Post Magazine

July 2013

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Storage for Visual effects Element X Creative, an Isilon house, recently worked on Leap Frog and 7/11 spots. The Creative-Cartel's Craig Mumma and Jenny Fulle on the After Earth set. 22 ties. "Elements and plates that are used frequently are automatically pushed to the L2Arc cache, and are then served off of those faster disks instead of relying on the slower SAS pool." The Open Drives platform uses RAID-Z, which Liesveld likens to RAID-5 but it manages file space better and is self-healing. "ZFS also gives us hot-swap capabilities for backups so I could create a data pool of disks, push project data to it and then pull those drives out for archive instead of having to go to LTO-3 or a FireWire-type back-up solution." The studio has 10GigE Fibre connections to all its workstations. "That allows us to get realtime 2K stereo and 4K files directly from shared storage to the artist. It also gives us the luxury of working with full-resolution plates rather than introducing proxies into the workflow." While working on the first season of the Netflix's series, House of Cards, Savage was able to keep the entire show, along with all related elements and reference footage, online and available to artists from start to finish."Prior to teaming up with Open Drives we had to do a bit of digital juggling, archiving and restoring shots and assets to manage space." The VFX studio provided over 300 shots for Season One, including a CG library, greenscreen car shots, monitors, sky replacements and a variety of other invisible effects. "House of Cards was shot at 5K with the Red Epic camera, so considering the volume of work we had coming in, the ability to put together affordable and scalable storage was essential." Now that Season One is completed, Savage has moved the critical data to nearline storage, which is essentially the same as their 50TB set-up without the SSD cache in front of it. "We push recently-wrapped data to our nearline storage and let it sit for a while before it gets fully archived. That way it's easy to access and if we need to get data back on Post • July 2013 the production server quickly, we can." Savage will be starting up on House of Cards' second season this summer. Sums up Liesveld, "The last thing you want to worry about is 'do we have enough disk space,' because then you can't focus on the actual work." ELEMENT X Dallas-based Element X Creative (www. elementxcreative.com) is a 25-person fullservice visual effects, motion design and animation studio targeting commercial, television and film work. Recently they began creating their own animated properties. "We focus on design and storytelling while investing heavily in our staff," explains Element X (@xcreative) CEO/par tner Chad Briggs, who believes in not getting too big and instead relying on a manageable core staff. Briggs feels that not being tied to only one aspect of the work has given Element X Creative (EXC) what he calls a leg up. "I've never been a snob to one medium; I love visual storytelling of all kinds. Our guys tend to cross pollinate between visual effects, animation and graphics, and it's that cross pollination that drives the design because we are not limited in how we think about a project — we can approach it from the best angle to tell the story." All of that couldn't be accomplished without having a deep, fast and expandable storage platform. "Storage is the life blood," says Briggs. "You have to have enough, and you always need more, especially these days with 2K, 4K and 4K stereoscopic. The demands of production on the visual effects side of things continues to get more extreme." EXC has had a long-standing relationship with EMC. "They have been rock solid, and the support is great," he says. The ability to add storage as needed, as well as having the ability to have a group of www.postmagazine.com users connected to that storage, is hugely important to Briggs. In addition, the latest version of Isilon offers more Gigabit networking on each node, "so we have the ability to connect a lot more users in a centralized place." EXC has three EMC Isilons F200s that offer 6TB nodes — each one has four 1GB Ethernet ports and 6GBs of RAM for a total of 18TBs. Even with that amount they often hit those limits, so Briggs says the studio is currently looking into buying another node or two. All that storage comes with the need for robust power and cooling. When EXC moved into its present location about four years ago they had to add a new electrical sub-system to accommodate. "It gets really hot," he says. "Once you start throwing in Isilons nodes and back-up systems and renderfarms — we have about 35 to 40 machines dedicated to rendering, each running different softwares/engines — that gets power intensive. Then you have the cooling aspect, keeping it under 70 degrees." In terms of projects, Element X just completed a national spot for 7/11 out of the Integer Group promoting the convenience store's July 11 free Slurpee giveaway. It features comedian Nathan Barnatt doing the "slurpee dance" in front of a greenscreen with retro '80s graphics behind him. The visuals were composited and animated at EXC. Charlieunformtango handled the edit. Another job was for Occam Marketing client Leapfrog. EXC created a flurry of CG products and graphics for the piece. Autodesk's Softimage XSI is the studio's primary 3D package. They also have Pixologic ZBrush and The Foundry's Nuke, Nuke X and Nuke renderfarm nodes; a seat of Mari will soon be added. For editing work they call on FCP 7 from time to time, but for the most part have switched to Adobe Premiere.

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