By Oliver Peters

Storage is the heart of a modern post production facility. The size and type of storage you pick can greatly impact the efficiency of the facility. Surprisingly, the concerns and requirements around a storage network aren’t all that different whether you’re a large or smaller post facility.

We reached out to two companies that provide editing services — Molinare and Republic Editorial — to find out what their storage workflows are like.

Darren Woolfson

Molinare
London’s Molinare is known for its work on television series for the BBC and Netflix, among many others. Darren Woolfson, Molinare’s director of technology and visual services, is a 30-year veteran of the London post scene, including a stint at Pinewood Studios. He joined Molinare in March 2020 in a new role that touches broadly on technology companywide.

Can you describe the setup at Molinare?
Molinare has 46 offline cutting rooms with Avid Media Composer software. Then we have eight Autodesk Flames for finishing and four Avid Symphonies for online. All are capable of working in full resolution at 4K. We’ve got five FilmLight Baselights for color correction, a bit of Blackmagic Resolve and handfuls of other tools. If you wanted to come to Molinare and cut on Adobe Premiere Pro, we would make it possible, but we’re mainly an Avid and Flame house.

What storage systems do you use to support all of that?
The core of our facility is based on 2 petabytes of Dell EMC Isilon, which is high-speed storage in clusters. Most of the systems can attach to it. The Media Composers are predominantly hooked up to ISIS or Nexis storage. We own quite a lot of that. In addition to our 46 cutting rooms in the building, I reckon we have at least another 20 running remotely from the editors’ homes. So we’ve also filled our racks up with more Media Composers. Teradici happens to be the PC-over-IP tool of choice.

Offline

The Baselight systems use dedicated storage for grading. It runs at about 6GB/s or 7GB/s. It wouldn’t be unusual for us to be grading 4K 16-bit images. This architecture allows our five Baselight suites to all pull media from the shared storage. The Flames have a bit of local storage on them as well as connection to the Isilon.

The Avid suites are using low-resolution media for offline editing?
Yes. Typically, most of the shows that we cut in offline would be at DNxHD 36. A Netflix show or any of the big streamers will often be finished in 4K 16-bit, uncompressed. A lot of the material that we finish on Symphony, which is generally for broadcasters, will use a lightly compressed mastering codec.

Overall, what sort of connection speeds to the storage are we talking about?
Our core is 100Gb/s using really good-quality Mellanox switches. The Baselights connect into that at 25Gb/s. The Flames connect at 10 or 25Gb/s. And then the Avids, depending on whether it’s online or offline, connect at either 1Gb/s or 10Gb/s.

You also have quite a few audio rooms using Avid Pro Tools. Do those tie into the Avid Nexis units?
No. We use DDP [Dynamic Drive Pool] for our audio rooms. The storage is by Ardis out of the Netherlands. Nexis isn’t optimized for thousands of relatively small audio files. We often do foreign-language versioning, so the mixes go very wide. They might be 500 tracks, particularly if it was a Dolby Atmos mix. Ardis has optimized its solutions to work really well in that environment.

You have a lot of different shows and series that get posted at Molinare. How do you control the amount of media so that your storage isn’t completely filled up?
One of the things I identified quite quickly when I arrived was the lack of a long-term storage strategy. I’ve implemented buying a lot of lower-speed, lower-cost and expandable options for nearline and archival storage. With good media management, we hopefully won’t have to buy too much more of the really high-speed stuff unless we decide to add a lot more finishing rooms.

For us, nearline includes lots of network-attached storage (NAS) and big tape robots behind it. Plus some software that sits on top, which automatically manages moving data from disk to tape and then back again. We are using a Quantum tape solution — LTO-8 at the moment. Let’s say the grading team has access to a share of storage. Anything that they copy into there will be managed by a policy. We can either make one or two tape copies. We can leave the original media on disk. We can remove it from disk. We can remove it from disk after 60 days. There’s full flexibility in how it works.

The pandemic has ushered in remote workflows, and now companies are looking at various hybrid models. How does that impact your storage needs and affect other issues, like security?
With the solutions that we offer our clients, media remains securely in our building as if you are editing locally. Effectively, Teradici remotes the monitors, keyboard and mouse data, and it’s encrypted. In general terms that satisfies most of our clients.

It didn’t change our storage systems, other than we needed more of it. Effectively, we had increased the number of cutting rooms. We suddenly had 60 or 70 systems hung off it rather than the 45 we usually do.

If you were to rebuild the facility today, what would you do differently when it comes to storage?
I would still use Avid for basic editing. Nexis works really well in the Media Composer world. Even if we had 200 edit suites, they’re unlikely all to be working on one project. So it’s still fairly straightforward to have multiple Nexis systems, each with a couple of projects on them, and then you only attach the relevant Avids to those.

I’m actually quite a fan of StorNext, Quantum’s file system. It has its challenges, but when it’s going well, it’s very reliable and fast.

