Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/145624
The need for speed Small Tree By Phil Oatley With the rapid increase in content that digital filmmaking now genHead of Technology erates, it's extremely important for filmmakers to optimize their Park Road Post creative time in post. As production of digitally acquired 3D films is Wellington, NZ becoming more commonplace, uncompressed digital content can www.parkroadpost.co.nz translate into hundreds of terabytes per project, and the traditional tools used to manage the content are often overwhelmed by new demands of data acquisition, collaboration, distribution, and long-term, protective archiving. As a premier post production facility located in New Zealand, Park Road Post Production was developed by filmmakers for filmmakers, and we have worked on some of the largest budget Hollywood films, independent American and foreign films and lower-budget New Zealand features and short films. Pressing demands from digital post production required us to dramatically increase our capacity and throughput. For example, on a recent project we processed an average of 6-12TBs of new material each day, and on a really busy day this could reach 20TBs. What's Shared Stor age thats Simple, affordable, & high performance Small Tree continues to refine and improve on its Ethernet based Shared Storage product family, bringing more video editing performance to improve your workflow. Small Tree combines Thunderbolt and 10 Gigabit Ethernet capabilities to provide greater I/O performance to Thunderbolt equipped laptops and desktops to break the 1 Gigabit performance barrier. Call or Email us for more information on a Small Tree's TITANIUM shared storage solution today. more, all of this new material needed to be processed and delivered to the client within 12 hours. This quick turnaround is important so filmmakers have the option of reshooting scenes before the sets are struck. While evaluating various systems, we knew it should be flexible and could be tailored to fit Park Road — and not the other way around. We did not want it to disrupt our creative workflow. We needed a solution with more speed, efficiency and scalability to handle the increasing deluge of content and assets. After much due diligence, we decided to extend our infrastructure using Quantum's StorNext and Scalar i6000 for virtualized tape storage. We turned to StorNext for its highperformance file access and support for heterogeneous OS environments, including complete interoperability with Apple Xsan. The intelligence behind StorNext allowed us to craft an automated workflow that enabled us to easily scale up without adding more people or requiring us to re-architect our pipeline. StorNext touches every part of the workflow, from ingest to archive. Now, source data (effectively the original camera negative) is rapidly acquired into a StorNext environment, either on-set or from field LTO-5 tapes, for collaborative processing via multiple SGO Mistika workstations. These workstations access source material concurrently over dual 8Gb/s Fibre Channel for maximum performance. The source data and all metadata generated on-set and derived through processing is automatically archived to LTO-5 tape via StorNext Storage Manager. Tapes are retained within the Scalar i6000 library to facilitate quick retrieval back to the shared storage pool for further processing. Tapes are also "vaulted" from the library for long-term archive. With StorNext we can rely on the software to take care of the heavy lifting of moving terabytes of data, allowing us to focus on improving creative processes. We routinely process multiple terabytes of data in just a matter of hours and can handle in excess of 20TBs per day at peak load, ensuring that the existing creative workflow that filmmakers enjoy at Park Road is not compromised, but rather enhanced by our technology decision. www.small-tree.com • 866.STC.4MAC www.postmagazine.com Post • July 2013 21