Strawberry Case Study: solis film + content productions’ Scalable Workflow with Strawberry Production Asset Management

Founded in 2011, Solis isn’t just another production house; they are storytellers dedicated to improving lives. Specializing in authentic, high-quality formats for lifestyle, health, and food, they produce content for major German broadcasters and streamers like WDR, RTL, and SWR.

Their mission centers on quality over quantity, emphasizing thorough research and professional production values. To uphold these standards while managing a high volume of long-form content, Solis relies on a sophisticated technical backbone, led by Christoph Eggener, Head of Post-Production. Eggener ensures that technical and collaborative workflows effectively support the creative process, not the other way around.

Rather than taking the traditional route of buying a storage box, Solis quite literally went outside the box to manage its Avid editing projects. To deliver top-tier content across ten active edit suites and a sound studio, they selected a project-centric, independent foundation. By implementing Projective’s Strawberry as their production asset management (PAM) tool, they unlocked a flexible, hardware-agnostic workflow that automates data logistics and streamlines post-production. This approach saves engineering bandwidth equivalent to three full-time employees, allowing the team to focus on creative, value-generating work instead of manual tasks.

Solis operates a technical setup that includes Avid Media Composer for video editing, powered by off-the-shelf HP servers for asset management and storage. The production storage is dedicated mainly to video editing (90%), with ProTools audio workflows accounting for 8% and Adobe After Effects graphics comprising the remaining 2%.

Like most production facilities, Solis operating budget is razor-thin, so the team needs to make the most of their resources. With each 30-45 minute project generating 1-4TB of raw material, storage costs can quickly skyrocket. Instead of investing in costly, proprietary storage, Solis investment in Strawberry allows them to collaborate on open, independent, standard IT hardware. The software layer Strawberry provides adds structure, security, and project-based management to this open environment, without slowing down the creative process.

Strawberry organizes all Avid editing projects, media files, and assets on Solis production storage automatically. A key component of their workflow is automated proxy encoding: as soon as content is ingested, Strawberry generates lightweight review proxies as a visual representation of the content on the production storage. This allows producers and assistant editors to instantly view timecoded material from anywhere in a standard web browser—no need to install and manage a dedicated client software, supporting a seamless hybrid workflow.

While most editing happens in-house, freelance producers often review content remotely. Strawberry Cloud Access allows secure connections to the on-premise environment from anywhere, but without the bandwidth demands or management overhead of a traditional VPN.

Unlike a VPN, which acts as a single gate where users have access to everything once they are in, Strawberry’s project-level access control extends beyond the firewall. This ensures users have granular access only to the projects they need, making it easy to manage permissions. This flexibility enhances security for Solis while streamlining freelancer onboarding.

With Strawberry, Solis has achieved a streamlined and adaptable post-production system that enhances every stage of their workflow, significantly reducing infrastructure costs compared to proprietary storage solutions.

Before, proxy encoding, project/workspace organization, and asset collaboration required manual intervention. Strawberry’s ability to automate these tasks allows the technical team to manage more, while the creative team focuses on being creative. The result: measurable and demonstrable improvements in performance and turnaround time.

Previously, sharing, viewing, and commenting on work in progress created chaos with uploads, downloads, versions, spreadsheets, and emails. With Strawberry’s intuitive project framework, collaboration within the Avid environment is seamless. Remote contributors work on the same dataset and content as those in the facility, and freelancers are easily and securely integrated.

The production asset management has proven reliable and flexible, adapting to the studio’s needs as they’ve evolved over the past decade.

Their journey with Projective continues as Solis looks to harness Strawberry’s open architecture for even greater efficiency. Next on the roadmap is integrating production music libraries directly into the editing interface via the Strawberry PAM, saving time and eliminating manual search-and-import steps.

For Solis, Strawberry is an indispensable engine of efficiency, enabling a “best-of-breed” hardware strategy without expensive proprietary lock-ins, all while delivering enterprise-level structure and flexibility.

Solis proves that high-quality post-production doesn’t need massive, rigid infrastructure. By integrating Strawberry with flexible IT storage, they’ve created a scalable, secure, and automated workflow. Solis’s decision to choose an independent, open, project-based framework/PAM over a traditional storage appliance has boosted the efficiency of their technical and creative teams. They’re also free to grow and adapt more easily as their needs evolve.