HUDSON, MA — The Danish production company Pineapple Entertainment (https://pineapple.dk) recently chose a Facilis (http://facilis.com) shared storage solution to enable a collaborative approach to media production. Based in Copenhagen City, Pineapple Entertainment has a staff of around 50 people and a core business of TV programs. The studio, however, has expanded since its inception to produce over 200 hours per year of content for all media platforms.
“Previously a lot of our programs, such as talk shows, needed only one editor, but we started bringing in more factual entertainment programs that required multiple editors working simultaneously on the same material,” explains Christian Martens, head of production at Pineapple Entertainment. “We had two suites connected with a NAS but no project sharing, and the rest was standalone storage, so we began looking at a suitable collaborative storage replacement.”
The Pineapple team set three main requirements for their research: the ability to share files, a system that was easy to use, and one that was budget friendly.
“We looked at systems like Avid NEXIS, but having talked to guys I trust about this kind of technology, they recommended that the Facilis Shared Storage system would be the best choice for us.” he says.
Stjernholm & Co A/S, Facilis’ distributor in Scandinavia, supplied and installed the system, and Martens found the installation process to be simple and painless.
“Kristoffer [Laursen, Stjernholm & Co] handled this perfectly. We had very few issues integrating the system into our workflow, it worked really well.”
The initial system was subsequently expanded with two additional Facilis shared storage units that at first worked independently, but were then integrated with the first system into the main workflow.
“It was very easy to expand the system – Kristoffer came in and did some magic for a day and had it running perfectly in a short amount of time, with no disruption,” Martens notes. “We now have 12 edit suites all connected to the Facilis storage, so we can move people around easily from one edit suite to another. All the editors are used to having a collaborative system like this, and they are happy with they way it allows them to work.”