Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/74632
As visual effects shots continue to grow in complexity, and more and more are created for stereo 3D content, the demands on storage systems increase. Fortunately, there's no shortage of storage solutions on the market to fit every need and every size facility — from single-site dynamos to global entities. MR. WONDERFUL Mr. Wonderful, the design, animation and visual effects division of New York City's Northern Lights editorial, shared storage with its parent com- pany until increases in business and project file sizes required a storage solution dedicated to VFX. The engineering staff reviewed several options and then settled on a Rorke Data HyperDrive File Level SAN, which uses the Galaxy Aurora RAID family and HyperFS SAN file system. Its file-based administrative architecture was deemed a plus. "We weren't locked into partitions as we were with Avid Unity and Facilis TerraBlock; we could expand and contract the size of the job's storage at will," says Damien Henderson, executive producer at Mr. Wonderful (www.mrwonderful.tv). "And we could administer the server on our own. Rorke was great helping us develop different protocols — Mac, PCs, Linux, Discreet — to connect to the server; it's a good solution for a heterogeneous network like ours." The 40TB HyperDrive is not quite a year old. "We went for a larger buy at the outset and got close to filling it up on the CBS Upfront project," Henderson reports. "We archive to LTO-5 tape for long-term storage." The bulk of Mr. Wonderful's work is for television networks, with commercials comprising the balance. "We approach everything from a creative and design perspective," he says. "Our creative, or the creative we do in collaboration with the client, dictates our VFX and CG." The recent CBS Upfront saw the network returning to Carnegie Hall, a popular venue for spotlighting its fall programming line-up. "It was a tradi- tional presentation with entertainment value," Henderson notes. "The half- hour prior to the presentation was eye candy, focused around the charac- ters on the shows. We had a lot of fun animating strips of photo booth-style pictures selected and edited by the CBS creative team. Then a live DJ came on, with animations projected over the entire proscenium, to give a rave- techno vibe up to zero hour." "Carnegie Hall has a deep stage area for concerts so we worked with the marketing division of the network, which built huge screens and scenic to cover the interior of the stage leaving the beautiful proscenium," says Henderson. "Then we created a trompe l'oeil architectural effect for the interior that was projected back onto the stage with the CBS eye logo worked into the architectural design." He notes that highly detailed reference photos of the famous hall's gin- gerbread architecture helped Mr. Wonderful animators repaint and retex- ture the interior elements working the iconic eye logo into the décor. This enabled CBS Corporation "to brand Carnegie Hall for CBS," he explains. Mr. Wonderful used Maxon Cinema 4D and Adobe After Effects to cre- ate about 90 minutes of content at 4320x2700 resolution. WorldStage, the new brand for Scharff Weisberg and Video Applications, distributed the content from 22 Dataton Watchout servers, from Corporate Imaging, with three Christie Vista Spyder X20s switching. WorldStage also furnished nine sets of double-stacked Christie projectors, which projected all the elements except for the tape rolls from the broadcast truck parked outside. "It was the biggest job we've put through [the storage] to date," says Henderson. "The system worked great. We had 15-20TB with all the data uncompressed before it hit Watchout." Mr. Wonderful used a Rorke Data solution while creating graphics — using Cinema 4D and After Effects — for CBS's Upfronts at NYC's Carnegie Hall. and safety reasons, Beedon explains. The RAIDs, internal to the Mac towers, create back-ups nightly. "For a company of our size, we put out a lot of VFX shots really fast; we delivered 1,500 shots last season with 15-16 artists. We had enough projects to necessitate splitting out Revolution on one RAID, Fringe on another and Person of Interest on a third so as not to have a bottleneck." CoSA VFX has been using LaCie RAIDs since its inception. "We wanted something that would work right out of the box and be economical enough to meet our needs," says Beedon. "We added the Pegasus early last season." Artists use Luxology's Modo for 3D animation, The Foundry's Nuke and Adobe After Effects for compositing and finishing, and Imagineer's Mocha and Andersson Technologies' SynthEyes for tracking. When the Revolution pilot came in, the company had just enough high- speed storage capacity on hand to handle its nearly 100 visual effects shots plus a regular slate of work. "The reality of TV is that schedules become truncated and artists have to hit the RAIDs hard; the RAIDs have to work flawlessly," says Beedon. For Revolution's look at a world that has lost its electrical grid and gone electronically black, CoSA VFX created matte paintings, set extensions, clean ups and wire removals, a CG Earth and some de-aging effects. The pilot arrived in-house as the company produced 30-40 shots for another pilot and was still working on Fringe and Person of Interest. "We found our storage was filling up fast, in part because we were prob- ably saving more renders than necessary," Beedon reports. "We offloaded prior episodes of Person of Interest and Fringe to free up space. Once a show www.postmagazine.com Post • July 2012 21 COSA VFX Television and film visual effects studio CoSA VFX (www.cosavfx.com) finished a busy broadcast season with shots for Alcatraz, Person of Interest, Fringe, Pan Am and JJ Abrams' pilot, Revolution, directed by Jon Favreau. The Toluca Lake, CA, company is gearing up for new seasons of Fringe and Person of Interest, and the launch of Revolution. While visual effects storage for features extends over a long period of time, episodic television "balloons in a week, then cascades off in a week and a half," notes David Beedon, one of the CoSA VFX partners. "It goes up and down violently." To handle such fluctuations, the company invested in Promise Technolo- gy's Pegasus R4 4TB RAID and LaCie's 4Big Quadra 4TB RAID, which are coupled with Mac servers and configured as mirrored pairs for redundancy