Minneapolis-based Splice Here recently refurbished its operations room
and the infrastructure to move direct-attached storage for each
workstation to a central storage system connected via fibre Channel.
Now, instead of having to swap drives and physical media, all its
artists have instant access to all the media.
"For us the efficiency it has allowed us to accomplish is amazing and
we’re still a pretty small facility of 18 people, including four
editors, four freelancers who are in regularly, four designers, three
audio guys, one colorist and one person for DVD authoring and
encoding," says Clayton Condit, president of Splice Here, who also
works as an editor.
At the core is Apple’s Xsan networking system that ties together eight
Medea RAIDs and ten Apple Xserve RAIDs give each of its 14
workstations, mostly G5s and some Linux machines, access to 45 TBs of
storage. The 18 RU RAID drives are split into four Xsan volumes on each
machine, instead of one large volume as separating the volumes makes
maintenance easier and reduces the possibility that the work will come
to a halt if the server crashes.
"We’ll do large shows where there might be anywhere from 50-80 rolling
videos, so we’ll have ten editors and five designers at any given time
working on the footage simultaneously," explains Condit. "It allows us
to turn it around in 2-3 weeks."
Condit continues, "The thing that we’re most excited about is the way
it ties in with Final Touch for color correction. I can be editing on
Final Cut and I can kick out a little 25K XML file and my colorist can
complete the majority of the work before the edit is complete. Once the
edit is finished the color correction is already done and the project
can move right along to the graphics department."
The investment in networked central storage means Splice Here can also
handle 2K workflow. "We’re finishing a 35mm music video that was
scanned at 2K," says Condit. "The 2K comes in as DPX files and
transcode it to a low-rez format so we can offline with it and then
kick that XML out, re-link to the 2K files, color correct and do any
graphics work in 2K."
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