Bethesda Softworks Purchased Facilis TerraBlock SAN

For video producer Matt Killmon and associate video producer Sal
Goldenberg of Bethesda Softworks
LLC, publisher of AAA video games such as Rage and Skyrim, no two work days are ever the same.

Every day brings a
new set video production tasks and challenges as they capture, edit,
manage, encode and wrangle internal and external video marketing and operations
projects for Bethesda.

In 2011 Bethesda’s burgeoning project load and video department
expansion brought about the need for a more efficient method of sharing assets
and collaborating on large projects.

Killmon said: "The storage I’d
inherited was end of life and no longer supported by the manufacturer. With 9TB
of existing, irreplaceable data on that aging storage, I knew we needed a fast
solution that could be easily shared and had room to grow with us."

New to shared storage, Killmon enlisted guidance from the Creative
Cow forums and purchased the Facilis
TerraBlock 24 EX SAN in July 2011 from Digital Video Group, Inc.

He shared:
"After comparing four different
solutions, TerraBlock best suited our needs for speed, expandability, and
flexible access for both Mac OS X and Windows. Now that we have a SAN like
TerraBlock, the thought of going back terrifies me.

"TerraBlock has made our
lives as editors much simpler. We spend less time worrying about capture
sessions or where to find an asset and more time producing quality content,"
Killmon continued. "Plus, the
expandability of the TerraBlock means growing the department further is no
sweat. Knowing I have an infrastructure in place that is built for expansion is
a huge weight off my shoulders."

Before TerraBlock, Killmon’s storage system, when near-full, dropped
frames, which resulted in lost takes. Killmon said: "When our old storage system reached capacity, a take longer than 7
minutes would drop frames and fail. In live capture from game consoles, dropped
frames mean lost takes. That simply doesn’t happen on the TerraBlock – full
volume or not."

Killmon and Sal have leveraged TerraBlock for a number of recent
projects including game-play videos for both Rage and Skyrim, and a trailer
for the final Fallout: New Vegas DLC, Lonesome Road, among others.

Killmon
said: "TerraBlock is fast, really
fast. Much of our live game capture is 720p60 ProRes, which the TerraBlock
could do in its sleep. 720p60 8-bit YUV is no sweat either. When we eventually
populate the other 12 bays with drives and can span volumes across both ‘sides,’
we’ll have enough bandwidth to easily capture or play back multiple 1080p60
8-bit YUV streams at the same time. I love that I can do whatever I want on the
system without impinging others’ activities."

TerraBlock has accelerated Matt and Sal’s turnaround by enabling
quick access to the same files simultaneously.

"With TerraBlock, we’re never
waiting on files to transfer, and we don’t have to duplicate assets. There is a
lot less confusion over where files are. Everything is immediately accessible
when it’s created," he shared. "TerraBlock also allows producers and game developers to more
efficiently assist us with capture during projects using the mobile capture
station. Anything captured on the machine is captured onto a TerraBlock volume
via Ethernet, so we can quickly access those files at the same time in our edit
suites."

Killmon continued: "The
most palpable time savings with the TerraBlock have been in the encoding
process. Being able to create master files on a TerraBlock volume from a Mac
and then immediately access those same files in our Windows Media encoding
software on a PC has eliminated a huge time-consuming step from our workflow."

In the future Bethesda plans to leverage TerraBlock and CatDV to
develop an in-house asset management system to help increase visibility into
the video department for its brand managers, automate repetitive, simple tasks,
and archive older material.

"It’s a joy to create
trailers for some of the best video games in the world, and TerraBlock helps
make that possible. Our experience thus far has been nothing short of
fantastic. It’s been a dream to learn and use, especially when compared to
alternative solutions out there," said Killmon.