Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/145624
Storage for Visual Effect Savage Visual Effects is gearing up for its second season of work on Netflix's House of Cards. 20 the production is ridiculous and you need answers right away." The Creative-Cartel's most recent job was the Sony F65-shot After Earth, which brought its own set of workflow concerns. "When we started, we were pioneering the workflow for F65. The last thing we wanted to worry about was our storage solutions because we had to worry about cameras more than anything," explains Mumma. "We went to JMR and said we need to have enough storage for all the camera files, and we are going to be traveling and need robust equipment that will last for all the different areas." The production brought them to Costa Rica, Pennsylvania, Eureka, CA, and Maob, UT. After Earth was the first film in which The Creative-Cartel used Joust almost as a complete package. "That meant keeping all those original Raw files live and online, which was a big deal," says Fulle. They had 150TBs live rolling with them from town to town. The Creative-Cartel provided production management for After Earth and acted as the hub for eight or nine visual effects companies, which produced about 700 shots. "We started at camera and did the mobile lab," explains Fulle. "So we processed all the dailies and kept all the files online, and once we started engaging with the vendors, Joust did all of the transcoding from Raw files to Open EXR, which was the format we worked in. We then managed all the digital images — moving them between the vendors and bringing them back in, showing them to the director, getting them to the DI house. After we finished the dailies it was all about managing the visual effects workflow. We were able to do light grading on the Post • July 2013 Baselight Transfer Station for visual effects stuff too. It was a really robust pipeline we worked out between Joust and the equipment we had on hand." Mumma points out how important power and cooling are to a drive's efficiency, especially considering how much traveling they had to do on After Earth. "That is important to consider when you are moving around with these drives. The JMR [drives] have a low power requirement, so you don't have to build a power plant to get these things up and going. We don't have to have big, special rooms. Now we can set them up in a hotel room with basic cooling and power." Fulle gives an example of when production took them to a remote location in Costa Rica. "They set us up in a hotel, and by hotel I mean in the middle of the jungle with bugs and lights flickering. We had all of our equipment set up and we had ran out of outlets for all the gear. Craig was able to take a sconce off a wall, pull the wires out and wire up a plug. Five years ago you couldn't have done something like that because you would have set the place on fire." There has never been a better time to take advantage of storage. "It's not as cost prohibitive anymore," concludes Fulle (@ JennyFulle). "One hundred terabytes is not going to break the bank, so you can keep it live and online and save all of the days that were wasted before and put them back into the hands of the artists." SAVAGE VISUAL EFFECTS Six-year-old Savage Visual Effects (www. savagevisualeffects.com) focuses on film, television and spot work, with studios in Los Angeles and Pittsburgh. While they might not www.postmagazine.com be a huge company, the do work with some big names, such as directors David Fincher (The Social Network, Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, House of Cards), Louis Leterrier (Now You See Me) and Bryan Singer (Valkyrie). Currently Savage has a core staff and builds up as needed, but they are currently moving toward staffing a bigger office in Pittsburgh with a larger, full-time staff. The studio's ties to Pittsburgh begin with co-owner James Pastorius, who grew up and went to school in the city; he has many contacts and artists to call on. Savage typically calls on Shake and Nuke for their compositing needs, and relies heavily on various 3D applications and RenderMan, but they will call on other software packages as needed depending on what freelancers they bring on for certain jobs. In terms of hardware, co-owner Brice Liesveld (@Brice) recognizes that having the right kind of storage is a hugely important. "It's all about efficiency," he says. "We are constantly needing more storage as things evolve, and if you can't access data in realtime your efficiency just drops through the floor. It's really important for everyone to have access to what they need without the hiccup of having to go pull something online." The need for storage never seems to end, especially with new technologies and the growing prevalence of 4K and beyond. "We aren't Weta by any means, but we chew through a lot of data, even at our size," explains Liesveld. "It was 2K, now it's 4K and 5K, and next it will be 6K and 8K. You have multi-layered files like EXR, deep compositing, which is file-size intensive, and newer cameras generating more and more metadata. Everyday there is another chunk of data you need to store and access. Without having reliable, consistent and large enough storage, you can't do your job efficiently." In order to get a system that worked for them, Savage contacted Venice, CA's Open Drives, which offers a scalable and easy-to-manage data storage platform built specifically for the media and entertainment industry. "Jeff Brue at Open Drives based the system on hardware from SuperMicro and he uses OpenIndiana, which is an open source operating system, which he has fine tuned for film and media," reports Liesveld. "Our current Open Drives system gives us 50TBs of live storage with the capacity to expand to approximately 150TBs with the purchase of additional disks." Savage's production set-up offers 50TBs of SAS disks that sit behind 960GBs of L2Arc cache, which Liesveld describes as an SSD RAID, offering very fast read/write capabili-