Directed by Frederik Du Chau and featuring the voices of Jason Lee, James Belushi and Amy Adams as Polly Purebread, Underdog will hit theaters on August 3. Schlaman spoke to us from the edit suite during a well-deserved break.

Studio Monthly: How many Avids sit on top of your Archion units?
BS: We’ve got five Media Composer systems working on this show. You use the same Avid Unity software and hardware, so there’s not much of a learning curve if, like me, you’re already on an Avid. It’s absolutely transparent. When I go into the administration tool to start working, I use the same Avid software and tool I’ve always used. Archion’s just working in the background, giving me more storage.

Why didn’t you just stick with an Avid array?
BS: It was a decision I wasn’t part of, though we certainly all had our opinions. Essentially, Spyglass was talking to different rental vendors and Archion was one of our options. But we were pretty happy with it when we got it. The interesting thing about the Archion, and something I’ve grown to really appreciate at this point in the process, is just how much storage you actually get. Our Unity has 4 TB of storage on it. With Archion, we can use 3 TB of that. One TB is a dedicated “mirror” for back up. If we were to buy storage from any other vendor, we would have only been able to use 2 of the 4 TB. So we’re getting 50% more storage but the same level of protection. And we don’t have to turn on Unity’s mirroring because the Archion takes care of that.

When we were on location in Providence, one weekend the power went out. We came in on Monday morning and the battery backup for storage didn’t run down. I made a quick call to make sure we could quickly restart it. Honestly, all we were told to do was turn the power back on, so we did. After we powered it on, we booted up the Avids while the storage was still coming back up. By the time the Avids booted up, the storage was already there, ready to go. It was amazingly simple. It’s also good to know that if a drive were to fail-and we haven’t lost a drive on this film yet-it would fix itself in the background, without any down time. You’d just get a message that the drive failed and, at some point, you’d want to swap it out. But you could keep working.

So it’s like a turbo-charged Avid.
BS: That’s what it is, really. You’re getting everything you’re used to, or would have gotten from pure Avid, but you’re also getting this extra storage.

This Underdog stars a real beagle, whose tricks must get some serious CG help along the way.
BS: Yea, we have a lot of CG elements on top of the live action, so the more terabytes the better.

To learn more about Archion storage, read Mike Grotticelli’s post in HD Studio here. [December 19 HD Studio]

For more ideas about storage options on smaller-budget projects, read Jim Feeley’s February ’07 Studio/monthly column here.

– Hard Drive Storage for Producers