Falcon's Creative Group
Taming Shared Storage for Complex Workflows
Falcon's Creative Group
Saham Ali
Director of Technology, Falcon's Creative Group
TB Space Reclaimed
Dollars Budget Trimmed
Minutes Retrieval Time
In 2016, Saham Ali joined Falcon’s Creative Group as director of technology. His new mission was to ensure processes and workflows remained on track for the teams of designers, illustrators, visual effects artists, and editors. However, their shared storage was rapidly filling with archived content, which could potentially grind new production to a halt.
The company needed a way to archive their valuable finished work apart from shared storage, yet have it instantly available whenever the team needed to access the files for new projects. Ali chose Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage to store his archived content and optimize their existing shared storage investment.
Falcon’s shared storage is now lean and perfectly sized to meet their needs for work in progress. Their entire content library is free to grow as large as necessary, and is immediately available whenever needed. Now, with their workflow running smoothly, the creative team is free to focus on delivering their best work.
For twenty years, the team at Falcon’s Creative Group has blended cutting-edge technological mastery, immersive and intelligent environmental design, and world-leading digital content production to deliver some of the most breathtaking and memorable immersive experiences ever created.
When Saham Ali was recruited to manage technology for one of the country’s most sought-after experience design firms, he knew he was going to be responsible for one of the most complex and challenging production environments ever built.
Falcon’s Creative Group tells stories on a massive scale—designing fully immersive experiences for museums, destination attractions, and more that push the limits of existing technology.
To deliver these intricate experiences, Falcon’s relies on a close-knit team of creatives: from artists, designers, and engineers, to writers, producers, animators, coders, and filmmakers. In fact, collaboration is so important to their storytelling process that the entire team is housed in a single building to foster creativity and encourage rapid problem-solving and sharing across all departments.
Yet the team wrestled with challenges every agency faces: the pressure of delivering their best work on tight schedules, the need to avoid delays when handing off work at each creative milestone, the costs of accidental deletion, and most importantly: the essential step of ensuring work is saved where it can be retrieved and reused for maximum efficiency on new projects.
Delivering up to 10K resolution, extremely high frame-rates, and even stereoscopic 3D designed for one of the world’s largest 360-degree panoramic displays meant that the team was working with enormous files sizes. There was little margin for error.
This was Ali’s challenge: How to help this talented team work better, and more efficiently, using the best workflow tools and storage for their operation.
Each creative department has radically different workflow storage needs at every stage of the design and production process. The animators might generate millions of small files, while the video editors might create much fewer, but still massive files. Everyone needed to know that their content and files were protected and archived as their projects evolved from initial designs to final handoff.
Rather than cobble together different types of storage for each step, the team found that a single shared storage solution called Qumulo was flexible enough to underpin their entire workflow. They liked that it was fast enough for both animators and editors and worked well with their highly customized installation of Shotgun, their production tracking and asset management software. They could keep every stage of their creative process working together smoothly.
Yet as useful as their shared storage was, Ali saw that it filled up quickly with content and assets not needed for current work in process.
When Saham Ali was recruited to manage technology for one of the country’s most sought-after experience design firms, he knew he was going to be responsible for one of the most complex and challenging production environments ever built.
Simply scaling up their shared storage would be expensive, and Ali knew that every expansion was a potential disruption for the creative team. Ali didn’t want to add complexity to the carefully balanced workflow, nor did he want to invest in a new class of on-site physical storage.
In fact, “cold” storage of any type was ruled out completely. Though attractive for its low price and ability to scale to their growing need, having to wait for files or retrieve entire archive sets to get a single file was not an option. Ali is responsible for supporting a world-class creative team, and he knows that time is money, a lot of money.
He needed a solution that complemented their shared storage, stored finished files and projects safely, made that content available to every department instantly, could grow to any size without interruption, and do so at a reasonable, predictable cost.
Ali had relied on Backblaze B2 at his previous company, so he knew it would be a dependable solution for Falcon’s as well. Ali began migrating completed customer projects to Backblaze B2, which freed up enormous amounts of shared storage and greatly eased any anxiety about the team running out of space.
Backblaze’s active cloud storage lets his team retrieve individual files, or entire project folders instantly—all without having to retrieve an entire archive set, as is common on “cold” cloud storage systems.
Now, with a highly optimized workflow capable of tackling today’s largest challenges—Falcon’s is excited to keep pushing the boundaries of design. They are developing deeper integrations between their solutions like Shotgun, Qumulo, Backblaze B2, and their own custom code, and are designing even more immersive and dynamic experiences that let attraction visitors customize their experience for real-time, dynamic storytelling on a scale that has never been achieved before.
Saham didn’t want to add complexity to the carefully balanced workflow, nor did he want to invest in a new class of on-site physical storage.
With Qumulo serving the entire workflow, and Backblaze B2 serving as a highly-protected, active content tier, Ali kept Falcon’s architecture simple and reliable, and highly optimized for both performance and cost. He can now carefully manage the growth and cost of Falcon's shared storage to match the needs of current projects, and he can rely on Backblaze B2 to grow as large as needed for everything else.
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