Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/714180
STORAGE FOR VFX www.postmagazine.com 26 POST AUGUST 2016 4.6TBs. "A recent release moves metadata for the file system onto SSD to accelerate metadata access," a logical use for SSD technology along with acting as a caching layer. "Every new release has cool new features and performance enhancements," Wallbridge says. He hopes that the new QC208 will "last for a while," but the company's storage needs grow daily as more big films come in and projects get bigger. "2K delivery is the norm now, but we expect 4K very soon. Allied, with Brad Pitt, will be 3K delivery. We put it on the new system right away." Atomic moved over to the QC208 about three-quarters of the way through Star Trek: Beyond, which ended up be- ing a whopping 240TBs on disk. "That completely blew our estimates out of the water," says Wallbridge. The Qumulo platform is scalable so he can expand the system next year if necessary. "We can add more nodes when we need more space; it's plug-and-play," he says. "We added four nodes to the QC24 cluster a few months ago, and it took about 30 min- utes. There's really no down time." Atomic archives projects to Google Cloud Storage (GCS) unless there's a studio rule against it or a specific timeline to observe before doing so. "For most projects we also render on Google with Conductor," Wallbridge points out. "We have the smallest render farm I've ever seen for the amount of work we do. From the beginning, the company founders wanted to use cloud computing as much as possible; it's one of the things that drew me to them." It's very easy for companies to ramp up for rendering on the cloud. "The last two weeks of Deadpool we had 35K cores run- ning on Google," he says. "Ramping up for rendering near the end of a project has always been a nightmare and to not have to do it physically was amazing." Cloud storage for the primary produc- tion storage is "still a ways off," however. "I don't think it's there yet for a place our size," Wallbridge says. "But we're headed that way. There's a desire for companies to have as little infrastructure as possible." PLATINUM PLATYPUS Based in Northport, NY, Platinum Platypus Inc. (www.platinumplatypus.com) had scalability in mind when it invested in a Quantum StorNext Pro Studio server about a year ago. Although the company looked at smaller StorNext solutions, it opt- ed for Pro Studio for its upgrade path. Pro Studio combines the Xcellis Workflow Director with Quantum QXS-412 RAID storage in a cost-effective, inte- grated solution that's easy for production studios to deploy. "We needed the flexibility of a system that could grow with us," says Platinum Platypus (PlatPlat) president Pete Sussi. And PlatPlat is growing quickly: A move this fall will expand its offices from 800 to 4,000 square feet to better accommodate VFX for features and script-to-screen ser- vices for Fortune 500 corporate clients, and broadcast and social media spots. PlatPlat's Pro Studio has approximately 100TBs of storage at present. "We previously used very large hard drives hooked up to dedicated comput- ers; we even used Dropbox for some storage," says Sussi. "Moving to a server was an investment, but once you get a server, you wonder how you worked without it. When you have 10 people working on the same footage at the same time, it's a huge benefit." Pro Studio fills the storage needs of all the markets PlatPlat serves. "We'll ramp up for months at a time to do VFX and animation for overlapping movies with Adobe After Effects, Pixel Farm's PFTrack, LightWave 3D, Pixologic's ZBrush and Imagineer Systems' Mocha. We'll have tons of 6K Red raw footage we need to store," Sussi notes. "Or we'll be working on corporate videos for international clients and get drives full of footage sent here for editorial and finishing with Adobe Premiere and daVinci Resolve." The company also partners with major advertising agencies and works direct with marketers to edit and finish commer- cials and create spot VFX. "Quantum was amazing in guiding us to Pro Studio and setting it up for us," Sussi reports. "We wanted speed, reliability and scalability so the system would grow with increasingly large file sizes and resolutions. Pro Studio works wonderfully with 6K, which was very reassuring to us. When we move we'll have fiber infrastructure in place so we'll be ready for the next stage of plug-and-play expansion. We're looking at adding Aspera file delivery, too." Last year PlatPlat did set extensions, prosthetic effects and many invisi- ble VFX for the independent western feature, Bone Tomahawk, starring Kurt Russell. It also did 300 greenscreen car shots for the Paul Rudd road trip film, The Fundamentals of Caring, distributed through Netflix. PlatPlat is currently creating VFX for Permission, a romantic comedy shot in New York and starring Rebecca Hall, Dan Stevens and Jason Sudeikis. It is also cre- ating natural environments, architecture and battle scenes for the VFX-intensive Platinum Platypus invested in a Quantum StorNext Pro server last year.