Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1208556
STORAGE www.postmagazine.com 11 POST JAN/FEB 2020 VOXX STUDIOS UPGRADES TO FACILIS SHARED STORAGE LOS ANGELES — Voxx Studios, an LA-based facility dedicated to film and TV au- dio production and post production, recently upgraded its storage solution from a NAS system to Facilis (facilis.com) HUB shared storage. Voxx specializes in localization, language dubbing, Dolby Atmos 7.1, 5.1 audio mixing, ADR, translations, adaptations, subtitling, closed captioning, sound de- sign and editing. The studio caters to a variety of clients throughout Europe, Asia, Latin America and the US, and continues to specialize in ADR, dubbing and voice over translation for projects coming in and out of the United States. Voxx has three audio recording facilities and uses Avid Pro Tools running on Apple workstations exclusively. The largest facility is a Dolby Atmos mix studio with facilities for ADR, dubbing and recording music. An adjacent facility has six Pro Tools studios running 10 hours a day in parallel. These studios perform the bulk of Voxx's day-to-day language dubbing. The schedule is always busy and there is no time for systems and operators not to be running at 100 percent. The studio's original shared storage solution was a NAS system that connect- ed to all the Pro Tools workstations. However, there were frequent system freezes in the middle of sessions and occasional hard crashes during the first two-and-a- half years. "We had problems getting all the studios running at the same time," says Silviu Epure, GM at Voxx Studios. "The spinning beach ball where the Mac locked up frequently was the worst, because it stopped engineers and directors in their tracks. It interrupted the creative flow of the actors and caused a lot of tension and frustration." The team decided on Facilis HUB shared storage after significant research and just how well multiple Pro Tools systems could work when connected to Facilis HUB shared storage. Designed to reduce transactional overhead between the client workstations and the storage server, Voxx purchased a 48TB Facilis HUB 8 for the large Dolby Atmos mixing room and 65TB Facilis HUB 16 for the six Pro Tools studios in the adjacent building. Both systems are connected to the house network via 10Gb ethernet. "All six studios are now running in parallel connected to the Facilis HUB server. We store both media and Pro Tools sessions on the system," says Epure. "We've not had any more complaints from the editors and most importantly, we're no longer seeing system freezes. Our engineers are now much more productive." MASSTECH LAUNCHES NEW ADOBE PREMIERE PRO PANEL FOR KUMULATE WHITELEY, UK — Adobe Premiere Pro users can now access the func- tionality of Masstech's (www.masstech.com) intelligent storage, work- flow and lifecycle management solution, Kumulate, from directly within Premiere Pro via an intuitive panel. The Adobe panel can be added to any Kumulate system with min- imal configuration (individual editing stations don't need to be added as locations in the system). Storage movement and workflow tools are then presented as a plug-in within Adobe Premiere Pro, allowing users to access their entire inventory across any type of online or deeper stor- age tier, including cloud, local disk, optical disk and LTO. All assets on all storage tiers are searchable to Premiere Pro users from within the new panel, using intuitive search criteria, including structured, unstructured and time-based metadata. These tools allow users to quickly access their content libraries from within Adobe Premiere Pro, dramatically speeding up workflows. Premiere Pro and other assets can be restored directly to editing storage, including individual sequences, complete projects, or selected files from a project. Kumulate's UI allows users to browse proxies, and features familiar editing tools such as Adobe markers to define and initi- ate partial restores when only a portion of a file or project is required. QUANTUM EXPANDS LINE OF NVME STORAGE APPLIANCES SAN JOSE, CA — Quantum Corp. (www.quantum.com) has an- nounced a new, lower-priced addition to its Quantum F-Series family of NVMe storage appliances, the F1000. Leveraging software defined architecture introduced with the F2000, the F1000 offers ultra-fast streaming performance and response times at a lower entry price. The F-Series is used by studios, corporations and government agencies to accelerate the capture, edit and finishing of high-defini- tion content, and, according to Quantum, speeds VFX and CGI render performance by 10x to 100x, to develop cutting edge augmented and virtual reality. Unlike more general purpose NVMe storage arrays, the Quantum F-Series was designed specifically for the video and image-based workloads that are critical to customers. This content can be high-defi- nition video used for movie, TV and sports production, marketing and advertising content, or image-based workloads that require high-speed processing. Quantum's customers are deploying F-Series NVMe systems as part of Quantum's StorNext scale-out file storage cluster and leverag- ing the StorNext data management capabilities to move data between NVMe storage pools and other storage pools.