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Storage for VFX Small Tree Shared STorage made Simple and affordable Small Tree believes Ethernet and SAN belong in the same sentence. It's what we call EtherSAN–and it increases your capacity while chopping your production budgets in half. That includes next generation technology like Thunderbolt i/o and Titatnium storage–for ultra high performance with prices down to earth. Simple. Call for a quote or reach us at www.small-tree.com airs we archive the episode and move it off the RAID, but Revolution had no official air date that we knew of, so we kept the whole show online along with upcoming episodes of Fringe and Person of Interest. That brought us pretty close to capacity." But as business continues to increase, "we can just keep adding RAIDs as needed and keep plugging and playing," he forecasts. SCREEN SCENE Twenty-seven-year-old Screen Scene (www. screenscene.ie) in Dublin offers comprehensive picture and sound post production and a specialist VFX area under one roof. Picture infrastructure includes offline editing and Avid's DS, Avid Sym- phony, and Autodesk Flame finishing rooms; sound is edited and mixed in their 12-room audio infrastruc- ture. Screen Scene services the feature, commercial and broadcast sectors. Screen Scene's storage needs are obviously legion. www.small-tree.com • www.granitestor.com • 866.STC.4MAC 7300 Hudson Blvd., Suite 165, Oakdale, MN 55128 About four years ago the online department moved from an Avid Fibre Channel Unity to a Facilis Terra- Block solution, putting the company on the path for additional TerraBlock systems. Today Screen Scene sports a 36TB TerraBlock 24EX for online storage, a 12TB TerraBlock 24EX for offline, and another 12TB 24EX for visual effects. The single-platform solution makes it easy to "coexist and share media among departments and removes any need to copy or duplicate media," says chief engineer Greg Tully. "We're all interconnected via Fibre or Ethernet " TerraBlock enables Fibre and network-attached clients in the VFX department to access the same media at the same time using the Facilis Multi-user Write volumes, which "is quite unique," says Tully. "We can even hook in the Fibre client and do screenings and share files among the online and DI departments without any duplication of media." TerraBlock has been serving the rapidly growing VFX department well for the last two years. Screen Scene's credits cover a broad range of work, from clean-ups and set extensions to CG crowds, destruc- tion and pyro. Recent projects include previs for A Good Day to Die Hard, effects for season one of Game of Thrones, VFX for the acclaimed feature Albert Nobbs, as well as the UK series Skins, Ripper Street, Coup and Loving Miss Hatto. "TerraBlock acts as our main visual effects storage and is accessed via Fibre on Nuke [workstations] that require realtime playback and the standard Ethernet network for 3D and 2D workstations," says Tully. "The process of reading rushes, working project files and CoSA VFX, which provided this visual effects shot for Pan Am, uses LaCie and Promise RAIDs. rendering all flows through TerraBlock." The previs for A Good Day to Die Hard took five months, he notes, with eight artists "churning out 3D sequences of potential effects scenes for the upcom- ing movie." All the post and VFX for Game of Thrones' first season were facilitated by TerraBlock during heavy compositing and rendering sessions. Screen Scene's VFX department is continuing to expand, and the seat and render node count is getting higher and higher. "We continually re-assess our stor- age needs and solutions," says Tully. "We may go with more Facilis expansion units or another storage solu- tion. These days it's about who is delivering optimum price/performance/reliability; right now we are very happy with the TerraBlock." CRAZY HORSE EFFECTS When Crazy Horse Effects (www.crazyhorseeffects. com) in Venice, CA, considered VFX storage for its all Mac-based workflow some four years ago, it discov- ered Active Storage, founded by the team that built Apple's XRAID. Who better to understand the Mac? "Active was a young company at the time, and we invested in a 16TB unit to get us going with four or five artists," recalls Brian Sales, compositing supervi- sor and IT lead. "Now we have 25 people on two RAID sets: our original ActiveRAID 16TB system and the 32TB ActiveRAID we added." VFX supervisor/co-owner Paul Graff notes that Crazy Horse Effects (CHE) had non-centralized stor- age at the outset. "All the workstations were con- nected together and shots were distributed over the network. That works for a small company — it allowed us to keep everything local on a hard drive. But as we grew it just didn't work any more for us." Sales says the Active Storage solutions have "been rock solid." Graff notes that the busy company has already stepped up to 2TB and 3TB drives to as much as triple volume over its initial 1TB drives. CHE, which does VFX for television and feature films, won Emmys for HBO's Boardwalk Empire and John Adams, and completed over 300 shots for the film Water for Elephants. It was this last film that prompted the acquisition of the 32TB RAID. More recently, CHE supervised/produced and completed several hundred shots for Oliver Stone's Savages and contributed work to Ang Lee's Life of Pi. "We created a few set extensions, many wounds and blood hits, and video chat for Savages," says Graff. "With our Red and Red Epic cameras we can shoot