Founded in a garage in 1998, Kukl started out as a small rental company for the film and television industry in Iceland. Demand quickly grew to include production and post-production services, and today Kukl is a leading supplier of equipment and services to Icelandic and foreign productions offering a complete workflow from pre-production to final completion. Kukl’s projects range from live satellite shoots to feature films.
To fully utilize its investment in computer hardware in its Audio-Video Operations Center (AVOC) and edit suites Kukl needed a fast and reliable SAN. Kukl mostly relies on Apple Mac Pro’s running Final Cut Studio with two Mac Pros used for ingest/playout in the AVOC and four edit suites, in addition to a finishing suite. Many of its projects have to move from one video system to another, and they felt the best solution for that is SAN on fiber.
“Our previous set-up of 4 edit suites and 1 finishing suite had been limping along with the suites connected via gigabit ethernet and projects stored on internal raid setups but sometimes on external drives.” says Head of Post-Production Konrad Gylfason. “This would mean ingesting material onto external drives and shuffling between free suites or moving material from the edit suites to the finishing suite via the ethernet connection, costing us hours in copying time. Then we were hit with the volcanic eruption and the addition of handling all the requests for edited footage from the eruption really put our resources to the test.”
After extensive research, Kukl decided to purchase Studio Network Solutions’ EVO, SANmp and HBAs, as the quality-to-price ratio was deemed quite high and they wanted a proven storage solution. Within a few days of the EVO being installed in Kukl’s AVOC, it was put into production use. The feature film King’s Road, documentary Iceland: Land of hope and several TV shows have benefitted from having the EVO available in their post-production pipeline.
The setup also allows Kukl to setup additional edit suites to work with materials from the EVO over gigabit Ethernet for short projects done in standard definition. EVO is used on a variety of projects, including live ingest to the AVOC (Audio-Video Operations Center) that could be edited immediately in one of the edit suites to complete a newsfeed within 30 minutes with help from Softron’s MovieRecorder. EVO is utilized for many long form projects which often require lengthy renders, which are handled on other computers connected to the EVO while work continues in the edit suites. The simple and accessible browser based control is a major strength of the EVO system. The Studio Network Solutions system was easily installed four months ago, and has already made a huge difference to the efficiency of Kukl’s video workflow.
Kukl’s editors were able to quickly become familiar with and use SANmp without a learning curve, which increased productivity. “So far it´s been a dream,” continues Konrad Gylfason, “now we ingest the material once and can access it from any of the suites. It also helped us during the live web-broadcast for Iceland Inspires, where we ingested the live feed to the EVO and were able to start editing right away, making segments available as the webcast progressed.”
He concludes, “Demand has increased for our services, especially with an economic climate that requires us to complete more projects locally with reduced costs. We are also looking into expanding our services and lure foreign projects in to Iceland. I suspect that before the end of the year we will have bought an extension to the EVO and will recommend the SNS products to our colleagues here and abroad.”
About SNS
Studio Network Solutions (SNS) specializes in the development of shared storage hardware and software solutions for the Media and Entertainment industry. Since day one we’ve applied unmatched ingenuity and experience to create outstanding products that exceed industry expectations while providing outstanding support to our customers.
Our customers range in size from individual freelance engineers to multinational media powerhouses. Our solutions are used to produce everything from books on tape to full track scoring for major Hollywood films. Our products have been at the technical core of the music you listen to, the games you play, the shows you watch and the movies you see.
We have a valued network of resellers located throughout the United States… and the world. Whether you have a product question or you’re ready to place an order, we encourage you to contact us today.