What makes a movie a box-office success? Stars. Stories. Scores… and data storage.
This year’s nominated films including The Whale and Avatar: The Way of Water used cutting-edge visual effects to bring their stories to life. Avatar was among the most ambitious digital effects films ever made, claiming landmark accomplishments such as mastering how to successfully digitally animate water and its use of an ultra-high frame rate.¹
It’s one of the most technologically advanced films of all time and also one of the most data-heavy films produced. (For reference, the first Avatar reportedly required a petabyte of storage. The sequel blew this out of the water, pun intended, requiring 18.5 petabytes of storage.)
It’s where the industry has been heading for decades, as digital animation and effects get more advanced. And while studios have no shortage of creativity and ideas for these projects, it turns out, many do have a shortage in storage capacity.
What Does It Take to Execute a Film Project of This Scope?
The answer: immense processing, storage, backup, and security capabilities. Creating large-scale digital film projects can take an army of artists and specialists, each working at a high-powered workstation, simultaneously generating massive amounts of data.
“Storage capacity as tech demands grow is one of the most common problems in the industry.” –Nicky Ladas, Chief Technologist, Cumulus VFX
For the second Avatar, reams of underwater performance-capture data were collected each day from 90,000-gallon tanks.² That data was sent back to VFX artists, who used files to bring characters and scenes to life. The studio needed the capacity to seamlessly receive and process data to create around 1,600 simulations.
It’s a challenge Cumulus Visual Effects (VFX) knows well. Based in New South Wales, Cumulus is one of Australia’s premier boutique VFX providers. The company is a trusted collaboration partner for larger VFX studios, nationally and internationally. According to Nicky Ladas, Chief Technologist at Cumulus VFX, most of the organization’s IT challenges came down to storage capacity.
“There was no overhead left on our old storage subsystem,” explains Ladas. “We had hit the wall from a capacity and performance point of view.”
A Closer Look at a Modern Digital Film Studio’s Tech Stack
Ladas adds that for effects studios, “Storage capacity as tech demands grow is one of the most common problems in the industry.” That’s because, to produce on time and at scale, studios rely on:
- Powerful computing cores—multiple racks with chassis containing numerous machines, adding up to thousands of processors and hundreds of terabytes of RAM.
- Fast-fiber network attached storage (NAS) and multi-gigabit networking—with local flash storage to support visual effects workloads’ high bandwidth requirements. (Around 100 terabytes can be in play in a production environment.)
- Transparent, easy-to-provision, fast object storage—storing complex, object-based files for rendering systems. Provisioning those data storage resources in real time has to be simple and transparent for users.
- Fast, robust backup architectures—able to back up and archive massive snapshots in a batch time window before the next day’s work begins.
Tech demands aren’t just intense; deadlines are, too. When one scene can take weeks to simulate and millions of processing hours to render, time is of the essence. Lagging tech can mean productivity headaches for hundreds of artists working in parallel.
A Data Center Movie Dreams Are Made Of
To meet the enterprise-level SLAs of global VFX studio clients, Cumulus needed a future-proof storage environment for growing data demands.
“We’re already talking about doubling simulations,” says Ladas. “Pure is solid. They’ve got the redundancy and performance that we need to free up storage bottlenecks and better support global clients.” This allowed the team to grow from 20 to 60 rendering artists, enabling more processing of complex VFX simulations and six-nines of availability during massive simulations.
In addition, Cumulus’ new, green Pure data center supports their commitment to ESG practices, minimizing environmental impact and reducing the physical footprint through higher density and performance.
Bringing Movies to the Silver Screen Requires Data, Too
Once upon a time, projectionists hoisted a film reel to play a film. Today’s theaters use software to play movies and advertisements.
For digital cinema company Arts Alliance Media, storage is incredibly important. The company has about 30,000 cinema screens around the world from which it needs to pull data that allows the software it builds to function. Spinning disks couldn’t do the job—only flash has the performance needed to process all this information. Pure Storage provided the power needed to handle these massive customer data demands, saving the company around £1 million.
Powering the Film Studios of Tomorrow
As more studios outsource data production demands to bigger data centers, processing farms, and the cloud, modern data storage providers that stay in lockstep with their demands will be key. The more (and bigger) projects a studio wants to accept, the more critical this is.
Studios can benefit from as-a-service, pay-as-you-go models, removing the need for large up-front investments in render farms, workstations, and the storage they require. As many leverage the cloud for processing and rendering power, data mobility and accessibility will be paramount.
The Pure Storage® portfolio offers cloud native, fast file and object storage solutions that uncomplicate data, with:
- Storage automation, to simplify provisioning and scaling so IT can seamlessly deliver resources.
- Storage as a service, with subscription and pay-as-you-go models.
- Cloud and container native storage
- Data archiving and backups that are immutable and require less space, without interfering with performance of production systems.
Workloads that are capacity oriented and don’t require top-level performance can benefit from Pure’s QLC-based arrays that can replace hard disk drives with a lower total cost of ownership and massive reductions in power, space, and cooling.
To learn more about how Pure can help your digital effects, animation, or film studio meet all your biggest data demands, contact us.
¹ https://www.engadget.com/avatar-the-way-of-water-review-hfr-high-frame-rate-170058030.html
² https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/16/movies/avatar-2-fx-cgi.html
