, scalable, and predictable environment that allows the studio to grow confidently, serve demanding clients, and focus on what matters most: delivering exceptional creative work at the highest level.