Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/57245
STORAGE SOLUTIONS in our Scottsdale, AZ, site where it acts as the content deliv- ery cache for the whole facility, a fully-automated site that provides file fulfillment for our customers." The Scottsdale facility also has its own MediaGrid 2000 for transcoding and working storage. "We've had the MediaGrid 1000 and 2000 in Burbank for a couple of years now," says Womack. "Our Scottsdale facil- ity has been operating a Media Grid 2000 and 3000 since September 2011. The 1000 and 2000 in Burbank replaced generic RAID-based Windows servers. We moved to Har- online. With other systems, to buy a new node and install it you need to start Friday night to get it ready to use on Mon- day. A MediaGrid expansion is ready to use immediately." He also likes that MediaGrid is "media-optimized" to make the best use of various file types on the same cluster, and any failures that occur are easy and quick to remedy. In Me- diaGrid it's possible to specify optimum block size based on the type of files being stored, he says. For example, it's pos- sible to have different block sizes for DPX files and MPEG files on the same MediaGrid. Modern, which employs Harmonic storage, works on TV series like the The Walking Dead. monic initially just for speed, but as we progressed, part of the decision to deploy these systems in Arizona was that they delivered SAN performance at a NAS price." Womack says transcoding speeds are important. "The faster the storage can supply the transcoder, the faster the job finishes and we can get another job in behind it," he says. "Our transcoding farm has become much more efficient." Modern VideoFilm has seen a lot of content delivery mi- grate to the Internet in the aftermath of last year's earthquake and tsunami in Japan that effectively quashed availability of Sony HDCAM SR tape for deliverables. "Instead of using mas- ter tapes for the source of TV station program dubs, we now have a master file that resides on a MediaGrid. That file is then transcoded to the customer's specifications and staged for Internet delivery via the 3000," Womack explains. Currently, Burbank's edit suites use Quantum's StorNext SAN for shared storage. "We're looking at the potential of MediaGrid to fill that role as well as we do full-resolution DI editorial," says Womack. "It would be a very cost-effective way to it. While the MediaGrid file system driver's software and client machine come with an unlimited license, every SAN client on every machine has an associated cost at- tached to it. And MediaGrid has a significant advantage in cost per TB of storage as well." Womack sees MediaGrid having the ability to "grow with us. One of the nicest things about it is the way it scales: For our last expansion, it took about 30 minutes to get the ad- ditional chassis in the rack and another 10 minutes to get it 6 • Storage Solutions • March 2012 TYLER NELSON Feature film assistant editor Tyler Nelson has several top movies to his credit, including The Social Network and The Cu- rious Case of Benjamin Button. Most recently he reteamed with colleagues from those films, editors Kirk Baxter, ACE, and An- gus Wall, ACE, assistant editor Alex Olivares and post produc- tion supervisor Peter Mavromates, on The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (Wall and Baxter just won an Oscar for their work). They decided to follow the same process they'd successfully used in the two films they'd previously done together. "We try to do the online inhouse, not at an outside facility," says Nelson. "We learned that the more horsepower we have behind us, the quicker that will be." This time that horsepow- er took the form of four compact G-Speed eS Pro external RAIDs from G-Technology by Hitachi with two ATTO cards. They were connected via SAS to the editors' computer. "We had various resolutions on Benjamin Button, The So- cial Network and Dragon Tattoo. Over the course of these three films to get higher-quality images and large file sizes we went from 8.1MB per frame to 54.4MB per frame. That's an astronomical leap. So we needed a lot more horsepower behind us this time," Nelson says. The editors onlined The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo with Adobe After Effects, admittedly an unusual software choice. "Nobody uses After Effects to online a film," Nelson con- cedes. "But with the workflow we've set up, we've turned a prosumer compositing application into an online tool for multi-million-dollar films."