HPCwire: SGI Technology Accelerates HD Digital Film Mastering

Since 1986 - Covering the Fastest Computers in the World and the People Who Run Them

HPCwire >> Off the Wire

April 20, 2007

SGI Technology Accelerates HD Digital Film Mastering

Page: 1 of 2
1 | 2 All »

SUNNYVALE, Calif., April 18 -- To meet the overwhelming demands associated with real-time high definition (HD) processing, Éclair Laboratoires, the leading digital film mastering facility in France, supplemented their existing 100TB-plus SGI InfiniteStorage CXFS storage area network (SAN) with a complete storage and server workflow solution from SGI. With the SGI solution fully implemented, Éclair Laboratoires now has an extremely dynamic and fluid environment that easily handles the intense real-time data processing and very large data management requirements associated with high-definition (HD).

"We wanted to work on the same film at the same time as the special effects and the digital color calibration, without saturating the network," said Philippe Mouton, IT director, Digital Department, Éclair Laboratoires. "We have a dozen Unix workstations connected to different Linux and Windows servers that are operating 24 hours a day simultaneously on the same scenes. A full-length feature film uses between 3TB and 10TB storage, and each frame is 8-12GB. We deployed a SGI CXFS SAN, which overcomes one of the biggest flaws in networking: it allows files to be shared simultaneously without copying; it works with multiple operating systems; and fibre channel accelerates access to the data. By placing our film scanner on the SAN we gained a very important time-savings because it is no longer necessary to borrow various bridges to transfer data from the scanner to do special effects or color correction. We found that with the SGI system we are able to work on three times as many films in the same period of time. We began building the digital facility with SGI over five years ago and we continue to grow with SGI because only SGI 's scalable architecture and CXFS offer all these efficiencies in the workflow."

Established in 1907 in Épinay, France, Éclair Laboratoires continues to develop film and shoot and produce 35mm negatives in their laboratories and studios. The digital services include digital mastering and processing, digital assembly of feature films, high-resolution scanning and recording, and visual effects, as well as film restoration. SGI servers run the Kodak Cineon scanner, a variety of Autodesk Discreet software, and Éclair's proprietary software, ColorUS.

Almost from the launch of their digital services department Éclair has been using SGI InfiniteStorage CXFS shared filesystem to power their workflow. As demand for digital intermediates has grown as rapidly in Europe as it has in the United States, Éclair Laboratoires has easily added SGI InfiniteStorage TP9300 and TP9500 systems and additional servers to the original installation.

"The new storage is dedicated to digital architecture around the SGI CXFS SAN which allows us to take full advantage of our ColorUS digital system that is capable of digitizing and performing digital color calibration in real time from 2K sources," said Philippe Mouton. "The SGI InfiniteStorage 6700 has been configured to hold four digitizing stations running simultaneously in 2K. We hope very soon to offer our clients a working tour that will enable them to visualize their images in scan resolution on a digital 2K projector, as well as showing the flexibility of centralized storage where all scanned pictures are at their disposal and available in high enough resolution to prepare a digital master."

Éclair Laboratoires' latest purchase is an SGI InfiniteStorage 6700 system with 48TB, an SGI Altix 350 server with 10 Intel Itanium 2 processors and 40GB RAM, and additional SGI InfiniteStorage CXFS software licenses.

"With more than 150TB of images to manipulate per year -- and that number is growing rapidly -- Éclair Laboratoires continues to strengthen their digital cinema mastering workflow with the most robust and reliable storage and servers available from SGI," said Louise Ledeen, Market Segment Manager, Digital Content Management and Media, SGI. "Digital intermediate facilities around the world use SGI's scalable architecture as their client base demands the creative freedom now possible through the digital mastering process. Éclair Laboratoires is one of those unique facilities where the power of SGI's most advanced technology is eclipsed only by the talent of their creative staff. SGI InfiniteStorage systems and SGI Altix servers help make the process highly interactive by providing the bandwidth and speed to deliver huge volumes of data in HD and 2K in real-time - accelerating the creative process and ultimately leading to a healthy and rapid ROI."

