By Karen Moltenbrey
At the heart of any post workflow is data. Lots of data, in a wide range of formats. Storage systems must be able to handle petabytes and petabytes of information as it moves through a post facility, enabling users access whenever they need it. As one director of workflow points out, storage is one of those things that users take for granted, that they don’t really think about. Without fast, reliable and robust storage, a person is in a way handicapping their team and putting them in danger of missing deadlines, the director says. But there is more to having good storage — it also has to be well-organized and used efficiently.
Here we look at the storage systems installed at two post facilities – one large, one midsized – and how those solutions are vital to the post houses’ workflows.
Sim
Sim is a major force in the post production realm. With hubs in New York, Los Angeles, Atlanta, Toronto and Vancouver, the facility is a leading end-to-end supplier of production equipment, workflow/dailies and post solutions around the world. With multiple locales and post offerings, it’s not surprising, then, that the company has a wide variety of storage solutions for its many customized storage workflows based on the project at hand.
The majority of Sim’s storage is on-premise, whether the team is accessing it remotely or in-house. Most of the on-prem storage has been in use for the better part of six years, with periodic upgrades occurring over that period. However, during the course of the last year or so, the facility has added both Microsoft Azure and Amazon S3 cloud storage into the mix. Sim also has been integrating more automation into the workflows whenever possible.
The offline teams use Avid Isis and Nexis on-prem storage, with many connecting to on-prem workstations remotely via HP RGS or similar remote access software. Finishing teams use Quantum StorNext SAN and local RAID systems (Promise Pegasus plus G-Speed Shuttle XLs) on prem, again, with many users connecting to on-prem workstations from home via RGS or a similar connectivity solution. Keeping the workstations on-site offers better security and enables multiple editors on a project to collaborate and share assets.
In addition, the majority of the picture finishing teams work straight from StorNext volumes; the FilmLight Baselight systems have local storage for caching and playback optimization, particularly for 4K content or higher. Re-recording mixers often share material on the StorNext volumes but run sessions from local RAID storage for playback optimization.
Post-wide, Sim currently employs a mix of on-prem and S3 storage (using Signiant Media Shuttle and Jet products). However, Sim is in the process of rolling out frame.io for a variety of services, including editorial cut approval, dailies screening, color/online reviews and more. “We haven’t done much editorial work in the cloud with Avid, but I imagine that it’s only a matter of time,” says Stacy Chaet, director of workflow at Sim.
Among the solutions is a proprietary service, Metabanq, the brainchild of Sim director of post Jesse Korosi, which uses S3 storage to house a client’s negative, giving those users instant access for VFX or promo pulls 24/7. Used in combination with Media Shuttle, “the pulls are ready for download in record time,” says Chaet. “There’s no need to have an operator on-site pulling LTOs or hard drives from our vault.” The Metabanq storage also houses a database where the group aggregates metadata from the camera, sound, script and VFX departments.
With so many different users, including those who typically work in-house as well as outside clients using the editing suites on-site, security and accessibility are major concerns. “We need to know that the storage is fast enough to be able to facilitate all the projects we have going on, because at any given time, whether it be our finishing teams or editing/offline teams, we have a dozen or two dozen projects being worked on at each location,” Chaet says.
Several of Sim’s projects in 2020 during COVID used a combination of the company’s various types of storage systems. “Our VP of engineering, Paul Chapman, worked some API magic to allow productions such as the Emmys and the Democratic National Convention to automate movement of media between different storage solutions,” notes Chaet.
As Chaet points out, many events, such as those, are now virtual. Rather than going to one location and filming, the content that was being recorded to go into the edit is coming from around the globe. Chaet explains the procedure: “Content was uploaded from all over the world — over 1,500 separate uploads — directly onto our Sim LA on-prem SAN via Media Shuttle. Once this media landed on the SAN, it was automatically uploaded to Frame.io via their API for producers to review and choose selects. The media was also automatically moved to the editorial teams’ Nexis to begin transcoding for Avid.”
“Frame.io is a fairly new tool for us that we really began diving into this year,” Chaet adds. “In a way, we were not really thinking about it before COVID, but going completely remote — plus adding Frame.io to our toolkit — allowed us to take a lot of separate concepts around the company and combine them, especially once the media was automatically uploaded to Frame.io.
“Frame.io is a fairly new tool for us that we really began diving into this year,” Chaet adds. “In a way, we were not really thinking about it before COVID, but going completely remote plus adding Frame.io to our toolkit allowed us to take a lot of separate concepts around the company and combine them, especially once the media was automatically uploaded to Frame.io. And the producers of these shows were able to review [the material] quickly and make selects and comments and give feedback to the editors. The editors would take those notes, put together and spit out a cut, then upload that to Frame.io and continue the process, going back and forth many times. It’s a bit different from how editors and producers would usually work, but it was still a way to collaborate.”
Harbor
With operations in six locales in New York and one each in Los Angeles and London, as well as remote locations when needed, Harbor focuses on talent, technical innovation and maintaining artist vision across feature films, episodic television and advertising. Founded in 2012 by Zak Tucker, Joe Gawler and Theo Stanley, the studio offers a unified creative approach by offering production and post production services under one roof. These include live action, dailies, creative and offline editorial, design, animation, visual effects, sound and picture finishing.
