“Wasabi has proven to be an easy to use centralized storage environment for a range of studio assets. The process of transferring assets to the service is straight forward and all stored content is immediately available so our creative teams can continue to work uninterrupted. And with no egress charges, we don’t have to worry about how often we access our Wasabi storage or download assets for review and repurposing.”

-Jason Davison, SVP of Information Technology at Legendary.

Overview

Legendary Entertainment is a leading media company with film (Legendary Pictures), television and digital (Legendary Television and Digital Media) and comics (Legendary Comics) divisions dedicated to owning, producing and delivering content to mainstream audiences with a targeted focus on the powerful fandom demographic. Through complete or joint ownership, Legendary has built a library of marquee media properties and has established itself as a trusted brand which consistently delivers high-quality, commercial entertainment including some of the world’s most popular intellectual property. In aggregate, Legendary Pictures-associated productions have realized grosses of more than $17 billion worldwide at the box office.

Challenge

Legendary’s media is spread across different storage formats and storage mediums. Much of their content has been kept on-premises with the rest in a number of cloud storage services. All of it was becoming expensive and the age of some hardware was becoming a big concern.

Solution

Legendary uses Wasabi hot cloud storage to offload expensive Tier 1, on-premise storage while still retaining rapid access to their files. They also have migrated some content over from other cloud storage services which proved to be too expensive once all the egress fees, retrieval request charges and API charges were added up. At the core of operations, Covalent, Legendary’s asset management system, provides the view into their storage infrastructure, initiates content moves and manages various projects. Legendary has also begun looking at Wasabi’s integration with Adobe Premiere Pro for remote editorial work which has been necessitated by the COVID-19 pandemic and work from home mandate.

Results

The immediate impact of using Wasabi has been the cost savings achieved by reducing their on-premise storage footprint and migrating out of other, more expensive cloud storage services that were riddled with egress fees and other micro-charges that were difficult to predict on a month-to-month basis and added up over time.

By centralizing much of their storage with Wasabi, Legendary have also broken down a number of storage silos and are spending less time searching for and managing files. Storing data in the cloud gives the Legendary team improved remote access and allows them to better collaborate over distance. “Going forward, we see a lot of benefit in enabling employees to work from the comfort of their own home with rapid access to all the work-in-progress and archived assets they need. And moving more of our workflow to the cloud will also allow us to hire the best people, no matter where they are,” said JoAnne Kim, VP of Post Production Technology.