About Éclair

Éclair Group is the leading post-production house and laboratory in France. It has a large spectrum of activities, from studios to photochemical activities, digital intermediate, television post-production, sound post-production and special effects. Éclair Group recently created Éclair Digital Cinema, a new venture dedicated to D-Cinema. Éclair Group includes two main subsidiaries, Éclair Laboratoires and Télétota, and is in the process of acquiring GTC, the third largest player in the French post-production industry. Éclair can be found on the Web at www.eclair.fr.

SGI - Innovation for Results

Page: 1 of 2
1 | 2 All »

Article Tools

Share Options

(Digg, Technorati, more)

Subscribe

Subscribe to HPCwire

Discussion

There are 0 discussion items posted.

RSS Feeds

Feeds by Topic

Feeds by Industry

Feeds by Content Type

Feature Articles

The Week in Review

The National Science Foundation has awarded funding to four projects as part of the Future Internet Architecture program; and the 3PAR bidding war is won by HP. We recap those stories and more in our weekly wrapup.
Read More...

Intel Flexes Parallel Programming Muscles

Intel Corp has released Parallel Studio 2011, a set of four tools designed to mainstream software development on multicore x86 architectures. The update folds in a number of parallel programming technologies that the company has acquired or developed independently over the past few years, including the Cilk Arts and RapidMind technologies, and Intel's own Ct data parallel language framework.
Read More...

Startup Makes Liquid Cooling an Immersive Experience

There's nothing like a blazing hot summer to focus one's attention on the best ways to keep cool. That goes for datacenter operators as well, who are equally worried about keeping their servers properly chilled. While there is no shortage of innovative cooling solutions being proffered by various vendors, a new liquid immersion cooling solution from startup Green Revolution Cooling could end up being the best of them all.
Read More...

Read more HPCwire features...

Around the Web

Picking the Right Processor

Sep 03 | Should engineers take advantage of GPU computing? Read more...

HP, Hynix Start Memristor on Path to Commercialization

Sep 02 | Could see first products in three years. Read more...

TED Talks for the IT Crowd

Sep 01 | A hand-picked selection of video presentations from the TED conference -- because the next big thing has to start somewhere. Read more...

LHC Compute Grid Teaches Some Valuble Lessons

Aug 30 | CERN project adapts its computation and storage strategy as hardware gets cheaper and better. Read more...

Godson CPUs Groomed for Supercomputing Duty

Aug 26 | Chinese-made chip adds vector SIMD unit; delivers 128 gigaflops in 40 watts. Read more...

Read more headlines...

Featured Whitepapers

Effective Backup and Restore

Jul 29 | | Panasas storage solutions deliver high throughput with many concurrent backup IO streams to standard backup applications such as Veritas NetBackup™ or EMC® NetWorker™. Download this whitepaper to understand the essential elements for effective backup and restore: the tape subsystem, networking, file system workload and administrative policy.

GPU Cluster Realities Whitepaper from Platform Computing

Jul 28 | | As compelling economics and performance drive GPUs into HPC clusters, developers are scrambling to catch up. Download this whitepaper from Platform Computing to understand how to capture the benefits of exciting new GPU capabilities.

View the White Paper Library

Multimedia

Webcast: Are you drowning in data?

In this webinar you will hear about the current storage challenges facing the HPC community, how Panasas storage solutions provide exceptional performance, scalability, and manageability, and how you can achieve the lowest total Cost of Ownership with a system that installs and configures in 15 minutes.

Webcast: Virtualized Data Center Roundtable

Join this online panel discussion for live Q&A with leading industry experts, analysts, and end-users to discuss the latest innovations, best practices, barriers to implementation, and measurable benefits of server virtualization with a particular focus on today's real world solutions.

Webcast: Watch SC09 Birds of a Feather Video: Scalable Fault-Tolerant HPC Supercomputers

Learn about scalable fault-tolerant architectures and examples of energy efficient and scalable supercomputing clusters using dual QDR InfiniBand to combine capacity computing with network failover capabilities with the help of programming languages such as MPI and a robust Linux cluster management package.