Storage in studios, for applications including animation, special effects, or editing, are often a JBOD (Just a Bunch of Disks), directly attached to workstations striped together to get acceptable performance, measured by raw throughput. Projects grow in size and scope, along with a thirst more sophisticated visual effects has caused an increase in the complexity of the creation process and a re-thinking of storage infrastructures for the studio.
When the storage infrastructure is incapable of meeting requirements for a large project, some studios have been forced to compromise the creative side. This is done by reducing the complexity of the shots, often limiting the number of elements in a frame, which reduces the strain on the server and storage infrastructure. Other studios broke up the artists into shifts to try to "spread the load" across a greater part of the day. This, along with generally longer workdays, due to infrastructure slowdowns, puts an undue strain on the creative and IT staff.
To handle growing requirements, Network Attached Storage (NAS) has to change dramatically in many dimensions, including higher throughput performance, transaction performance, increased file system scalability, and improved availability. Although there are many technical trends that are driving changes to storage in the studio such as higher resolution formats, faster networks, and 64-bit computing, the primary driver of storage demands are creative trends. For entertainment, everything is driven by creative requirements, conceived by writers, directors, producers, visual effects supervisors and artists. It is a chicken and egg scenario, where creativity pushes the technology and technology enables the creativity.
With an increasing appetite for more sophisticated visual effects, one obvious change is that blockbuster movies have more shots than ever. The number of shots per movie has gone from a few hundred, into thousands of shots spread across multiple studios. Shots are also longer and more complex, with more elements in every frame. The creative side is also driven by directors being more involved in digital creation which can lead to revisions as they see what is possible and push technology to its creative limits.
With the increase in the number of shots, studios have grown their creative staff, and prepare for a more scalable & collaborative post-production environment. With studios growing, the storage infrastructures quickly became a bottleneck, driving studios to use high-end centralized storage solutions to scale.
For example, Fox Studio's Fantastic Four production had over 1,000 shots, spread across 10 studios, with 4 doing the majority of the work. Some studios focused on characters, such as Giant Killer Robots' (GKR) revolutionary work on the Human Torch, while others focused on broader scene effects, like Meteor Studios' work on a key bridge scene. The projects were among the largest they had ever undertaken. Both studios required high performance NAS to support the number of shots and the complexity of the projects, and both studios relied on BlueArc's Titan Server to meet their requirements.
For GKR, this meant having a solution that could dynamically scale as the complexity and the number of shots grew and as they continued to expand. "BlueArc from the beginning was simple to implement and scale, and allows us to take on more projects and larger projects than we have ever done before", said Rich Simon, senior administrator at GKR. They grew their storage infrastructure from 4TB to 8TB then to 12TB to handle projects. With Titan's ability to scale file systems to 512TB, they can continue scaling without breaking up projects across multiple file systems. Capacity increases were driven by the large scope and complexity of creating realistic flame effects.
The complexity of the flame effects also pushed storage performance, with more than 60 artists collaborating on shots. In addition to artists, GKR has 75 render nodes also accessed files on Titan to perform complex calculations to produce smooth finished (rendered) images. At night, GKR also uses the artists' workstations as render nodes. Prior to BlueArc, GKR experienced slowdowns when many workstations accessed central storage. Per Simon, "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." With Titan, GKR was able to handle the entire render farm and workstations, getting over 300MB/s during peak periods, a level impossible with software-based NAS solutions.
High throughput will always be required for studio storage, but now with the increased complexity, transactional performance is now critical as well. To create frames, many reference files are required, which are accessed by the artists to create them and by the render farm to complete each frame. These files include information for every element in a frame from particles for smoke, flame, or even fur, and layers containing textures, shadows and other elements for each frame. This has increased in complexity well over four fold from even a few years ago. This has added the requirement for studio storage to support more requests and transactions. BlueArc's hardware architecture, using similar technology to that of high performance switches, allows it to sustain over 60,000 connections and well over 100,000 IO/sec (IOPS) in a studio environment. This ensures that all render node requests are responded to promptly, preventing failed renders stemming from storage access or latency issues.
Meteor's efforts in Fantastic Four were more subtle than the Human Torch, but no less sophisticated. Their challenge was to create a Brooklyn Bridge sequence without the bridge's ever being used in the production, saving production costs and increasing creative flexibility. This required the creation of a computer generated (CG) bridge along with water, cars, helicopters, people, and even a fire truck. To avoid distracting from the story, this meant photo-realistic effects that viewers would perceive as real. Photo-realistic effects were often distracting as viewers could discern real from CG images, but technology has enabled more detail creativity with more elements, making effects more difficult to spot.
Responsible for over 240 shots, Meteor scaled to about 80 artists and 80 render nodes, as they pushed both overall throughput and IOPS performance, with elements like water, reflections, crowds and other complex effects. At times, Meteor exhibited performance over 100,000 IOPS, producing rendered frames. These loads cause traditional NAS solutions to slow down, but not the BlueArc Titan server. Jami Levesque, Director of Technology said, "While under our previous environment it could take up to fifteen minutes to open a Maya file, it's now a matter of seconds, saving valuable artist time and focus." This can result in more iterations and better quality output.
Meteor also took advantage of Titan's capability to support tiered storage, using the appropriate disk for each step of their workflow. They stored files for high performance rendering on fast 15K FC drives, enabling high throughput, I/O, and availability. For completed or inactive shots, they leverage lower cost, high capacity Serial ATA drives. This allowed them to create a solution that has a price/performance model that matches their workflow, vs. sacrificing performance with an all SATA solution.
Studio storage has to adapt and scale with the creative and technical trends in this industry. Studios can no longer afford to simply use local, non-high availability storage as projects grow and include more collaborative artists. A centralized high performance NAS solution is required. It must scale dynamically well beyond typical 16TB file system limits, must sustain very high throughput and I/O performance, and must allow for a collaborative file-sharing environment. Although traditional NAS servers have not been able to keep up with the needs of studios, BlueArc's innovative Titan Server is designed to scale and sustain the performance required in these environments. Titan has been proven by fire in real world studios, enabling them to focus on creative results, which must be the primary focus of all studios.