Keith James and Jason Vigue

Republic Editorial
Republic Editorial is a commercial editorial shop located in Dallas. It started out as a branch of the Santa Monica-based Red Car. Keith James is a Republic partner and senior editor along with Jason Vigue, who juggles a dual role as a designer and IT specialist for the company.

James and Vigue spoke to us about their storage and editing workflows.

Please tell me a bit about Republic Editorial’s background.
James: Red Car brought my partners and me together in 2004. When Red Car’s owner retired, we were able to transform into our own company — Republic Editorial. We also have two sister companies, Infinite Fiction, which focuses on 3D motion design work, and Threaded Pictures, which focuses on production. Our core business is 90% long- and short-format commercials, working with ad agencies as well as direct to clients.

Edit Bay

What is the design of your facility?
James: We occupy the ground floor of an eight-story building in Uptown Dallas. We have two Flame finishing rooms, five creative offline suites and two audio post studios — all very comfortable and designed around clients being in the room with us. Infinite Fiction, our design team, is housed in a small wing on this floor. Our Threaded Pictures production division has a small area for doing pre-pro meetings and casting calls.

What software are you using for editing and color correction?
James: Two of the editors work on Media Composer and four on Premiere Pro. Our Flame guys do the majority of color at this point just because they’re also compositors, and that’s just been easier than round-tripping to other systems for grading.

Shared storage is an important component of many facilities. What did you settle on for your shop?
Vigue: We have a 96TB Facilis as our primary storage server. We started off with Fibre Channel when we did the initial build-out in 2013. But with advancements in the technology and the iMac workstations, we’ve shifted to 10GbE [10 Gigabit Ethernet] over Cat 6 cable. Now we’re down to only the two Flame systems that are still on fiber. We also have a smaller 32TB Facilis system, and everything is linked together on the same network through two 10GbE switches. So even though they’re separate systems, they’re shared throughout the office.

Lobby

When you made the decision to go with the Facilis system, were you primarily an Avid-based editorial shop?
Vigue: At the time we were half and half. Adobe came in at the right time with a stable build just as Apple was shifting to Final Cut Pro X. Some of the editors didn’t want to shift from Final Cut Pro 7 back to Media Composer, so we were early adopters of Premiere.

When the pandemic hit, many places locked down, and companies were forced to work remotely as much as possible. How did you address that?
James: We adapted quickly to set up our home studios for our artists at the start, but we also made a push before Delta hit to start getting people back into the office. We found that some disciplines, like audio, were really hard to do remotely – everyone was listening on different speakers.

The offline editors were fine working from home throughout the pandemic. It was a lot more work with local drives, accessing our VPN and stuff like that, but we’re transitioning right now. We’re making the move to a ProMax system, which gives you a hub at your house plus a hub that sits off the Facilis and allows you to sync project and media files seamlessly between the two.

Clorox

Vigue: ProMax has been around for a while with storage. We just came across this solution, which is a peer-to-peer sharing setup. They’ve got their own software, but it’s done through an Intel NUC mini PC. A NUC goes home with a local RAID, and then we’re just selectively sharing job folders complete with project, graphics and media files to editors based on their ongoing project needs.

James: To be clear, we’re not using Raw media with ProMax — only lower-resolution, transcoded media for offline editing. We’re working out a different setup for our two Flame guys. For them, we’re looking at using Amulet Hotkey with Teradici, which will allow them to simply remote into their systems at the office. The Flames need their local Stone storage, so duplicating all that stuff would not really work the way it does for the offline editors.

Do you have a strategy for archiving projects and productions?
Vigue: Currently we’re doing everything to LTO-6. Ours is a manual operation with two bays for LTO using StorageDNA’s DNAevolution. We keep everything online and organize our material quarterly. After about six to nine months, we start backing up quarters.

Editing

We’ve also been discussing incorporating a cloud backup solution. We’ve talked to Wasabi because they have no egress charges and have flat fees for their storage. I don’t think we would ever put an entire shoot in the cloud — only our project files. Original camera media is being backed up to LTO anyway.

What about the considerations in reassessing your future facility needs?
James: We’re working with advertising clients in a traditional setup where the client is normally in the room. With the pandemic, we’ve done editing over Zoom, and we’ve also used Evercast with specific jobs when latency was critical. I’d say right now, maybe 30% of our work is supervised with clients coming into the facility.

As an editor, when somebody sends out email comments, you often feel like you’re trying to fit a round peg into a square hole to make their cut work. However, when they’re with you, you can quickly take a stab at it and go, “Hey guys, I don’t think this is working,” present an alternate solution and keep things moving forward. There are shops that are going completely virtual, and we’re hearing more and more clients expressing frustration with that being their only option for working. Our goal, when this whole thing is hopefully over, is to have the flexibility to be in studio or work from home, depending on what the client wants.

Oliver Peters is an award-winning editor/colorist working in commercials, corporate communications, television shows and films. More information at oliverpeters.com.