From Emergency Rescue to Infrastructure Backbone: QQ studio Storage Upgrade

About QQ studio

QQ studio is a Czech production and postproduction company engaged in filmmaking and European television projects. For their visual effects (VFX) artists, editors, and sound designers, high data throughput and system reliability are critical. Data bottlenecks and hardware crashes risk missed client deadlines, broken delivery promises, and interrupted creative flow.

The Breaking Point

In mid-2024, QQ studio’s production pipeline hit a wall. Over 40 TB of active project data lived on an aging QNAP NAS. External access via FTP failed, forcing reliance on expensive third-party file transfer services like Frame.io. Meanwhile, project management relied on Kitsu, the studio’s central tool for tracking VFX shot status, coordinating task assignments, and reviewing preview renders across creators.

For most modern companies, the automatic answer to a failing local server is simply: Move everything to the cloud. However, given QQ studio’s hybrid setup where editors, VFX artists, and render nodes work directly on local workstations, relying on remote storage isn’t practical. The studio works with massive, uncompressed video files where even a 2.5Gbps local network can sometimes feel slow. Pulling terabytes of raw footage down from the internet daily would cripple their creative workflow, and paying for 40+ TB of active, high-speed cloud storage would burn through project budgets entirely. They needed the massive speed of a local network, but with enterprise-grade reliability.

Meanwhile, daily backups were manual and fragile, relying entirely on hope that systems wouldn't crash. With growing project scopes, a team scaling over 40 creators, and strict commitments to major partners, studio leadership knew their old infrastructure had reached its limits. They brought me in to work alongside their team and replace the fragile setup with a stable, secure foundation.

Deploying the Industry Standard

Rather than forcing a proprietary, unproven setup from scratch, I worked with the team to implement an architecture that has long been an industry standard for major film and animation studios worldwide. Industry giants like VIZ Media rely heavily on TrueNAS to power their massive production pipelines. Therefore, we brought that same enterprise foundation to QQ studio, deploying a Dell PowerEdge server equipped with dual 32-Core Intel Xeon processors and 192GB of RAM to run Proxmox VE and TrueNAS.

The Power of ZFS and Targeted Tuning

The legacy QNAP NAS used a standard RAID 1 configuration (disk mirroring). This meant the studio was unable to leverage half of its high-speed storage capacity and traded it directly for durability.

By implementing TrueNAS with the ZFS file system together, we overhauled their storage efficiency. ZFS allowed us to configure a storage pool that maximizes available capacity while safely tolerating the complete failure of any two hard drives without losing a single byte of data. But solving primary storage was only half the equation because we also wanted to squeeze every bit of value from their original investment. Instead of retiring the old QNAP NAS, we upgraded its internal resources and repurposed it as an automated secondary backup server running in tandem with the primary setup. Moving this upgraded unit to a separate physical location added true geographical durability.

With a resilient dual-server foundation in place, ZFS allowed us to precisely tune the underlying datasets based on departmental needs:

• TV Production: Working with massive, continuous video files, we configured their dataset to maximize raw throughput and optimize streaming performance.
• VFX Department: Dealing with thousands of individual image sequences and frame renders, we optimized their dataset for rapid, small-file access and high input/output operations (IOPS).

The ultimate test of optimized storage is high-end production output, and this custom tuning paid off immediately. Complex, multi-layered visual work was assembled, rendered, and delivered directly on the new TrueNAS storage hardware without a single performance stutter. You can see the work in action in QQ studio’s recent VFX breakdown trailer below:

Ending Manual Overhead and the Self-Hosted ROI

Together with René, who covers Senior VFX work while also managing internal backups and IT tasks, we completely overhauled the fragile, manual backup routine. We established a fully automated 1:1 offsite replica over a secure VPN tunnel to a secondary facility 50 km away. While pure cloud storage wasn't suitable for raw video files, we strategically leveraged the cloud where it excels: maintaining encrypted offsite snapshots of server configurations and project tracking databases. If primary local hardware fails, production data remains safe and recoverable without risking client delivery dates.

Simultaneously, project tracking achieved a massive financial and operational win. While cloud-hosting SaaS licensing for Kitsu was projected at 20,000 CZK (~$900) per month for just 20 active users, deploying it locally was essential for performance. Studio tracking tools must tightly integrate with raw video files and local render nodes. Hosting it locally ensured instant preview uploads and lag-free tracking without bandwidth limits or third-party transfer fees. By leveraging existing internal hardware and IT resources instead of paying high monthly SaaS subscription fees, QQ studio achieved a full Return on Investment (ROI) in just 3 months.

Today, that setup seamlessly powers 64 active users. Because it runs locally, internal artists can continue logging progress uninterrupted even during connectivity hiccups. Furthermore, custom render-farm bots automatically upload preview renders directly into Kitsu with zero network latency, bypassing remote cloud storage limitations entirely.

From a Localized VFX Fix to the Studio's Central Spine

What started as a targeted rescue mission for the VFX team quickly evolved into the central backbone of the entire studio. The true value of the modular architecture showed when production demands grew. Instead of spending thousands on a full network overhaul or outside engineering, the QQ studio team handled the upgrade entirely in-house. By upgrading a specific network segment to 10Gbps for their most demanding local artists, they unlocked a massive performance leap for minimal cost, instantly linking those local workstations and the 3D render farm into a high-speed, unified workflow.

Seeing the rock-solid stability, other departments naturally migrated to the server:

• Sound Department: Moved their large audio projects and session files onto the server for fast, low-latency access, and now rely on it to back up and hand off data between artists.
• TV Production: Built their complete editing, assembly, and broadcast delivery workflows on top of the storage infrastructure.

Looking Ahead: A Shared Win

What began as an urgent rescue mission to fix storage bottlenecks ultimately transformed QQ studio’s operational landscape. By finding the right balance between high-performance local storage and strategic cloud utilization, we eliminated recurring SaaS subscription fees, removed unnecessary data transfer overhead, and secured their data across physical locations, all while building a modular foundation ready to scale with future production demands.

I want to extend a massive thank you to Jan Tégláš, René Ruszó, Tobiáš Petrůj, and the entire team at QQ studio for their trust, vision, and active collaboration throughout this build. Upgrading live production infrastructure requires tremendous care, and their willingness to innovate alongside me made this transformation a complete success.