Concordia University With Facilis TerraBlock

The Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema at Concordia
University is known as the gold
standard of film study in Canada.

The MHSoC is the largest, university-based center for the study of film
production and animation across the country, accepting more than 200
undergraduate and graduate students each year. The school gives students the
opportunity to learn the professional film production workflow. Students have
the ability to work on projects that range from 30 second spots to 2 hour
features using everything from 35mm film to HD video during production, then
utilize editing and finishing tools such as Avid Media Composer and Autodesk
Smoke.

A key component to the students’ learning experience is a
strong shared storage network for project collaboration and data access,
according to film post production coordinator Marcus von Holtzendorff.
"It’s important for our students to use what the professionals use and get
adjusted to using a shared storage environment like Facilis TerraBlock. It functions as a teaching tool and allows us
the utmost flexibility when it comes to expanding our capacity and
reading/writing from our 30 workstations."

Marcus von Holtzendorff recognizes the importance of a
storage network to his students’ workflow, especially in light of past
experience. "Formerly, storage was
sort of a push and pull process, where our students were forced to save their
work on independent disk drives and copies were always changing hands. Students
were keeping backup versions on disk drives and realistically they couldn’t
keep track of who had the latest version. There was no accountability and
projects were frequently stalled because we lacked a better storage system."

In early 2011, having grown tired of the antiquated process,
von Holtzendorff sought out a technology to add versatility to the school’s
workflow. Throughout the evaluation
process, von Holtzendorff considered Tiger Technology’s metaSAN, the Apple
Xsan, Studio Network Solutions’ Evo and Facilis TerraBlock. After thoroughly reviewing different
environments, he felt that TerraBlock was the right solution for
the school, especially since some of the storage networks would add substantial
cost year after year to a level that Concordia could not sustain. With the
analysis and his decision in hand, von Holtzendorff purchased a 24EX TerraBlock
with 12 TB of storage.

"Immediately, TerraBlock gave us improved flexibility
in our post production workflow. We
operate with almost all Macs in our facilities and we needed a solution that
could easily cross over from Mac to PC, and TerraBlock was terminal agnostic.
This allowed our students to focus directly on the creative process, instead of
which computer they needed to use," said von Holtzendorff.

With a TerraBlock-supported workflow, the Hoppenheim School’s
students now store all projects on central storage, giving them the ability to
access their projects instantly from any workstation. This eliminates duplicating
media files and improves project management. "The TerraBlock takes the stress off our workflow. We previously
had trouble locating footage but with a shared storage solution, we can read
and write all media right to the SAN," said von Holtzendorff.

"TerraBlock is suited to fit our needs," said von
Holtzendorff. "We needed a
scalable, versatile and overall reliable storage system that allows our
students to create high-end projects with HD video and TerraBlock finally gives
us that ability."