Cinesite, a London-based subsidiary of Kodak, liases with firms
Seagate and Baydel to boost its hard drive capacity and retain its
lead in special-effects technology
There's more to Hollywood glamour than meets the eye. A lot of
hard work goes on behind the scenes. Just ask the IS team at
Cinesite, which is acutely aware that its next special-effects
offer is only as good as its current satisfied client.
These people don't lie awake at night worrying about potential
high-tech problems. With several terabytes of critical data stored
on Barracuda drives inside Baydel's O/ESR RAID cabinets, Cinesite's
cadre of artists is free to create startling images that thrill
moviegoers worldwide."If we fail to deliver on a project, we have
extreme difficulties getting other clients through the door," says
Kevin Wheatley, technical services manager at Cinesite's Soho-based
headquarters. "For that reason, we've invested in what we consider
to be a very reliable system."The proof of Wheatley's observation
lies in the proverbial pudding. Cinesite, a subsidiary of Kodak,
has become a leader in special-effects technology. A sample of the
company's creative work can be seen in box office smashes such as
Tomorrow Never Dies, Mission Impossible, SpaceJam and Casper. An
efficient system for data storageCinesite, based in London's Soho,
has installed a state-of-the-art storage to offer greater
reliability. Seagate's Barracuda provides users of workstations,
disk arrays, file servers and supercomputers with unmatched
performance. With spindle speeds of 7,200rpm, the Barracuda family
boasts MR heads, embedded servo, PRML channel and a 7.1msec average
seek time.Baydel, based in Leatherhead, Surrey, develops and
manufactures high-performance, high-availability cross-platform
RAID storage subsystems and is Europe's largest independent
manufacturer of storage products. The company's flagship O/ESR
RAIDER-5 array is in global use in some of the world's most
demanding and data-intensive environments. It seems natural, then,
that Baydel ensures maximum quality in its cabinets with Seagate
storage instruments. "There is a natural synergy between Baydel and
Seagate," says Baydel's managing director, Jim Bailey. "Seagate is
the recognised technology leader in disk drive production, and
Baydel is the recognised leader in utilising disk drive
technology." Enhancing FX Imagery Cinesite stores images range in
size from 12Mb to 100Mb. Between 250 and 1,000 images live in four
Baydel RAID configurations at any one time. "We probably have a few
hundred shots on each project," says Wheatley. "There's no such
thing as enough disk space." To attain the highest performance
possible, Wheatley has striped the Baydel boxes together. The
result is that Cinesite has boosted its sustained transfer rate
from 88Mbit/s to a superfast 106Mbit/s. "It's really the only way
to check and see if what we have done is correct," says Wheatley,
adding that he is able to attain the same video resolution as HDTV.
Cinesite stripes 3 Ultra SCSI Baydel boxes to realise true data
throughput for a real-time playback. If the company wanted, it
could go well over 200Mbit/s because it has the appropriate
hardware configurations. The artists can then play back their
sequences in real time at full resolution, which reveals flaws and
imperfections that they may miss if they were looking just frame by
frame. Wheatley explains that his company's goal is to push each
drive to its limit, rather than continually adding cabinets with
more and more drives. "It's not just the cost of the disk drives,"
he says. "It's also the space that the technology occupies. Rents
in Soho are expensive." Cinesite, which transitioned from
Micropolis drives to Seagate for quality-related issues, knows
there is no margin for error in their line of work. "There's no
hiding place for a bad block of information," says Wheatley, adding
that 300Gb of data were used for a single sequence in this year's
science-fiction thriller Lost in Space. "You can't catch up if a
disk goes down. We run on tight deadlines." The bottom line is that
there is a seamless marriage between Seagate, Baydel and Cinesite
when it comes to a final product. "If you don't know there have
been special effects in a movie, we've done our job correctly,"
says Wheatley.
Roger Gann