FOCUS MEDIA & ENTERTAINMENT


Issue 18, October/November


for post-production for a slate of films requires double-digit numbers of petabytes of capacity of just nearline storage. “Your online storage is [also] enormous,” Ward says.


BIG DATA ISSUES COME TO HOLLYWOOD


Of course, the scale of storage that movie studios are dealing with for the first time has created a new set of challenges. This means no standard practices have been developed yet, so this area of the industry is pretty much “the Wild West”, as Ward calls it. “People are solving these problems in different ways,” he says.


In addition to the immaturity of the processes for dealing with digital storage in the film industry, expenses associated with storage can still be easily overlooked because the size of the budget for each major film is so big.


The scale of required storage capacity itself is one challenge, and whether it really needs to be that enormous is one of the unanswered questions. No common practices for optimization of stored data have emerged in the industry.


While the initial files are shot at much higher resolutions, a finished film is typically delivered at 150mbps so the final cut, at a high resolution, may take anywhere between 12 terabytes and 20 terabytes. “That seems manageable, but what they shot was a petabyte,” Ward says.


The material that was shot but did not make it into the final product is archived, usually on tape, to be used in case a studio wants to make a sequel in the future. Herein lies another question the industry has yet to resolve: what is the best compression rate for archived data?


Creatives do not like compression because they do not want to reduce the quality of the image, Ward says. Investment in shooting is also a consideration: a studio will sometimes spend hundreds of millions of dollars on a film, so what is the correct compression rate that will be satisfactory to the cinematographer and not diminish the value of the investment?


“In the past you saved everything,” Ward says. “But what do you save [today] when the costs are much greater [since] it’s stored digitally?”


Archiving is a major challenge which has so far been met with tape. All raw video normally gets backed up on LTO-5 tape drives and stored. “The scale is so large, I don’t think anything


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else meets the price-point requirements when you have to deal with this many petabytes of data,” Ward says, considering tape.


But tape has its own challenges, especially at scale. Forester’s Reichman says one of the concerns is whether in the future studios will have systems that can read tapes produced on today’s technology. Another challenge with tape is management. He says tape is really the best medium out there for archiving, as long as the organization has mature processes for managing the archives.


The final cut, at a high resolution, may take anywhere between 12 and 20 terabytes


“If you know what you’re doing to manage that chain over long periods, tape is the cheapest, most stable, densest way to store data,” Reichman says. “If you’re not good at that, then put it on disk.”


WHAT WILL REPLACE TAPE?


For movie studios, with the scale of their storage requirements, disk is not a viable replacement for tape. “Optical media really hasn’t gained the density or stability to replace tape,” Reichman says.


The problem is that disk systems themselves are really only designed to last five years and they spin constantly, so they’re drawing power forever and it’s not so easy to move them from place to place. While disks have not stopped getting denser they have stopped getting faster.


Phase-change memory is already available in limited forms, but viable commercialized solutions will start emerging “in the next several years”, according to Hillsberg. Racetrack memory is about five years out, he says.


Meanwhile, no matter how sophisticated digital cameras and computer graphics get, all the data Hollywood cranks out in the process of making its flops and blockbusters will continue to be stored on tape and shelved in studio warehouses. n


For these reasons there is such a big interest in SSDs, which have emerged as a more likely candidate to replace tape.


But the buck doesn’t stop with Flash memory. IBM, for example, has multiple technologies under development that may one day revolutionize the way data is stored.


Bruce Hillsberg, director of storage systems research at IBM Research, says his division is focused on new materials that may ultimately replace Flash memory technology in SSDs. One goal of IBM’s research projects in the area of long-term storage is being able to store data for 50 years without migration.


If the company achieves this goal, it will be a revolutionary technological breakthrough that will make the task of archiving much simpler for all organizations with archive scale similar to that of movie studios.


Both tape and disk have to be replaced periodically, although the lifespan of tape is about four times longer than that of disk. According to Reichman, a tape can sit on a shelf for 20 years, while optical disk systems have to be refreshed about every five years.


Examples of solid-state alternatives to Flash that IBM is working on include phase-change memory and racetrack memory. Phase-change memory takes advantage of the ability of chalcogenide glass to be switched between crystalline and amorphous states.


Racetrack memory technology promises to deliver storage that is 100-times denser than what is possible today, Hillsberg says. “Racetrack memory is a nanotechnology based on magnetic domains. If this lives up to our expectations it will revolutionize data centers.”


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