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www.postmagazine.com 31 POST JULY 2014 STORAGE FOR VISUAL EFFECTS "high-tier" talent who typically wouldn't deal with prosumer-level gear, Legion creative director/VFX supervisor James David Hattin says the Drobo-Synology storage solution is serving them well. "I'm comfortable staying with this con- figuration through next TV season," he says. "We'll be looking for larger office space in the next few months, but we'll probably just expand our number of Drobos and maybe add Synology to the mix here. The ability to mix and match drive sizes makes the Drobo an econom- ical choice. The Drobos have been robust and bulletproof; we've experienced no drive failures." He says the Drobos are easy to expand and fast. "The 5D has a 256 gigabyte cache drive so commonly used files get served up quicker than from a RAID proper," Hattin explains. "We put Enterprise drives in them because they are driven hard 24 hours a day. Synology, too, is a fire-and-forget system." Last season Legion worked on live-action plates from an episode of Revolution that required matte paintings for set extensions and exteriors. New Zealand-based matte painter Yvonne Muinde, who has worked with Weta on feature films and is on the Legion talent roster, was the ideal artist for the job. Using custom built Python tools, Le- gion ingested onto Drobo plates received online from the client and synched them for the artists with BitTorrent Sync. The matte painter simply saved her work locally, where compositor Kyle Spiker in Hollywood comp'ed elements into shots and roto artists Huey Carroll and Kevin Shawley, in LA and Boulder, CO, respec- tively, supported him by rendering mattes into the Sync network. Legion sent com- pleted full DPX frames to the client for review via Aspera. The project was turned around in less than two weeks. THE MILL With facilities in London, New York, Chicago and Los Angeles, The Mill (www. themill.com) is known for award-win- ning moving image, design and digital projects for the advertising, games and music industries. The company strives to standardize its storage for VFX across all locations, and the flagship London fa- cility selected BlueArc storage solutions about eight years ago. "I wasn't there for the decision but heard that BlueArc outperformed the competition," says Mattias Andersson, systems manager at The Mill in LA. "Since then it has served us very well." After BlueArc was acquired by Hitachi Data Systems, the configuration at The Mill's LA studio was replaced by a Hitachi NAS 3090-G2, powered by BlueArc. It has about 50TBs of fast disk storage and about 70TBs of slow, or nearline, disk storage. Similar systems are now in place at all The Mill locations. Andersson says The Mill in LA uses the Hitachi NAS for CG, compositing, project files and renders. All the set up files for the Autodesk Flame are also saved into Hitachi storage. The storage solution of The Mill in LA needs to offer resilience, network performance, ease of management, and the ability to migrate data across fast systems. "We need to be able to work through failures; the Hitachi NAS has dual heads so it's still fully functional if one goes down," Andersson notes. "Network performance is great too: each head has two 10-gigabit Ethernet connections." The company also uses a Rohde & Schwarz DVS SpycerBox SAN for Film- Light Baselight color grading; network back up is done to LTO-6 tape. Recent projects using the Hitachi NAS include the Halo 5: Guardians Multiplayer Beta teaser trailer for E3. The Mill teamed with 343 Industries and Microsoft on the action-packed teaser, which features de- tailed character animation, clear lighting and strong rim-lit silhouettes. Also, Mill+, the concept, design and animation arm of The Mill, worked with a team of designers and VFX artists at The Mill in LA and London to contribute cinematics to Activision's Call of Duty: Ghosts. The highly-stylized look is a hybrid of live action and CG with con- trasting sharp, shard-like shapes for the enemy, and light and smoke elements for the underdog ghosts. Andersson is now demo'ing the Avere FXT Edge Filer 3800 to boost perfor- mance. "It sits in front of the Hitachi hardware and acts as a caching server for higher throughput and less stress on the NAS," he explains. He expects the company to continue with the Hitachi NAS but says it's proba- bly time to step up its capacity. "I wanted a system that you can easily add more storage to," he says. "And the Hitachi NAS is it. I can buy another 20TBs and quickly grow the system as projects get bigger and demand increases." RISING SUN PICTURES Adelaide, Australia's Rising Sun Pictures (www.rsp.com.au) delivers complex VFX for high-profile feature films and tele- vision shows, including X-Men: Days of Future Past, Gravity, The Seventh Son, The Wolverine, The Great Gatsby and the last five Harry Potter films. According to Mark Day, director of engineering, fast, reliable and scalable storage solutions are a necessity. "The VFX world does not sleep and renders are happening 24/7, so robust solutions are required," he says. For Rising Sun Pictures that means a performance stor- age layer comprised of Avere Systems FXT3200 Edge Filer, which executes hundreds of thousands of operations per second. A storage layer consists of an Isilon NL400 Scale Out NAS, which is Burbank, CA's Legion Studios and its cadre of remote artists (above) tap into a 20TB Drobo 5D array with Thunder- bolt for such projects as NBC's Revolution (top).