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Giant Killer Robots accelerates 3D visual effects and animation for feature films with BlueArc's Titan storage system, scaling the company's technology infrastructure to support increased project requirements – delivering a high performance solution for GKR's creative digital workflow.
Giant Killer Robots (GKR) is an Academy Award-winning visual effects boutique specializing in high-end, high resolution CGI animation. Based in San Francisco, GKR provides complete animation services from preliminary creative and technical guidance to final compositing. The company services all aspects of the entertainment industry, including movies, commercials and music videos. Feature films in which the company's art has been central includes Scooby Doo and Scooby Doo Too, Matrix Reloaded and Matrix Revolutions, Son of the Mask, and Blade III.
GKR acts both as art department and CG production house, developing ideas from beginning to end.
"BlueArc turned in unbelievably impressive performance numbers. It was a different technology and a much more impressive technology set than EMC or Network Appliance's. And BlueArc as a company provided the kind of service you would get from a small company."
"The performance is excellent, and it is a nice piece of equipment, but the reason we keep talking to BlueArc is the support."
"Once we passed about 10 workstations and 15 render machines, the disks started to bog down, so we needed not only considerably larger storage capacity, but also faster throughput."
-- Rich Simon,Different from many technology-driven companies, for GKR, it is it not uncommon for deployment of the company's technology infrastructure to lag the need for new equipment. The company's continued battle to win new projects and fluctuation in the industry from opportunity to opportunity creates an environment where all aspects of the company need to be dynamically performing at their peak – to both survive and thrive.
With the company's industry success on projects including Scooby Doo gaining them a strong reputation for quality, new opportunities have been easier to come by – increasing the demand for new artists and cutting-edge technology to support continued growth and leadership.
However, the company's existing central storage infrastructure, consisting of two Dell-powered servers and PowerBault JBODs, was inadequate for the company's rapidly expanding data needs. As the company's render farm expanded beyond 10 workstations and 15 render machines, the disks started to bog down, so GKR not only needed considerably larger storage capacity, but also faster throughput.
Rich Simon, the company's Senior Systems Administrator, knew that the company would need to invest in enterprise class storage to keep the studio functioning under higher loads – complementing the company's arming its artists with state of the art workstations and a 75-node, 150 CPU render farm. GKR investigated multiple NAS options, seeking high performance at a price that made good business sense.
"We're living project to project, and our longest planning horizon is generally six months or maybe a year," said Simon. "I looked six months ahead, and said we needed this device, no matter what."
GKR, after investigating multiple NAS options from leading vendors, selected BlueArc's Titan, primarily due to the system's high performance, the potential for scaling capacity, and professional support that outperformed the competition. Starting with an initial 4-terabyte system, GKR has continued to expand the BlueArc as needs grew, through 12 terabytes today.
With Titan, GKR has achieved performance statistics exponentially higher than the company's pre-existing storage technology – upwards of 250 to 300 Megabytes per second, in an all-Windows CIFS environment. The increased performance and scalability of the system enabled GKR to support the real-time editing and rendering of image files produced by more than 50 digital effects artists, storing high definition, high density layers and textures that form the building blocks of GKR's creative artistry.
There are two basic processes for GKR's visual effects production - three dimensional elements to be added to film and two dimensional compositing, which is the art of placing those elements onto film. For projects where effects are added to live action, the elements need to appear completely realistic. Sometimes, as in Son of the Mask, the art may be given an unreal, cartoonish feel. Three-dimensional elements can include cars, buildings,
life-like characters, and complicated effects like hair, fire and fluids. The 3D models for these elements are rigged, animated, textured and placed in lighting in preparation for being turned into moving images. The process of making those images is called rendering, which is carried out by a 75-node dual AMD processor render farm.
For a company like GKR, the rendering process can utilize a significant portion of their computing cycles, but technology improvements elsewhere in the production flow can deliver benefits throughout the process. The company has provided artists with powerful desktop machines that rival the individual render nodes, enabling them to look at frames as quickly on their desktop as they can on the render farm, adds Simon.
Yet, as the film and all the disparate elements are created, the data begins to add up - with each frame consuming an estimated 12.5 Megabytes. Movie film runs at 24 frames per second, so a single minute's worth of film consumes nearly 20 gigabytes of storage. Multiply this by five to ten versions of each shot and its apparent how much storage is involved. As a result, highly scalable, high performance storage is critical for the company's digital production.
BlueArc's Titan has not only delivered the multi-terabyte capacity required to store ongoing projects and archived activity, but throughput capable of sustaining wire-speed data rates from the company's render farm. The company not only has avoided seeing disks bogged down from high demands or had to fiddle with modifying their storage to conserve space, but has achieved the highest levels of performance - nearly four times competing products reviewed under evaluation. The increased performance has enabled the company's artists to produce more higher-quality content more quickly.
Companies like GKR, focused on digital data acceleration, have found their storage technology infrastructure to be fundamental to their business – a key component of their creative workflow. With BlueArc's Titan, GKR not only met the company's growing data capacity need, but delivered performance capable of meeting future demands, as the company continued to win new projects and hire new artists.
With digital effects creation becoming a growing portion of the entertainment market, and the demands for individual projects accelerating, GKR expects the Titan to continue playing a starring role.