Post Production Boutique Services
Real by Fake, formerly known as Local Hero Post, is the trusted full-service boutique of numerous high-profile clients such as HBO, Netflix, Lionsgate and Apple, with credits that include the recent movie Home Again starring Reese Witherspoon, and HBO series Big Little Lies and Sharp Objects. The studio is now working almost entirely on 4K projects and is starting to work with HDR content as well.
Real by Fake needed to compete in a rapidly evolving marketplace demanding services in 4K and HDR without breaking the bank.
Since 4K requires four times the space as 2K, the facility started encountering capacity issues which, along with a disappointing vendor service experience, drove them to explore options. The search, however, was paved with solutions that came with high costs and pricey support contracts.
“We go above and beyond [for our clients] and didn’t think it was too much to expect the same from our storage vendors, but it took DigitalGlue and creative.space to find that level of service. They came on site, trained our staff and helped us understand how the product works and what makes it unique. They gave us the kind of service you’d expect if you were making a huge investment or dropping a pile of cash, but this is an affordable monthly fee — and still DigitalGlue delivered, spectacularly.”
Steve Bannerman
CEO, Real by Fake aka Local Hero Post
Instead of purchasing another piece of iron and committing to another service contract, Bannerman found creative.space, an On-Premise Managed Storage™(OPMS) system and entirely new concept in media storage that not only met his requirements, but surpassed his expectations. For Bannerman, the solution scored high on all counts — affordability, service, support, and reliability.
Real by Fake works with major studios and needs to secure assets from unauthorized access.
The creative.space Web App allows Real by Fake's non-I.T. staff to independently manage the system. The built-in LDAP directory service lets them divide their storage into separate volumes, known as Spaces, for each Production and restrict access to specific users and groups. Everything that they need to do can be completed from a central and simple-to-use interface without needing a command line.
“creative.space is a really dynamic tool because wherever I am, I can just create the Space that I need, manage the permissions, and if a new person joins the team I can add them right away. I don't need to wait for anyone in I.T. or someone from creative.space to do that for me.
Borja
Post Production Engineer, Local Hero Post aka Real by Fake
Snapshots allow Real by Fake to create read-only backups of their Spaces that they can navigate to and restore deleted or modified files and folders from. The underlying ZFS filesystem scans every block of data and self-heals any corruption that might happen as hard drives age.
With editorial, VFX, and color working off the same storage, the //DEUS EX keep everyone connected, collaborating, and creating in real-time
Real by Fake's //DEUS EX node features both a high-capacity HDD pool and a high-performance SSD pool. Color is able to work with 4K OpenEXR files in real-time while the rest of the team is able to work on HDDs that provide the same level of performance for non-image sequence based video and audio formats.
“We didn’t just need a big, fast piece of storage, we needed something that works and service we could rely on. We needed a business model that was going to let us excel, and we got it. One of the things I love most about creative.space is that it helps us keep our infrastructure costs down. If the system we're using turns out to not be the right product, we’re not locked in. We can simply move on to a more appropriate creative.space solution for our needs.
Steve Bannerman
CEO, Real by Fake aka Local Hero Post
Adopting creative.space has enabled Real by Fake to take on 4K and HDR projects. The Web App syncs data between HDD and SSD tiers to efficiently manage capacity usage. By copying internally instead of through a workstation, files don't need to be "prepared" first by the operating system, leading to significant time savings when moving processing image sequences made up of lots of files.
