Facilis Terrablock at Dutch AV Production Tinker imagineers

Netherlands-based international experience design, creative consultancy and production agency, Tinker imagineers BV has selected Facilis Technology, Inc. to install its TerraBlock shared storage system within a different AV production facility.

Tinker has commissioned a Facilis TerraBlock 24D/EX16 with 64TB of storage: it is already operational within the facility, which is on schedule to open in the autumn of 2015.

First conceptualised in the spring of 2014, Tinkertopia is an inspiring and technically advanced working environment in a facility in Utrecht city centre. It provides a range of integrated facilities including an AV production studio, creative atelier and meeting point. It provides hubs for freelancers and an inspiration window for all those that work there.

With the advantage of starting with a blank canvas, Tinker has been able to create a production workflow that will offer support and new ways of collaboration for its creative teams. The Facilis shared storage system is at the heart of this new workflow. At the facility, Tinker has expanded the AV-Studio since projects were demanding more intricate audio visual content. Its audio visual team consists of an audio visual producer, multimedia developer, 2d/3d designers and non linear editors.

“We aim at the non conventional canvas, everything different than the 16:9 ratio and bigger than the full HD format. This is due to the nature of our projects, which are mainly multi-projector projections in the 3d public space,” explains Michel Buchner, creative technologist, Tinker imagineers.

After evaluation of several systems, Tinker selected Facilis Technology’s TerraBlock. “We invested in a TerraBlock 24D/EX16 with 64TB of storage,” Michel Buchner explains. “Why Facilis – one of our producers has experience working with Facilis and he was very positive about it. We looked seriously at two systems and in the end Facilis’ proven reliability was decisive.“

Shared storage technology empowers the creative spirit and helps grow the organization.Shared storage is an important concept to Tinker since it allows several creative teams to work in a collaborative way, sharing content and inputs in a real-time environment. In Tinkertopia, a diverse mix of facilities will operate on the shared storage platform, from motion graphics design to 3d design and other workstations will be used for non-linear editing. A major purpose of the shared storage system will be to support the company’s render farm.

“At Tinker we have experienced strong growth for a number of years and when you grow in size there is need for a central platform which integrates well between OSs,” Buchner stated. “The fact that you can use TerraBlock to share data between multiple volumes is great. We’re using this facility to support our render-bucket, so everybody has access to all the output, all the time.“

Looking at the company’s high resolution content creation workflow, TerraBlock is very supportive to this growing business area.

“With our motion graphics stations we’re creating some crazy canvasses. Currently, we’re working on a canvas of 16400×1200 pixels which is a real challenge. At the moment the speed is good but we’re very happy to know that we can gain further speed with the current TerraBlock system and additional SSD’s, as and when it’s needed,” concluded Michel Buchner.