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Quantum StorNext and Apple Xsan Beta Sight

Oct 13, 2009 12:00 PM, By Ramy Katrib, CEO of DigitalFilm Tree

In today's postproduction workflows, common tasks such as rough-cut editing and visual-effects generation are performed using applications running on industry-standard operating systems such as Mac OS X, Linux, and Windows. The end result is a workflow built around applications running on a mixture of server platforms. These diverse workflow implementations cost a fraction of what proprietary systems cost and enable shops to create high-quality masters for much less. However, diverse workflows require glue to bind them together, or issues can arise.

Digital workflow challenges

Foremost among these issues is the problem of content organization and management. Sharing content requires careful tracking of versions to prevent working on older cuts and potentially losing hours of work if a critical scene or effect is dropped. At the same time, tracking the physical and digital intermediaries among different systems adds significantly to the overhead of producing a master. Additionally, there is a problem of actually transferring content. Dropping files onto a FireWire drive and sneakernetting the drive to the next system is slow and inefficient. However, LAN transfers are not necessarily better because copying large files over the LAN is slow and can potentially destabilize applications, resulting in lost productivity and difficulty meeting deadlines.

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Solving the transfer problem requires a large, common pool of shared disk storage, but even this isn't sufficient. What's needed is a system that is fast enough to simultaneously ingest and edit HD, 2K, and 4K files and platform independent to provide a cost-effective balance between performance and capacity growth.

So how do you overcome all these challenges in today's postproduction environment? As a leading innovator in digital workflow solutions, DigitalFilm Tree has a great deal of experience addressing this question, as illustrated by the work we do weekly on NCIS: Los Angeles (CBS), The Sarah Silverman Program (Comedy Central), Cougar Town (ABC), Scrubs (ABC), and Dinosaur Train (PBS.)

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