Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/348146
www.postmagazine.com 30 POST JULY 2014 STORAGE FOR VISUAL EFFECTS studio on X-Men: Days of Future Past. Its storage solutions came into play for building CG assets, animation, rendering, and lighting and compositing. "There's no magic storage configuration that works every time," Cannon notes. "Every shot in every film has a different storage and I/O profile, but we can change the mix of Isilon and Avere to fit the chal- lenges of the day, week or month." For example, MPC Montreal initially tapped Isilon for its scaling capacity and Avere for performance, so all the work- station and render traffic went through the Avere cluster. But some shots for the X-Men feature had very large data sets of 5-10TBs. In those instances, "the render would flush the cache in Avere and cause performance problems for the whole studio," Cannon recalls. "So now certain large data sets go straight to the Isilon cluster." While Cannon is happy with the stor- age solutions in use, he says he continues to "evaluate the landscape." He adds, "We're at an interesting point in storage technology where we're looking at object storage and how to do global file sys- tems. Requirements are always evolving, and new companies are coming along that could potentially offer advances in cost, performance or features." SPLICE Minneapolis-based Splice (www.splice. tv) has used Apple Xsan storage for the last six or seven years. Its Xsan currently has about half a petabyte of storage for fast access by 35 employees working on feature films, commercials and corporate projects. Post production supervisor Carl Jacobs says the Xsan's no-cost expansion capa- bility has been a real asset. "Once you put in all the hardware, adding another client machine costs nothing," he explains. "We added three more machines the other day. We just attached them, turned them on and got to work. Adding machines without incurring extra cost trumps about every other consideration." Jacobs also likes that Xsan will accept "whatever storage you want to put in it. We've had three-generations of storage: We started with [Apple] Xserve RAIDs, then Promise, then Rorke. Now we have a combination of the latter two." Unlike many who are looking for "ex- citing" storage solutions, Jacobs says he just wants "fast, dumb, reliable storage. I think storage should be boring. I want it to sit there and work, like electricity com- ing out of the wall; not be exciting." Splice "hangs a lot of servers" from its Xsan and shares files with clients via wireless AFP and FTP. Three Tandberg LTO-6 tape libraries provide nightly back up, archiving and restoration. Recently, Splice provided VFX, color, editing, finishing and audio post for director Eric Howell's short film, Strang- ers, which was shot in 4K with Red cameras and anamorphic lenses. "With Xsan, every operator in every depart- ment had access to the same files," Jacobs explains. "There was no moving files around. [Apple] Final Cut Pro X, [Blackmagic Design] Da Vinci Resolve, [The Foundry's] Nuke and [Side Effects'] Houdini all accessed the Xsan directly at 4K. We had sort of future-proofed the system for 4K work with 8-gig fiber, and everything worked fine." Splice had previously worked with Howell on Ana's Playground, which was short-listed for an Academy Award, and a PSA campaign for the American Cancer Society. The company will be partnering with the director again for his feature film debut, Voice from the Stone, which is shooting this fall in Italy with star Emilia Clarke. Jacobs says a lot of manufacturers contact him with new storage options, and he's always 'looking at and evaluat- ing" new systems. But so far, "we really haven't found anything that matches the advantages of Xsan, especially in terms of total cost of ownership and flexibility." LEGION STUDIOS Legion Studios LLC (www.vfxlegion. com) is a creative collective with a hub in Burbank and a cadre of artists around the world who work remotely from their own locations. Legion's distributed work envi- ronment has successfully completed shots for many clients, including The Purge: Anarchy, the independent feature Swelter, and an episode of NBC's Revolution. The company platform can support five to 10 mid-size television shows at any one time, plus multiple features, including a 400-shot feature currently under development. The Burbank hub needs larger-scale storage than do any of the individual artists. Legion's prima- ry storage system is a 20TB Drobo 5D array with Thunderbolt into a file server; on-site mirrored back up with dual disk redundancy makes the system fault tolerant. Additional storage is provided by a Drobo 5N and an older model Isilon system that serves out files for rendering. Enterprise drives from Western Digital and Hitachi are used. Some artists have Synology NAS sys- tems at their locations with dual gigabit Ethernet connections. The BitTorrent Sync tool enables Legion to sync shows to the artists and allows them to work at drive speeds. A small Apple Mac Mini render farm handles incoming Nuke composites for rendering in Burbank. Even though all of Legion's artists are Apple Xsan storage has been an "asset" for Splice (right). The stu- dio worked on director Eric Howell's 4K short Strangers (below).