Pacific Title & Art Studio
PacTitle's Award-Winning Trailer for "The Dark Knight"
The Challenge
Driven by the extreme bandwidth requirements of uncompressed 2K & 4K content streams, providing concurrent file access to many editing stations and meeting aggressive timelines to complete jobs, Pacific Title & Art Studio required a storage solution that would allow them to accelerate collaborative post-production workflows, centralize islands of storage and economically scale capacities into petabytes.
Application
Pacific Title was chosen to create a multitude of 4K, 2K and HD trailers and visual effects for the highest grossing movie of 2008--and the second highest grossing movie of all-time--Warner Bros.' masterpiece, "The Dark Night." This throughput-intensive, real-time, collaborative environment required very high levels of bandwidth performance and QoS. A large number of editing stations required continuous data delivery to maintain full productivity and meet aggressive studio deadlines.
In addition, these very large content files consume significant capacity at a rapid pace. With ever-growing performance and capacity scaling requirements, PacTitle wanted a solution that provided the lowest capital and operating expenses without compromising on quality.
Solution
PacTitle selected the DDN Silicon Storage Architecture (S2A) data infrastructure platform to create a centralized storage repository and to enable real-time concurrent file access to rapidly accelerate its post production workflows. The S2A was the only storage platform that was capable of supporting multiple, uncompressed 2K, 4K, 8K and HD streams and the studio's extreme capacity, performance and scalability requirements while providing the greatest density and lowest power consumption profile.
About PacTitle
PacTitle was founded in 1919 by legendary Warner Bros. animation artist and producer Leon Schlesinger, and quickly became the leading creator of feature film title sequences, from the Silent Era to classics such as "The Jazz Singer," "Gone with the Wind" and "Ben Hur,"to working on visual effects, trailers and title sequences for modern day hits such as "Rocky Balboa," "Iron Man," "Disturbia," "Tropic Thunder," "Little Miss Sunshine," and "The Chronicles of Narnia."
After working with Warner Bros. to help create the celebrated animated series "Looney Tunes," Schlesinger sold the company to Larry Glickman in 1935. Under Glickman, PacTitle flourished for decades as a provider of title design and optical effects for films and the television industry.
In 1989, PacTitle ushered in the digital age with the establishment of Pacific Title Imaging, Hollywood's premier Scan & Record facility. This was the first step in the process of creating the company's end-to-end digital post production pipeline, encompassing visual effects, digital compositing and optical, 3D animation, digital intermediate and digital trailers.
The company also became famous for restoring and preserving many classic films, including "The Wizard of Oz," "2001: A Space Odyssey," "The Sound of Music" and "The Exorcist."
From main title design to asset management, PacTitle has positioned itself as one of Hollywood's most comprehensive post production facilities, combining state-of-the-art technology and artistry with over 80 years of experience, innovation and success.
PacTitle's Digital Content
As a post production facility for feature films and television, PacTitle manages an extraordinary amount of data. Studios submit raw footage for editing and PacTitle also generates net-new content in the form of title design, visual effects, theatrical and Internet trailers and more.
Ingesting raw footage is the first step in the post production process. The most suitable storage platform must possess extremely fast write throughput performance to avoid costly wait times. Conventional storage systems suffer performance degradation for writes and exhibit lackluster performance when it comes to managing large content files.
Next, several editors require simultaneous access to the many hours of footage. Previously, post facilities had to purchase dedicated storage platforms for each editing station, creating inefficient islands of storage, housing multiple copies of the same content. This was necessary, as conventional storage platforms do not provide enough throughput performance or parallel access to allow multiple editors to work on the same content file. Each respective editing operation had to be completed before the next one could occur and it took several hours or even days to transfer the updated files between editing stations.
Then, compression is used to convert the raw, "magnified" format into a resolution appropriate for the viewing device, such as a Digital HD projector, HD television or mobile device. In addition, Digital Rights Management protections are applied to ensure intellectual property protection and assign rights for viewing or reproduction.
Next, the edited footage is played-out (frame-by-frame) for review by the Director and other production personnel to ensure that the titles, visual effects and trailers perfectly align with the vision and consistency of the film or television project. In this step, eliminating frame drops is critical to ensure fidelity and preserve the expensive and valuable time of executive production staff. Conventional storage systems simply do not provide real-time capabilities, which result in frame drops and idle wait times for production personnel.
Finally, archiving all of this content requires an extremely dense storage platform to minimize the operating expense and administration. Conventional storage platforms manage low capacities and require multiple systems to scale to petabyte levels. This expensive proposition forces users to choose alternate, slower and less-effective storage media such as tape to drive down capital and operational costs.
PacTitle's Initiatives and Challenges
With the popularity of High Definition television and film, data capacities and performance requirements provide economic and technical challenges for post facilities. In order to effectively create visual effects and theatrical trailers for Warner Bros. "The Dark Knight," PacTitle needed a storage solution that would eliminate technical and workflow bottlenecks and accelerate results.
Post-production processes are very intricate and time consuming and are the final step in preparing a film or television project for release. In order to meet studio release deadlines and operate successfully in compressed timeframes, PacTitle required a flexible, highly scalable infrastructure with at least 300MB/s of read/write storage available at any time without interruption.
The DDN S2A Storage Platform
PacTitle selected a DDN S2A data infrastructure platform, utilizing high performance, low- latency fibre channel drives. This DDN platform provides Consistently Predictable Performance, which means that data is always available at full-speed. Unlike conventional storage, the S2A completely eliminates degraded mode. There is no loss of performance during writes, drive errors/rebuild events, verifying data integrity or for RAID 6 data protection, so consistent QoS is delivered. In addition, zero latency, real-time data delivery enables PacTitle to deliver zero frame drops which are a critical requirement for editing and play-out.
Because content is delivered and edited in uncompressed HD format (2K, 4K and 8K) the S2A was selected because of its ability to support multiple high resolution content streams concurrently, within a single system. Conventional storage systems were designed for IOPs-intensive, small-files seen in OLTP environments, ATM transactions and airline reservation systems. 2K & 4K applications are large file, sequential data patterns that require tremendous amounts of bandwidth-intensive throughput performance, exactly what the DDN S2A was purpose-built to deliver.
Now, PacTitle has the ability to provide concurrent access to extremely large content files, so multiple editors can work on projects in parallel. This has not only accelerated their workflow, but has increased project margins and enabled faster project turnarounds.
Different data patterns require different data storage platforms. Clearly, for content files as large as PacTitle worked on during "The Dark Knight" project, a specialized data infrastructure platform was required. By selecting DDN, PacTitle avoided the issue of attempting to utilize multiple, isolated and externally striped general purpose storage systems and a complex array of switches, which can pose issues such as key frame drops and content degradation. The S2A platform successfully removed the storage bottleneck for PacTitle, enabling the studio to realize greater ROI on its technology investments and employees. By utilizing a centralized S2A storage repository, PacTitle reduced both capital and operational expenses, which provided new opportunities for incremental business expansion.
