Letting the Work Flow
By Karen Moltenbrey
With seven digital film recorders running 24/7 and more film directors requesting the impressive visual fidelity of the 4K digital intermediate (DI) process, Capital FX, a leading UK postproduction company, has to keep its work flow, well, flowing. To accomplish this, the company recently selected Silicon Graphics, Inc. (SGI) as the provider of its storage and cross-platform networking solution in its new DI theater facility.
Housed in London's Mayfair district, close to the heart of UK film and television production in Soho, Capital FX now has the ability to complete the filmmaking process--from the digitization of raw shot rushes, through color grading, dust busting, editing, special effects, compositing, and film write-out--in real time at 2K or 4K resolution.
Installing an SGI InfiniteStorage RM660 SAN with SGI InfiniteStorage Shared Filesystem CXFS software, which the company purchased in June, means that Capital FX has centralized its digital work flow, allowing multiple operations to be performed simultaneously on multiple operating systems in different suites within the facility. As a result, this reduced the requirement to copy data¿critical in this market, where a 90-minute feature film in 4K resolution generates 16TB of data.
One is Not Enough
Almost as soon as the eight-seat DI theater was operational, Capital FX realized the demand outweighed its capacity. Warner Bros.' Charlie and the Chocolate Factory came in as a 4K project, requiring DI, color grading, and effects, plus subtitling and final output to film for 21 different language versions. So, the facility has taken a second floor in the Mayfair building, where it has constructed an additional, much larger DI theater venue, and is proceeding to purchase additional SGI InfiniteStorage systems and related networking hardware and software.
The expansion was, in part, to ensure that Capital FX is ready to handle another major 4K DI project, Warner Bros.' Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, due to be released in the US this month. The Harry Potter job will include film scan to digital intermediate, effects, compositing, and color grading, with many different language versions as well.
"With the SGI InfiniteStorage RM660 system, we have converged the entire work flow to work on one feature at a time, and we don't have to copy two or three sequences to various locations on the network while different departments work and then convert the changes," says George Ilko, IT director at Capital FX. "Initially, we selected SGI for the CXFS shared-file system, which is unique to SGI, so that we all can work simultaneously."
Ilko continues: "Among other factors, we also [valued] SGI's GRIO software, which provides the ability to play back a 2K, scanned, full-length feature, which is 2.5 to 3TB of data, in real time, or a 4K scanned feature, at around 16TB of data, in real time. We run ARRI scanners, film recorders, and color-management software, in addition to Autodesk software. Between ARRI, Autodesk, and SGI, we've got a really good partnership and good integration among the companies' systems. It is a very efficient way of working."
The DI theater at Capital FX is an Autodesk Discreet Lustre 2K/4K digital grading and color-correction system. Designed as a complete preview theater with full Dolby Digital 5.1 surround sound and THX, it features a Barco D-Cine Premiere DP100 digital projector and a Kinetron film projector for side-by-side comparisons on the 8-meter-wide screen.
The SGI InfiniteStorage RM660 SAN with 20TB storage uses SGI InfiniteStorage Shared Filesystem CXFS to link to the entire facility. The DI theater, with Lustre running on Windows XP, is networked to a Discreet Smoke editing/finishing system running on an SGI Irix OS-based, four-processor Silicon Graphics Tezro visual workstation for HD and special effects, and is also networked to the postproduction suite, which primarily runs Discreet Combustion, along with Apple's Shake and Eyeon Software's Digital Fusion.
Capital FX's in-house art department, which creates original title sequences and artwork on Apple Macintosh systems, is also linked by the SGI SAN. SGI Shared Filesystem CXFS ensures seamless work flow between any and all of the suites, regardless of the operating system.
The company is in the process of adding SGI Guaranteed Rate I/O (GRIO) V.2 software for enhanced performance of high-bandwidth data. This will ensure real-time DI to film output. Capital FX protects the valuable intellectual property it works with using the latest security solutions from Cisco Systems throughout the facility's IT structure. As with all the other components in the digital work flow, the security solution integrates seamlessly in the SGI SAN infrastructure.
DI and More
With approximately 40 employees, Capital FX was founded in 1990 as a film optical house, and transitioned to digital film mastering and an IT infrastructure almost six years ago. The facility's bread and butter has always been foreign versioning title work, and it offers the only laser subtitling in the UK. Using Celco Fury recorders, which run Silicon Graphics Octane2 systems, as well as ArriLaser digital film recorders, the facility has the biggest film output in Europe, and handles the foreign title version for almost all the major features distributed by Walt Disney Studios, Warner Bros., Universal Studios, Sony Pictures, United International Pictures, and 20th Century Fox.
The recent addition of the DI Lustre suite with SGI RM660 storage and SGI Shared Filesystem CXFS has proved a tremendous success. Capital FX has used the theater suite to finish not only the DI and color grading, but also extensive original work on a number of late-summer and early-fall releases, including Stealth, scanned in at 4K, and Batman Begins, Asylum, Ripley Under Ground, The Bridge, Dead Man's Card, and the just-completed V for Vendetta, all scanned in at 2K.
"With the current push for a larger-venue DI theater, SGI's scalable InfiniteStorage systems are an important benefit, allowing us to add nearline storage very quickly. That's a huge need of ours, in order to keep constantly growing the network," says Ilko. "We'll actually be doubling the storage to 40TB of online storage, switching on GRIO, putting in a 68TB nearline storage device, and another SGI InfiniteStorage gateway server. We're also purchasing SGI's Data Migration Facility (DMF), which will allow us to automatically dual-state data, meaning it is copied to online and nearline storage simultaneously as it arrives into the network. DMF also monitors the threshold of the online SGI RM660 storage, and as that gets to about 80 percent capacity, the date is automatically migrated to the more cost-effective SATA nearline storage. The scalability of SGI InfiniteStorage is also important because we've already run tests in 6K resolution to ensure we're future-proofed, and 6K is an absolute monster!"
"Future-proofing a digital intermediate facility is exactly what SGI InfiniteStorage solutions provide," says Louise Ledeen, senior marketing manager of production at SGI. "It's having the storage and networking capabilities you need now, at real-time speed, along with the SGI CXFS cross-platform functionality, which enables our customers to select the best applications for editing, finishing, and interactive color grading. That allows directors and cinematographers, collaborating with the colorists and other creative talent, to fully realize their artistic vision. And, as 4K digital intermediate becomes more popular, SGI's scalable infrastructure provides the ability to seamlessly add storage capacity for handling simultaneous projects at 2K and 4K resolution and beyond."
Karen Moltenbrey is an executive editor for Computer Graphics World. |
