Pacific Title & Art Studio

As anybody who has recently paid $10.75 for a movie ticket knows, Hollywood is a big money industry.

While Julia Roberts gets the biggest piece of the pie, a good chunk also goes toward the storage systems needed to process digital images that create those epics.

Pacific Title and Art Studio Chief Technical Officer Andy Tran says his shop spent around $10 million on its storage infrastructure in the four years he's been there. Tran is always looking for the latest storage systems to keep up with the relentless advances in digital film technology. PacTitle does post-production work, creating trailers, credits, and subtitles and doing color correction for movie.

"I bleed a lot," says Tran, which is his way of saying he's often on the sharp, leading edge of technology.

Tran has spilled a lot of blood and Pac Title's money this year alone overhauling its SAN to keep up with his company's requirements. His latest upgrade was completed in June as the film industry moves from 2K to 4K resolution digital images. 4K images have around 4,000 vertical lines, and each frame is 4,096 pixels wide by 2,160 pixels high. With 24 frames per second, Tran says each movie could require 4 TBytes of storage.Bandwidth is also at a premium, as multiple users work on a file simultaneously.

"Over the past couple of years, everything's gone completely digital," Tran says. "We work on a couple of movies at the same time. If you have four people working on a movie, you need 2.1 Gbyte-per-second storage controllers to maintain the speed.

In June, Pacific Title installed an SGI InfiniteStorage 6700, which is based on a controller from DataDirect Networks' and back-end Xyratex enclosures. (See PacTitle Taps DataDirect, SGI.) Pacific Title also uses SGI systems based on LSI Logic Engenio storage, but Tran says those systems couldn't keep up with the requirements of 4K resolution. Neither could older DataDirect systems, which Tran says could only support two concurrent users in his shop.

"I said, 'That's not good enough. I need at least six concurrent users,' " Tran says. "Lo and behold, with 4-gig and the [new DataDirect system] I can have six concurrent users at the same time without getting dropped frames. If you're watching an action movie and the frame slows down -- that'd be kind of cool, but that's not supposed to happen in the movie."

Tran says another reason he selected the InfiniteStorage 6700 is that DataDirect uses shared SAN file systems and clustered NAS in the same box. Before upgrading, he looked at traditional NAS systems from EMC and Network Appliance but they couldn't keep up with his demands."We couldn't go with a generic NAS system because our scanner and recorder scan really fast," Tran says. "Our scanner pumps out 100 megabytes per second and you can't do that consistently with NAS. We have to hook our scanner directly onto a SAN."

Still, the DataDirect controller alone wouldn't be enough to keep up. Tran also upgraded Pacific Title's infrastructure to 4-Gbit/s Fibre Channel. He added a Brocade Silkworm 48000 director with the new system, giving him 128 additional 4-gig ports. (See SGI Adds Brocade Switches.) Pacific Title also has a Silkworm 24000, 12 Silkworm 4900, and two Silkworm 4100 switches. Tran says he uses InfiniBand switches for several servers.

"The load on the server is a lot less when you have fewer ports, and we can do that with 4-gig," he says.

Tran says PacTitle's SAN is closing in on 400 Tbytes. His staff will continue to use the Engenio systems for jobs that don't require 24 frames per second.

Besides storage systems, Pacific Title has three full-screen theatres that include a digital projector, workstation, and visual effects software. Tran estimates each room costs around $1.5 million. And he's far from finished building out his infrastructure."Ultimately, we'll add a lot of [SGI 6700] storage to support 4K film," Tran says. "We're doing some 4K now, but not a whole feature. Over the next 14 months, we'll do more as we get a Sony 4K projector."

Some of that storage, as well as another Brocade Silkworm 48000 director, will go into Pacific Title's second studio in West Hollywood to mirror the primary Hollywood studio.

Tran says the constant upgrades are necessary to keep up in an extremely competitive business. It seems to be paying off. The studio's credits include Snakes on a Plane, Munich, Cinderella Man, and John Tucker Must Die. It's currently working on the sixth Rocky movie, which means its artists have to make 60-year-old Sylvester Stallone look like a real heavyweight boxer under the watchful eye of the film's star and director.

"He's here almost every day," Tran says of Stallone.

Dave Raffo, News Editor, Byte and Switch