To power a new color correction and editorial production facility for motion picture trailers, EFILM in Hollywood, CA, has purchased new a networking and storage system from SGI.
A pioneering digital film lab that has used the SGI InfiniteStorage and storage area network (SAN) technology for several years, EFILM — owned by Deluxe Laboratories — recently expanded its business into movie trailers in an 8000sq ft building across the street from its main facility.
With networking assistance from SGI Professional Services, EFLILM designed the facility to house two editorial suites and a color correction suite, which also functions as a digital or film screening room.
Almost all trailers at EFILM are edited in 2K resolution, and, when completed, most go back out on film, to video and, with increasing frequency, to the color-accurate, DCI-compliant (Digital Cinema Initiative) format.
To build the SAN to provide high-speed storage and networking to run its new trailer operation, EFILM purchased an SGI Altix 350 server with 8GB RAM and two Dual-Core Intel Itanium 2 processors (for a total of four processor cores) running on the Linux OS.
The SGI Altix 350 is set up as the gateway server, receiving offline tape from an Avid system — via a 10Gb link to EFILM's main DI facility across the street — that shows how the trailer is to be cut. The server then delivers the information to two Autodesk Smoke workstations.
EFILM also selected two SGI Origin 350 servers with 8GB RAM as metadata servers, and an SGI InfiniteStorage RM660 RAID storage array — optimized for rich media and streaming applications — with 21.5TB of storage.
For more information, visit www.sgi.com.
