Growing pains: documentary producer turns to disk arrays to handle rising storage needs.(Special section: storage in the studio)(Cry Havoc uses disk arrays)

Going from garage-style start-up to producer of TV documentaries for stations such as The Discovery Channel and Fine Living can cause a few growing pains along the way. This was certainly true for Cry Havoc Productions, which had to upgrade its data storage system to keep up with an accelerating workload that now requires juggling multiple projects at the same time.

A few years ago, Dylan Weiss, now CEO and president of Cry Havoc, got together with television producer (and father) Milt and longtime film school friend Gary Copeland and launched the Venice, California-based postproduction studio, after a series of kitchen table discussions about the types of projects they wanted to create.

Today, the partners are realizing their dream, directing and editing documentaries such as Driving Design, a one-hour program about how cars of the future will be designed, which aired this spring on The Discovery Channel. The team is also handling production and postproduction work on documentaries that cover classic-car restoration and the history of Ducati motorcycles.

In a world where 30 to 35 tapes of raw film footage for one documentary can consume as much as 800TB of disk space, Weiss says it's vital to have a storage system that's up to the task. And when it came to learning about the types of disk storage that can best support rapidly growing production requirements, Weiss had plenty of challenges along the way.

Back in his college days, Weiss used an Apple Macintosh system for film editing and production. For storage, he used disk drives based on the FireWire interface, which features a high-speed serial bus capable of moving large amounts of data from computer to disk. Unfortunately, he experienced a number of drive failures, often at critical times, and a subsequent lack of support from the supplier. Weiss also noticed that as the FireWire drive neared capacity, performance suffered. "I couldn't fill it up past 15GB," he says, "or it would slow down considerably."

When selecting a storage system to meet Cry Havoc'sApple Final Cut Pro-based video editing setup, the team chose Huge Systems' SCSI-based 1.2TB MediaVault disk arrays based on a faster, latest generation SCSI interface. After the studio optimized the array for high-speed transmission of film footage, Weiss began to notice improvements in the studio's over all workflow. For example, he was able to run multiple streams of standard-definition (SD) video for editing, effects, color correction, resizing, and so forth. He was also able to take advantage of improved rendering performance. "One thing that speeds up my work flow in the editing stream--where I'm pushing deadlines and doing real-time effects on multiple pieces of video--is that I no longer have to wait for things to render. I simply hit Play and see the effects run in real thee."

Because Cry Havoc shoots and edits in SD, it only needs to process each 2K flame at between 28MB/sec and 32MB/sec, as opposed to the 120MB/sec to 180MB/sec required for HD footage. Since installing a Pinnacle CineWave HD-capable video capture card and an HD-capable disk array, ...