Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/559853
STORAGE UPDATE www.postmagazine.com 44 POST AUGUST 2015 ATTO HELPS 'SCHOOL OF CINEMA' TRANSITION TO DIGITAL MONTREAL — The Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema at Montreal's Concordia University is Canada's largest university-based center for film production, animation, and film studies, serving a total of 635 students annually. With the infrastructure to support film pro- duction in Montreal quickly disappearing, the school secured a $2.1M fund that enabled it to transition from 80 percent film to 98 percent digital cine- ma production. Prior to the school's digital transition, its film production staff was tasked with maintaining multiple direct-attached hard drives — a chal- lenge when dealing with 200 students. And with the department producing 200-odd projects per semester, or about 10 feature films worth of material, the amount of time consumed rendering and copying files was creating a bottleneck. An additional challenge was the need to balance staffing with an increasingly complex production process. With the prospect of shooting digital cinema formats and storing the raw 4K image files on the horizon, storage capacity was another concern. After discussing their needs with a few vendors, the school decided it had to build a solution based on shared storage. The system the school ultimately installed con- sists of a Rohde & Schwarz Clipster for conver- sion and DCP generation, DDN SFA12K storage, and workstations running Avid and Final Cut Pro for editing, along with DaVinci Resolve for color grading. To integrate its Thunderbolt-equipped workstations to the 8Gb Fibre Channel SAN, the school selected ATTO Technology's (www.atto- tech.com) ThunderLink TLFC-2082, part of the company's portfolio of Desklink devices designed to connect workstations and laptops to high-per- formance Fibre Channel, 10GbE and SAS/SATA infrastructures. "With the Thunderbolt Macs, you can't put a Fibre Channel card in, so ATTO's Thunderlink devices ended up being really crucial, both for moving material around and doing a conform and grade," says Marcus von Holtzendorff, the school's post production coordinator. "Now we have three to four people color correcting simultaneously, pulling material off the SAN in realtime." With the school's new workflow, most proj- ects involve students shooting in 4K or 2K using Alexa, Red and Blackmagic digital cinema cameras. The raw image files are then stored on a 150TB SAN specified to handle six uncompressed 2K streams. Management of the system is turnkey — an important requirement the department had set for the transition. Along with providing high-bandwidth access for the school's Thunderbolt-equipped work- stations, ATTO's ThunderLink devices enable laptop connectivity to the SAN. Project files are transcoded to ProRes or DNxHD so that students can offline edit using laptops on their platform of choice. This step is, for the most part, performed offsite, a trend that von Holtzendorff attributes to "comfort and convenience" factors.