postPerspective Update

Storage for Color and Post
By Karen Moltenbrey

At nearly every phase of the content creation process, storage is at the center. In this piece, we take a look at two
post facilities whose projects continually push boundaries in terms of data, but through it all, their storage solutions remain fast and reliable.

Light Iron juggles an average of 20 to 40 data-intensive projects at a time and must have a robust storage solution to handle its ever-growing work. And Final Frame recently took on a project whose storage requirements were literally out of this world.

With offices in New York City and London, Final Frame is a full-featured post facility offering a range of services, including DI of every flavor, 8mm to 77mm film scanning and restoration, offline editing, VFX, sound editing (theatrical and home Dolby Atmos) and mastering. Its work spans feature films, documentaries and television. Recently the facility’s work on the documentary film Apollo 11 tested its infrastructure like no other, including the amount of storage space it required.

“A long time ago, we decided that for the backbone of all our storage needs, we were going to rely on fiber. We have a total of 55 edit rooms, five projection theaters and five audio mixing rooms, and we have fiber connectivity between all of those,” says Will Cox, CEO/supervising colorist. So for the past 20 years, ever since 1Gb fiber became available, Final Frame has relied on this setup. Every five years or so, the shop has upgraded to the next level of fiber and is currently using 16Gb fiber.

“Storage requirements have increased, because image data has increased and audio data has increased with Dolby Atmos. So, we’ve needed more storage and faster storage,” Cox says.

While the core of the system is fiber, the facility uses a variety of storage arrays, the bulk of which are 16Gb 4000 Series SAN offerings from Infortrend, totaling approximately 2PB of space. Also, the studio uses 8GB Promise Technology VTrak arrays, totaling about 1PB. Additionally installed at the facility are some JetStor 8GB offerings. For SAN management, Final Frame uses Tiger Technology’s Tiger Store.

Foremost in Cox’s mind when looking for a storage solution is interoperability, since Final Frame uses Linux, Mac and Windows platforms; reliability and fault tolerance are important as well.