With such a wide range of services, Harbor relies on a range of storage systems — including those from Avid, Quantum, HP Enterprise (HPE), Supermicro, Accusys, Apricorn and Qualstar — so artists can work optimally while the data remains secure.
According to Corey Stewart, chief technology officer, most of the finishing and dailies services are based on Quantum’s StorNext — a direct, on-prem SAN system that’s standardized across Harbor’s facilities. “It’s an industry standard and very robust and low-latency, with guaranteed bandwidth to facilitate serving the data back to the post production systems that we use for pretty much everything,” he says.
For offline editorial and sound, Harbor heavily leverages Avid Nexis technology, as that technology is best in class for offline editorial and enables media and project sharing over Avid Pro Tools. “We track that technology and do what’s best in class there, the same as we do for the SAN environment for M&E with Quantum,” Stewart explains. “If we’re using Avid software, we use the same for storage because the users know it really well. You know what you are getting into, and there’s a higher cost associated with that. But it’s top-of-the-line performance and peace of mind.”
Harbor has its own mass infrastructure that it has built, and a lot of that is based on Supermicro enterprise-class, disk-based NAS. The HPE Nimble hybrid solid-state/disk-based storage (a result of Nimble being acquired by HPE) is used for virtualization. According to Stewart, a lot of this equipment is found in different segments within the company, although it becomes harder to dovetail into this technology because sometimes certain virtualized environments are not necessarily tied to one work stream.
Accusys T-Share storage is a Thunderbolt shared storage unit that is both economical and has a small form factor, so Harbor often sends this solution out in a remote kit when an off-site project requires high capacity within a small-footprint environment. “They [Accusys] have some interesting options out there, and it works really well with Mac workstations for building a small Xsan SAN environment that’s all Thunderbolt-based,” notes Stewart. “In those remote kits, we can scale it; there are some vertical and horizontal scaling options. But the larger ones that require multi-OSes and whatnot, we still stick with a Quantum SAN environment for cross-platform requirements and performance.”
Lastly, Harbor uses encrypted drives from Apricorn, also an industry standard, particularly when users need to travel and transport data. Meanwhile, the company uses Qualstar and Quantum LTO tape drive technology for its tape libraries.
Although Harbor does use SSDs, the company tries to use SAN and NAS solutions as much as possible. “We stay away from local storage as much as possible just because if that local storage goes down, then it’s a one-and-done thing. All your eggs are in one basket,” explains Stewart. “We facilitate high availability, redundancy and protection in terms of making sure it’s an enterprise-class, best-practice solution, where you have multiple power supplies, multiple controllers. So, if you have multiple drive failures, you can still be functioning and operational, because we cannot incur any downtime, or the client walks out of the room. That’s why we try to build [our systems] as enterprise-class as possible.”
Even so, Harbor has some SSD volumes for really high bandwidth/low latency, but they are very costly. That’s when the company tries to use a hybrid solution instead — one that acts as a sort of cache to help facilitate super-fast access. And on the backend, there is a larger spinning disk to help facilitate the capacity that’s needed.
While not every Harbor locale has the same workflows, the company tries to standardize the equipment as much as possible, which makes sense from a support and an economy-of-scale standpoint when purchasing or upgrading gear.
Harbor has had its current setup in place for several years, with upgrades and new software versions added along the way. Insofar as Stewart does not support so-called forklift upgrades, he notes that sometimes you have to just bite the bullet if the situation warrants it, as was the case when the studio switched over to the Nexis platform. In this instance, the newer architecture “massively outweighed the option of maintaining a legacy storage.”
It was difficult to single out specific projects at Harbor where storage proved invaluable to the work. “With every project, storage is integral. It’s the heartbeat of the company; if the storage wasn’t there, we wouldn’t be able to facilitate working with a multi-faceted workstation infrastructure, and especially even now, with the COVID situation. It allowed us quick transition into a remote workflow because we didn’t have to remote any of the storage,” says Stewart. “The storage is still here on-prem, with all of our workstations connected to it. We were just remoting the user interface out to our employees and clients. Like any studio, we don’t want our data going elsewhere. It needs to be in our secure data center.”
Harbor works with all the major studios (Disney, Starz, Netflix, HBO and more), while its commercial client portfolio includes top brands such as Facebook, Nike, Ulta Beauty, Lexus and P&G.
Harbor recently finished a few films remotely, including Disney’s Hamilton, whose picture and sound were done at Harbor, with color grade by Gawler, Tony Volante serving as the supervising sound editor and re-recording mixer, and Rob Fernandez as an additional mixer. Also, Harbor completely finished the sound and picture remotely for an episode of Netflix’s summer release Homemade, an Italian-Chilean anthology series of short stories that take place during the pandemic from filmmakers around the world. The episode Harbor worked on was directed and written by Maggie Gyllenhaal, with color grading by Roman Hankewycz and sound design and mix by Grant Elder. In addition, the studio completed the sound mix remotely on the social drama Hillbilly Elegy, about generations of an Appalachian family’s struggles, which will debut on Netflix November 24. The film’s sound finishing was completed at Harbor, with Robert Hein and Josh Berger taking the reins as supervising sound editors, and Berger and Elder as re-recording mixers.
Main Image: Sim’s Kara Forbis working remotely on DNC
Karen Moltenbrey is a veteran writer, covering visual effects and post production.