Colour grading and finishing with GBLabs

Colour grading and finishing with GBLabs

RIF///RAF Creative is a boutique post-production company based in Hell’s Kitchen, New York City that specialises in colour grading and finishing services for theatrical, broadcast and web markets.

Founded in 2011 and owned by cinematographer and colorist Pedro J. Padilla, RIF///RAF has developed into a flexible and agile studio, with the capability and creativity to collaborate with filmmakers and content creators to craft compelling visuals that are consistent with their stories and messaging.

The setting

According to Padilla, “Prior to our relationship with GB Labs, I had five workstation clients but no shared storage. That meant that we were still in the old mode of walking – sometimes running - drives from one client to another, and this was a problem. Not only were new expectations for rapid turnaround becoming the new normal, it was becoming doubly challenging as larger and larger file sizes needed to be worked on."
"Coupled together, especially when you are working 24-hour shifts at peak times, working in that way had become very expensive in terms of time wasted waiting for content or data to be transferred or rendered. I knew I needed a fast, reliable storage solution that could not only handle what we needed immediately, but be able to grow with us without blowing the budget.”
The solution

With GB Labs FastNAS F-8 Nitro Studio, Padilla solved the problem of clients waiting to physically receive projects before they could work on them. It also provided the ability to enable multiple clients to simultaneously collaborate on a project. Hence, increase workflow productivity.
Padilla said, “We’re a small shop, so the majority of our need was to have a fast and reliable way to connect five clients to a common storage system so we would no longer have to waste time and money having to sneaker-net disks and drives from room to room. A fast, local 10 GbE that everyone could share was what we needed – to work off of if we wanted to – but primarily as a way to safely and securely back up files, which had been an ongoing worry for us."
“FastNAS F-8 Nitro Studio has an ample GbE port for direct connection and so far, the speeds have been pretty good."
A solid Foundation

They now use it not only as storage for completed media projects, but also as a working drive for ongoing projects because they can do color grading, editing, and other tasks directly from the FastNAS F-8 Nitro Studio system if they want to.
According to Padilla, “Having FastNAS F-8 Nitro Studio has removed the insecurity about the state of our local data backups. We now have a single solution rather than five. It’s saved us having to keep running out to buy more hard drives for backups."
"We now have a pretty nice size 20TB backup at our disposal and we can offload from there once we’ve done archival work onto other drives. Our FastNAS has made that process a lot smoother because it’s a single, fast location that everyone is connected to. The FastNAS F-8 Nitro Studio is nothing short of amazing.”
 
What differentiates GB Labs?
GB Labs understands real-world problems and provides storage solutions that are right for the individual. For example, according to Padilla, “FastNAS F-8 Nitro Studio comes configured originally with a 1 GbE connection, but I asked GB Labs to fit a 10 GbE card in the back and it works very well indeed. They delivered precisely what I asked for.”
Published by GBLabs