We've installed and supported storage technologies for dozens of studios, large and small, over the past seventeen years. While the technologies keep changing, what drives creative professionals stays the same. They need uninterrupted access to their assets. They don’t care about streams or space. A gigabyte might as well be a reference to Doc from Back to the Future. What artists care about is having as much time to be creative as possible in order to tell the best version of their story. To do this, they need technology that is easy to administer, and flexible enough to meet their needs and their budget. Unfortunately, we have found that this has been an either/or proposition.Today, you can either get storage that is powerful enough to give you uninterrupted creative flow, or you can get storage that is easy to administer and flexible enough to fit your budget and your needs. Therein lies the dilemma.
But what if you didn't have to choose?
Enter creative.space: a new kind of no-compromise storage, for a new kind of no-compromise studio. creative.space is storage as a managed service. You don't buy our storage, you subscribe to an adaptable solution. If you find out that you need more space or more performance halfway through a production, you call us, and we give you scale up options. If you add twenty new hires, you don’t need to worry about annual budgets, just pick up the phone. Best of all, you can tune our storage without an IT degree. Just tell our software what you want to store, whether it’s 4K compressed ProRes 422 or 6K uncompressed OpenEXR, and it tunes the underlying hardware automatically.
When given the freedom, creative professionals don’t think twice before pushing their hardware to its highest limits. However, modern storage doesn’t perform on a linear scale. We believe that as a creative professional, you should have the information you need to tune the storage for the work you do. That's why we benchmark and burn all of our hardware before we send it to you. When you set up our storage, we don't just give you options, we also tell you how certain choices will change our storage's performance, capacity and fault tolerance. When you first set up our storage, we let you choose between Raid 0, for maximum performance, Raid 1, for maximum fault tolerance, and Raid 5 or 6 for a balance between performance and fault tolerance. We also tell you how fast your storage will go, and how much space it will have for each one.
Once you've chosen your raid, we let you split the storage into spaces. Spaces remove the limitations of hardware-defined storage and give you the freedom to adapt your storage work for you. It’s like a smart folder that makes sure files within it are stored as optimally as possible. We optimize each space for the kind of content you want to store on it. Whether you want to work with uncompressed OpenEXR frames or compressed proxy footage, we can create a space that will literally change the way the content is stored on the hardware, to squeeze the maximum performance out of it.
Every single person’s effort on a production results in only one thing, the data. All the blood, sweat, and tears that creatives put into their craft are precious, so we see it as a moral imperative to not let it fall into the wrong hands. That's why we took the time to build a user authentication server into creative.space from the ground up. Once you set up the spaces you want, you can split them into shares, and invite your most valued players to the shares they need to access, without worrying about whether they can see content that you'd like to keep secret. Once you've added users, you can tweak what kinds of actions they can perform, to make sure that only the users that you choose can make administrative changes to your creative.space.
Keeping your content safe goes beyond keeping it private. It also involves protecting it from corruption and accidental deletion. That's why we include server-grade data protection and automated snapshotting out of the box. Our storage checks every single piece of content as it enters the system and can repair any data that appears to be corrupted. A snapshot is like a freeze frame of your system. If someone accidentally deletes data, you can simply mount the snapshot and bring the files back. The best part is, unlike Time Machine from Apple, snapshots don’t take up any more space.
We don't stop there. We make it easy for you to add your media directly into our storage. You don't have to lock up a workstation and saturate your network every time you want to ingest new footage. Instead, just plug your drive in our storage’s USB 3.1 port. Sometimes storage is behind security, so we made our intuitive ingest interface accessible over the network from your web browser. Simply plug in a drive and use our folder comparison tool to compare source and destination contents to copy only what you need. Beyond ingest, the folder comparison tool can compare any two folders on your system to eliminate manual data consolidation.
Once media is on our storage, we make it easy to browse with our built-in file browser. You don't need to wait to set up network shares, just to view your media. After all, it's your media. That being said, setting up a share is as easy as selecting a folder and adding some users. We want to make it as easy as possible for you to connect your workstation, so mounting a share is as simple as pressing a button.
We know that creative teams get into a groove. They build their own unique workflows and organization structures. As a vendor, we have to provide solutions that adapt to the way you work, not the other way around. That's why we're including folder structure templates with our software. We give you a custom share that you can mount to your desktop and bring in your folders and files. When you’re done, starting a new project is as simple as selecting the right template.
Finally, a no-compromise studio should always know if their storage is performing to its maximum potential. That's why we've included metrics monitoring. We can monitor up to 5,000 unique metrics that paint a detailed picture of exactly how our storage is working for you. Whether you choose to view these metrics or not, we know when things aren’t operating as they should. We proactively monitor our storage's performance to make sure you are getting the performance you rely on.
As a glass-to-glass integrator, we've always taken care of customizing the technology we install to fit the needs of our customers. We've learned their mindsets, their workflows, their budget, and their vision for success in order to devise the best strategy for their needs. We've implemented many different enterprise media storage appliances, media asset managers, nearline and offline backups, and cloud-based solutions. We've even built custom software to make asset interchange between these technologies seamless. Now, we're taking everything we've learned, and making an entirely new kind of storage for a new kind of studio.
Over the past five years, we've seen a massive shift in content creation. Indie filmmakers, post houses, corporate communications departments, advertising agencies, educational institutions and houses of worship are pursuing the same production value and impact as Hollywood cinema. These studios approach post-production very differently from large Hollywood studios and they demand an entirely new kind of storage strategy. That's why we made creative.space. Storage is the heart of any workflow and so it easily becomes a bottleneck when not properly managed. New media teams don’t have the same path to skills and knowledge as those in Hollywood. We are here to support creatives of all kinds turn their visions into reality.
At creative.space, we believe that anyone with a story worth telling should only be limited by their creativity, not their technical prowess. There are so many barriers between making the decision to create content and understanding the nuances of making that content engaging and compelling. We hope to provide the tools and support needed to help creatives as they struggle through this journey so they don’t feel like they are feeling their way around in the dark.
Every team is unique and there is no way for us to know your exact needs without opening a dialogue. This is why we have launched our Early Adopter program. On top of getting creative.space storage for your team, you will also get a direct voice in our software development process to help us create solutions that improve the day-to-day lives of creatives like you. We'd love for you to help us develop features that turn your vision for your studio into a reality.
