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Showing up at the awards shows is the easy part for Framestore, a leading visual effects and computer animation studio based in the UK and North America. Whether it is a full-length feature film destined for movie theaters or a 30-second commercial headed for television or the Internet, the hard work is behind the scenes, where the volume of digital files has become an increasing challenge for post-production studios like Framestore.

Framestore has been working in digital film and video for more than 20 years. The company uses innovative talent and technology to create marketing content for every platform and partners with clients ranging from brands through to Hollywood studios, ad agencies, production companies, and video game developers. Framestore's movie portfolio includes work on such films as Avatar, Clash of the Titans, The Dark Knight, The Golden Compass, Skyfall, and the entire Harry Potter series.

Andy Howard, head of Framestore's engineering team that focuses on commercials, has seen a sea change in industry practices over the past two years and knows the impact it has had on the company's business model.

"Everyone had been shooting 35mm film, and suddenly there was a huge drop-off," Howard says. "From the smallest commercials to the biggest feature films, people switched to electronic camera formats, so we ended up with tens of thousands of files per project, which required a new shared storage production workflow."

In the past, Framestore used Thomson's Bones to scan in film, convert it to data file format for editing, colouring, trans-coding, and other production work, and then return the processed files back to film for cinema and television release. Now the former film footage arrives as digital video and audio files, and there is more content than ever before because camera crews are no longer constrained by the high cost of chemically processed film.

THE FILE SHARING AND TIERING CHALLENGE
Framestore uses a variety of editing software, including Apple Final Cut, Avid Media Composer, and Autodesk Flame and Smoke products.

This diversity meant that Framestore needed a solution that could cope with changing conditions and changing applications. Support for high- performance shared access to files running on a variety of platforms (Linux, Mac, and Windows OS) was a key requirement. Howard looked at other solutions including Lustre and IBM's GPFS, but StorNext stood out as the only product capable of adapting to all platforms and programs. In addition, Howard was impressed with strong technical support from Quantum engineers who understand the industry and know what StorNext can do for a company like Framestore.

The StorNext File System provided immediate benefits, such as shared access to files and rapid processing for a smooth workflow. In addition, because collaborative work could now occur without moving huge files from one workstation to another, there was also less strain on the network and less time used in getting data where it needed to be. However, despite the improvements in the digital workflow, Framestore was still struggling with how to manage the growth of digital data files.

"When we had a 20-terabyte high-speed shared SAN, we could manage the files with few problems," Howard explains. "But when we had to expand the SAN to 130 terabytes, the data became unwieldy and expensive to store, so we really had to manage it differently."

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