Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/74632
Storage for VFX live-action elements ourselves. There was a night highway sequence where the shot was focused wrong through a mirror. So we mounted a camera on the roof of a car, drove the car and replicated everything outside the car's front window with the correct focus." By mounting either a Canon EOS 5D and 7D camera with a fish-eye lens on a laptop during 1st unit photography, CHE was also able to capture some surprising footage. They intended to gather content to use, in an undistorted mode, for video playback during videoconferencing sequences, but director Stone loved the super close-up fish- eye shots so much that he ended up using much of CHE's photography. CHE also crafted "some gorgeous Indian environments" for Life of Pi, says Graff. "For that film we did everything from all-CG wide establishing shots to adding back- grounds or foregrounds. Those shots were stereo environments done in After Effects and Nuke." Working in stereo 3D ups stor- age requirements because it "doubles scans and produces a lot of extra renders," Sales reminds us. Graff explains that a film is likely to stay online on the RAIDs for a few months, so he's always "pushing for more space. We moved to 2TB and 3TB drives, but the bot- tom line is you can never have too much storage. It can get really tight with space." Method's VP of technology Paul Ryan. The choice of solutions not only depends on the work and the workflow but also is "driven by the support for the system in each region and the relationship of the facilities with their local vendors," he notes. Both Isilon and Panasas did not require huge initial investments and can "grow in quite manageable chunks," Ryan says. "They really shine with their ability to grow capacity or bandwidth independently." Panasas gives Method "some exposure to parallel NFS. We're interested in seeing how it performs in a VFX environment and have been very happy with the test results from our Sydney facility, which is building out its infrastructure. " He explains that the emerging parallel NFS standard makes it possible to build more scalable, higher-throughput storage networks; the data bandwidth and metadata bandwidth can expand independently as needed. "Panasas has really spearheaded this storage system architecture. Other vendors are working toward employing it, but Panasas has been there for quite a few years already." Method LA perhaps enjoys the most var- ied workflows of the group, from Flame- based commercial finishing to film and com- mercial visual effects, says the facility's direc- tor of technology Olivier Ozoux. "Right now we have close to 350TB of storage between our Isilon, BlueArc and SANs," Ozoux reports. "We split work between Isilon and BlueArc more for our convenience than for performance. Features are done with BlueArc storage and commer- cials with Isilon." Method LA's biggest recent film VFX job Crazy Horse's Paul Graff: The studio uses Active Storage solutions. METHOD With facilities in Los Angeles, New York, Sydney, London and Vancouver, which work on film effects, CG features, and effects and CG for commercials, Method Studios (www. methodstudios.com) has opted for an indi- vidualized approach to visual effects storage rather than a one-size-fits-all solution. Currently, London, Vancouver and New York use Isilon storage; Sydney has a Panasas system; and LA uses both EMC's Isilon and Hitachi Data Systems' BlueArc storage. "We're happy with each facility using the technology that works best for them," says 24 Post • July 2012 was for Wrath of the Titans, which consumed 120+TB of BlueArc storage. "BlueArc's two heads give us 80TB of online, high-speed storage and another 80TB of near-line stor- age," says Ozoux. "High-speed online vol- umes transparently connect to slower near- line disks so, from a user perspective, it looks like files are sitting on a single piece of stor- age even though they are migrating from faster to slower disks. That allowed us to keep the Wrath data easily accessible to art- ists without resorting to archiving on tape." The facility implements the same process for commercial visual effects on its Isilon storage. Artists use Autodesk's Maya for character animation, Side Effects' Houdini for effects and Pixar's RenderMan and Chaos Group's V-Ray for rendering. "We're always reviewing our needs: Stor- age is sort of an arms race year after year," says Ozoux. "You find out you always need 20 percent more than the amount you have: You want to do more complex things or the artist expands to take up all available www.postmagazine.com resources. We try to manage that [latter] process, to give artists the tools they need and show them where they're spending their data and at what cost. "From a technical point of view, we're very happy with both platforms. Looking forward, we are always looking for the best performing hardware and, ideally, it would be a single solution." RHYTHM & HUES With more than 1,400 employees in six locations (Los Angeles; Mumbai and Hyder- abad, India; outside Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia; Vancouver; and Taiwan), Rhythm & Hues Studios (www.rhythm.com) boasts over 1PB of storage globally. In LA, the largest facility has about 300TB of Tier 1 storage in EMC2's Isilon IQ 10000 Series 28-node cluster and several 6000 Series clusters. According to chief technology officer Gautham Krishnamurti, Rhythm & Hues has "gone through pretty much every solution out there," including "home brewed" storage systems. "Typically, we like to have two differ- ent vendors, but two years ago we became solely Isilon. We've been very happy with Isilon's performance and support. If we need to add more storage, we add another node to the cluster so it's an incremental cost." Storage is broken into three tiers. Tier 1 Isilon storage is used for media currently in production, which needs to be accessed by artists and the renderfarm; it's high-perfor- mance and scalable, and is broken down into job data and RLA data. Media is moved to slower Tier 2 near-line storage to free up space in Tier 1; Tier 2 content is not immedi- ately in use or heavily accessed. Tier 3 far-line storage is used for long-term archiving. Shows are typically shared among the Rhythm & Hues facilities with every location sharing assets. "Every facility is treated exactly the same and expected to do the same quality work," says Krishnamurti. "We have a completely distributed workflow