Pixel perfect – pixitmedia’s hybrid cloud-based workflows give Taylor James the creative and competitive edge
- March 21, 2022
pixitmedia joined forces with Konsistent Consulting and full-service production company Taylor James to transform their three Americas sites seamlessly from on-premise to on-cloud.
London, UK, 21st March 2022 – Pioneering storage and cloud-based workflow experts pixitmedia continue to strengthen their reputation and reach, transforming how media companies collaborate around the globe in the new creative frontier.
Taylor James is a full-service, integrated production studio, with offices in London, New York, Los Angeles, Mexico and Buenos Aires. They specialize in translating creative ideas into high-quality content through concept design, CGI, 2D and 3D animation, live-action, photography, VFX, and post-production.
Endeavoring to remain at the forefront of technology, and as a logical reaction to remote working requirements and collaborative workflows, Daniel Marshall from Konsistent Consulting reached out to pixitmedia to radically overhaul Taylor James’ storage and file access infrastructure.
Daniel Marshall, Solutions Architect and consultant for Taylor James from Konsistent Consulting explains:
As part of their global multi-site transformation, pixitmedia and I have collaborated with Taylor James to completely move them from an on-premise, hardware-based business to virtualizing it in the cloud.
‘Now, we have three totally separate disparate sites, working on the same files at the same time, seamlessly using pixitmedia’s technology.’
Realizing the vision
Over the past few years, Taylor James has had to scale up both operations and creative staff to meet the demands of their expanding client base across the globe. Moving to cloud-based synchronized digital workflows was uncharted territory for their Americas offices, although it had long been on their roadmap.
Taylor James’ Americas operation has three sites – one in New York, one in LA and a team in Mexico. There were two potential options; an on-premise datacenter at all three of their offices, or migrating all three to the cloud, consolidating all Taylor James’ existing data, including hundreds of terabytes of archived projects.
Marshall explains: ‘We looked at the storage piece. On-premise, Taylor James had 200 terabytes of Isilon that was due for renewal and refresh, we didn’t want to provision 200 terabytes in the cloud.’
What was required was a storage solution that delivered seamless performance, instead of simply storage size.
Ben Leaver Co-Founder & CEO of pixitmedia: ‘It’s a credit to the teams that we were able to come together to form a strong partnership between pixitmedia, Daniel and Taylor James to get them fit for the future. Yet again, our wealth of knowledge and understanding of customers’ requirements and the capability of our products made all the difference.’
pixitmedia’s AWS/ngenea combination taps into S3’s unlimited cloud-based storage capacity, with a very fast pixstor hot tier on the front. With ngenea in between, the back-and-forth file flow is transparent, robust and very fast.
Once the archive is ported over, ngenea can stub all the required files and the AWS Glacier Instant Retrieval storage class gives unprecedented levels of fast file access. This means clients have the oversight and control to handle only the folders and files they specifically need (whereas previously, gigabytes of files would have to be requested, moved and stored, taking up unnecessary amounts of valuable time).
Instant access. Instant difference
‘We’ve been able to scale up in terms of render and capacity. Instead of shuffling data between different silos in different countries, we bring the artist in Mexico to the data. All artists now access the same environment; they are all working off the same file sets across time zones and physical locations.’ Says Marshall.
Taylor James now has a global view of their data, from any office, no matter what the storage tier. Remote file access now also means artists can throw themselves into the part of their jobs they genuinely love; bringing their creative ideas to life.
This new difference is reflected in the work. Artists can work smarter, using time that would have previously been spent locating and downloading vast quantities of data, to work across more projects than ever before. With ngenea as the engine, a truly collaborative, multi-site workspace is possible.
The cloud-based workflow is good for their creative well-being and fantastic for Taylor James’ reputation, global scalability, output and integrated future.
About Taylor James
Taylor James is an integrated production studio, working across every media channel. Based in New York, Los Angeles, London and Mexico City, the company specializes in translating creative ideas into high-quality content through concept design, CGI, 2D and 3D animation, live-action, photography, VFX, and post-production. Recognized at Cannes Lions, Clio Awards, Creativepool, and more, Taylor James offers original, world-first ideas that spark imagination, change behaviors, and transform experiences.