Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1013519
www.postmagazine.com 30 POST AUGUST 2018 in Hollywood studios to create CG elements used in combination with 3D photogrammetry. For instance, visitors will find eel and fish that are entirely CG el- ements and coral that is photogrammetry, resulting in real images projected on to 3D geometry. With all of this content, Cal Academy ends up producing around six times more storage. "Making immersive content requires an enor- mous amount of bandwidth," says Garza. "We find it's very challenging to give the artists the ability to preview this content in a way that gives them the look and quality that they need to make their creative decisions." Garza continues that, "working with high dynamic range content like OpenEXR really bal- loons the content. We built a high-performance foundation that allows us to work with this massive amount of media. Panasas (https://www. panasas.com) is our core storage. We rely on it for our large planetarium shows and large pro- ductions. We also rely on it for its performance and reliability. It's the backbone of everything we do at the planetarium." The Cal Academy needs to run 24/7 and expects whatever their artists are able to put in the render queue will be done by the next morning so they can watch their content. "There's no doubt that the variety of storage vendors we tried in the past have not been able to live up to the demands we put at them," adds Garza. "Panasas has consistently been able to give us the performance and reliability that we need for our productions." G-TECHNOLOGY INTRO'S G-DRIVE MOBILE USB-C MLOGIC FOR VFX SAN JOSE, CA — G-Technology (www .g-technology.com) recently introduced the G-DRIVE mobile USB-C. Featuring a plug-and-play USB-C port and transfer speeds up to 140MB/s(2), the G-DRIVE mobile USB-C drive offers portable storage in a stylish, aluminum design to complement a Mac computer. With up to 2TB(1) of storage, users can instantly back up videos, photos, music and documents. The drive is 5400RPM; the interface is (1) USB-C, (1) USB 3.1 Gen 1 and is offered in 1TB or 2TB capacities. The drive is available now for $79.95. CULVER CITY, CA — mLogic (www.mlogic.com), founded in 2011 by Roger Mabon, is known for its cutting edge mTape and mSpeed solutions. Finding that many teams are using the two solutions in tandem, mTape for long-term archival needs after post, and the mSpeed RAID solutions for live ed- iting and redundancy, Mabon says that many of the company's solutions are tailored to the VFX and edit needs of a production. With Mac-centric designs, the mLogic retinue starts with products as diminutive as the very affordable $99 mBack, a zero-footprint hard drive designed to mount to iMacs or Apple Displays. But the company's offerings expand far further, capable of accommodating full editing teams with or without shared access to drives. Its rack-mountable and tower solutions have ports to connect directly to a computer as well as dedicated connection to provide a metadata controller with en- coding for oversight over sharing and access. "We have a very, very unique system in the mSAN line, that's a shared system, so you can hook multiple Macs and PCs or a combination thereof directly to the box and share," says Mabon, who started the successful G-Technology brand of hard drives in 2003 before selling to Hitachi Global Storage Technologies (HGST) in 2009. Multiple mLogic systems can share the RAID storage over Thunderbolt for connected interoperability. He continues that the company's spinning and solid state drives both see a lot of usage from VFX. The affordability and speed of spinning drives make them attractive to some, while the perfor- mance, reliability and longer lifespan of solid state will make them a choice for others. With Thunderbolt 3, mLogic is able to bring the best of both worlds through its mSpeed solutions, fault toler- ant RAID arrays for high performance read-and-write applications. mLogic's software is provided for free with every purchase, giving safety checks and progress reports. The program will even allow drag-and-drop usage with mLogic's mTape LTO archival solution. "I've sold hundreds of thousands of external hard drives and RAID systems in my career," he explains. "I guess people in general just don't understand that you can't leave a hard drive sitting on a shelf. I realized that all of those hard drives that are sitting around are going to lose their data… LTO tape is not only the safest place to archive your footage, it is also the most af- fordable on a cost-per-terabyte basis." He admits that cloud storage is also a safe, redundant solu- tion, but the costs inherent to maintaining a lot of data can be prohibitive. In addition to safety concerns, the remote access to footage in cloud storage can also be costly in terms of upload and download times. G-DRIVE mobile USB-C. mSpeed mTape A 180-degree experience at Cal Academy.