Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/83694
n n n n Storage ible increments along with non-disruptive upgrades so that users have constant access to existing data while upgrades are performed. In regard to animation and special effects Mac Guff Studios (Paris, France), a division of Illumination Entertainment, was the primary facility that created Dr. Seuss' The Lorax, an animated film released in 2012, which, according to box-office Mojo, generated nearly $200 million in its first 45 days of worldwide release. The Lorax was rendered on HNAS storage by Hitachi Data Systems. systems), to engage in professional, uncom- pressed workflows by allowing fast RAID stor- age systems to be directly attached, supplying up to 1000mb/sec data rates! Thunderbolt also enables the direct connection of professional video I/O devices to these systems—all this with one small, high-performance connection. Coughlin: Thunderbolt is the first in a se- ries of PCIe-based storage interfaces that will remake the industry over the next several years and allow aggregate BW of 64gb/sec or higher. Danielson: Because Thunderbolt-enabled laptops are getting performance that previ- ously only desksides could get, there will be wide adoption of the Thunderbolt standard, particularly for on-set use. Frankly, on-set, file- based workflows sorely need more bandwidth. The bottleneck between on-set storage and the shared storage in the facility will be stream- lined by various solutions, such as ATTO's Desklink family. With Thunderbolt on-set storage, ingest streams will more fully saturate the SAS, Fibre Channel, and 10-gig Ethernet ingest paths into shared storage. Which storage devices work best and within which type of video production environments? Coughlin: The storage hierarchy for video large studio environments. Smaller studios will use direct-attached RAID and Thun- derbolt. Thunderbolt will be used in the field, as well. Danielson: Our customer feedback is that customers would like to get the most band- width possible in the least amount of rack space, so we focus on bandwidth per rack unit: for mixed read/write bandwidth, a 2RU enclosure with 1.6gb/sec and a 4RU enclosure with 2.8gb/sec. For production environments, there are many different sizes, so there is no Format SDTV (NTSC, 4:2:2, 8-bit) HDTV (1080p, 4:2:2, 8-bit) Digital Cinema 2K (4:2:4, 10-bit) YUV Digital Cinema 4K (4:4:4, 12-bit) YUV Digital Cinema 8K Resolution (width x height) 720 x 480 1920 x 1080 2048 x 1080 4096 x 2160 7680 x 4320 creation, what are the requirements? Coughlin: Modern video rendering has similarities to HPC (high-performance com- puting) and engineering simulation and mod- eling, and tends to involve bursts of data trans- fer that the storage systems and network must accommodate. The use of clustered computer and storage, with many nodes for processing the rendered images, is common. Very-high- speed InfiniBand connectivity for computer nodes and storage in not uncommon for these applications. Of course, as the resolution of the finished product increases—and there are projects now using 6k or higher rendered resolution—both the bandwidth and stor- age requirements increase. The high costs of building a modern rendering facility have led to a strong market for outsourced rendering. Because much of this work can be done trans- ferring the initial input and the final result through the Web, rendering could be seen as a good example of the use of cloud resources for professional video production. Danielson: We have seen our customers [in large film animation and special effects facili- ties] find great value in non-disruptively scal- able storage systems. With effects and anima- tion rendering occurring 24/7, it's imperative Frame rate (fps) approx. 30 24 24 48 120 Data rates (MB/sec) 6.25 49.8 199 1,910 23,890 Storage capacity per hour (GB) 22 179 716 6,880 86,000 The chart above offers an example of storage and bandwidth requirements from the Coughlin "2012 Digital Storage for Media and Entertainment Report." Note that stereoscopic content can increase these numbers by 2X for raw content and approximately 1.5X for lossless compressed content. production and postproduction will include Flash memory, high-performance HDDs (hard disk drives), high-capacity/low-cost HDDs, and optical or magnetic tape storage for archiving. Note that Flash memory is be- coming dominant in professional video cam- eras, and this trend is expected to continue in future years. Schlatter: RAID subsystems work best in 44 August/September 2012 perfect storage device. The best solution is an agile and intelligent architecture that does not burden the production facility with unneces- sary costs, yet has the ability to scale infinitely to meet growing production needs without disrupting operations. We focus on modular- ity to allow scaling down to entry-level systems and to allow granular scaling in easily digest- that these companies have a unified infrastruc- ture in place to bring every ounce of efficiency out of their renderfarms. For instance, they need to be able to move their datasets, rebal- ance their network ports to any node in the cluster, add storage nodes, and apply software patches—all non-disruptively and without downtime—because downtime costs money.