Adrian Bull CEO, Cinelab London
“There is a lot of complexity in dealing with hundreds of thousands of individual files when scanning film. It’s not large single image sequences, there are folders with anything up to 40,000 .dpx files. A classic issue with directory listings of these files is speed - you need to be able to find a directory quickly, see what’s in it and manipulate it. pixitmedia’s central storage is able to store, organise and handle that write-heavy workflow. “What is really important to us is the timeliness of that turnaround
between us processing the film, scanning it, transcoding it, and then getting the digital assets to the production teams. Whether it is a file-based delivery or tape delivery, the timings of the turnarounds are critical. From our client’s perspective, they need to know they have got every shot they need or if they need to re-shoot. That speed in delivery is everything. “pixitmedia is at the heart of our facility. All of our digital workflows
are now connected and we’ve come a long way from the number of disparate legacy tools that we had. The pixitmedia team is very good at understanding how different filing systems work and really understand media files. They have done a great job of getting all of our systems up to the standard and to integrate properly.”
high resolution files from captured film; Cinelab London was using a restrictive pre-installed workflow for scanning film, transcoding and delivering. Whilst this had helped Cinelab London get quickly established in the market, it lacked flexibility and problems arose when demand for Cinelab London’s services grew which necessitated the acquisition of more scanners, and more transcoding capability. Existing storage became unruly,
and Cinelab London quickly faced increasingly slow file transfers to get to the exact data they needed. Cinelab London also recognised an opportunity to become early market leaders in offering film capture to production companies at 4K definition, which at the time, were requesting film capture in 2K. To deliver this vision, Cinelab
London turned to pixitmedia to help transform their data workflows - harnessing the power, flexibility and scalability of pixstor high-performance software-defined storage and the pixitmedia team’s unrivalled workflow knowledge. Handling the challenges of the
growth in volume of work, rapid delivery and the day-to-day data
storage system management, pixstor enables Cinelab London to avoid the need for an internal support team, and focus on the job at hand. pixitmedia’s team of data workflow specialists stripped the complexity of storage system management for Cinelab London by quickly gaining an
“They now have a complete
performance and efficiency for the heavy workflows
they require.” Jamie Bean
Solution Architect, pixitmedia
understanding of existing technical resources and providing hands on technical support. With around the clock support on
standby from pixitmedia’s European and US based technical teams,
storage solution that delivers guaranteed
Cinelab London receives regular and preemptive updates on the storage system backend so that potential issues or storage limits can be identified and handled early on.
Beyond Expectations In building the central storage that could support 5 film scanners, pixitmedia aligned with Cinelab’s technical partners, DFT’s Scannity Solution and ARRI Arriscan scanners, to ensure a seamless workflow. Configuring both sets of scanners to write data to a central location at maximum throughput was the first stage of removing islands of locally attached storage and inefficient manual file copying. Subsequently, DFT have gone on to recommend pixitmedia as their storage provider of choice for their Scannity scanning solutions. pixitmedia ran extensive tests
in their lab facility on the scanner’s operating system, image resolution, frame transfer rate and colour grading to prepare this solution. Integrating all of Cinelab’s hardware was no easy feat; the legacy scanners, such as the Spirit 4K Scanner, presented particular challenges since it was no
longer supported or developed by the manufacturer. “We worked closely with Cinelab
London to ensure their legacy solutions were up and running with the new pixstor ecosystem; they now have a complete storage solution that delivers guaranteed performance and efficiency for the heavy workflows they require. By integrating Cinelab London’s different scanning technologies to a central infrastructure, they have complete visibility of their data and workflows with a solution that is entirely scalable as they continue to grow” - Jamie Bean, Solution Architect at pixitmedia. The result is a system that is now
entirely scalable, Cinelab London’s additional software grading and video editing tools; BlackMagic Design, Resolve, Avid Media Composer and Adobe Media Encoder are now able to all write data to a single central location. With pixstor, Cinelab London can confidently focus on their craft - facilitating productions by rapidly digitising and delivering hundreds and thousands of hours of film for the biggest names in the entertainment industry.
www.pixitmedia.com
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