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August 2018

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www.postmagazine.com 27 POST AUGUST 2018 "We're constantly assessing cloud offerings, but performance for us is critical and we're not yet seeing a cloud offering taking us anywhere near the performance levels we need," explains Clark. "I can see a time where we start to see some of the lower demand storage pools migrating into cloud-based object stores and definitely the replacement of our tape storage units with cloud storage." According to Clark, the new system is "absolute- ly working better" than what Rising Sun had previ- ously been using. However, he adds, "it's important to note that the jump has been enabled by the availability of a number of core technologies that have completely upended the price performance in storage over the past 10 years — low cost flash and SSD storage, more dense RAM and higher density magnetic spindles. They're just the physical bits though — the major game changer in storage was Sun (now Oracle)'s release of the ZFS file system, which enabled companies to build incredibly high performance file servers that utilized these compo- nents at a price point that was previously unheard of. We'd been experimenting with ZFS for years on smaller scale and non-production critical servers, and developed enough confidence to deploy it as our main storage. Our old filer was excellent at the time, but as the complexity of our work and scale of the studio increased, so did the demands on that system, and it became a key impediment to artist productivity." Clark says that it's "absolutely critical" for a stu- dio that creates high-end visual effects to have the proper storage. "Artists need to create work that's increasingly complex, and their time needs to be spent on making that work the best it can be with- in the time allowed. The platform they're working with — workstation, software, pipeline, render and storage — need to be as transparent to the creative process as possible to enable the best work to be done in the right amount of time. Time lost to out- ages or unresponsive systems ultimately affects the quality of work and therefore the reputation of the studio, while also hurting the studio's bottom line. In an increasingly competitive landscape, studios need to be very focused on productivity." TIMBER Santa Monica, CA-based Timber (http://timber.net/) is a design, visual effects and finishing studio that creates high-end work for clients who are predom- inantly in the advertising space. One of the compa- ny's most recent projects was to create animated characters for crowd sequences, CG weaponry and digital fire effects for a Cox Communications spot titled Epic Battle (see page 7 for details). According to Jonah Hall, creative director/ partner at Timber, "The industry is changing so much, that we can't really do things the way we did even five years ago. We're in commercial production, which is quite different from feature production. A lot of it has to do with the amount of media that's going up all the time. It's just increasing, but the amount of time we have to work on these projects is really shortened, so, data starts when the cameras start rolling. You have people use digital cameras that shoot 8K resolution now – directors work differently. It used to be that they were very picky about when they rolled the camera, because film cost money, but now they just fill up drive after drive after drive, and you have a DIT there on set transcod- ing everything. When a shoot is done, the post houses, and I say houses because it's always quite a few, they all get a drive, with everything on it not color corrected. In the old days, when the schedule was really long, the drive would go to the editorial house, the editorial house would use it, then when they were done, the edit was locked and then it would be time to get the color correction done, that drive would move over to the color house, then they would plug into that drive and do their work, and then when it was time to do the finishing and visual effects, you would get a visual effects company involved and the drive would go to the them and they would use it and make what they needed to make. But now, all those things happen in tandem, so every- one is sending drives all over the place, so the big difference for a company like Timber, is that we no longer have the luxury of having a locked edit in order to get started. Since five or 10 years ago, the visual effects company, by the time the train even entered their station, the number of shots that were even being talked about or considered or moved around was just the ones being applied to the final edit. But in our case now, we simply get all the film dumped on us because we actually start working on edits that are not locked and edits that are in progress and shots that a director might have said loosely that he liked and he was planning on using. So we kind of jump in with all the same media that the offline company does. For that reason, we built a specialty server and I don't know if other com- panies are doing it this way, but we have a server now that's committed to just cloning the drive straight from set. We cut out all the middle men and take all the media and we save it. A typical project can be 4 or 3 TB worth of film media and that goes onto a server. It's not meant to read and write all the time, it's really a storage server so when the conforms are being built, they apply the EDL and then pull it off of that." Things change so much, so fast. Before something ships, and it's on the networks. we'll suddenly find out that they didn't like two of the shots and we have to swap them out. We have Timber's Epic Battle campaign for Cox. Rising Sun worked on the Chinese film, Animal World.

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