Filmmaking has come a long way since the early days when movies were shot on old-fashioned film cameras, and footages were stored on 35-milimeter tapes. The creative workflows constituted artistic traditions and manual processes.
“It was a photochemical and mechanical process for 100 years,” Jimmy Fusil, media & entertainment technologist at Tsecond, said, recalling the days when crew spent hours on movie sets working on tedious manual processes.
The Crossover to Modern Moviemaking
“What’s been incredible in the last 25 years is the explosion and the importance of data in that industry,” Fusil noted.
A grass-roots movement revived the old way of working, introducing a battery of smart technologies and digital workflows that shaped the modern digital moviemaking. In this new chapter, manual workflows are replaced by digital processes, and files, not films, are the digital assets. Data is distributed in more places than one can count, and the volume grows staggeringly with each production as directors and cinematographers adopt new styles of filming.
“Very quickly we went through the digital transition where files represented millions of dollars of investment, and they became the thing that needs to be protected and shuttled from place to place.”
Today moviemaking happens largely outside the walls of the studio, at what is described as the edge.
“Production is the most edge-centric activity that I can think of,” Fusil exclaimed.
The crew sets up gears and equipment for recording at a certain location, with a makeshift server room backstage with a tiny computer setup collecting and storing terabytes of data – picture, sound, ancillary files – every minute.
Post-processing, like color-correcting and color-grading, too has by and large shifted to the edge where terabytes of high-resolution pictures are being processed in non-datacenter conditions.
Data, sometimes, is transmitted to the cloud as an intermediary storage location, but it is worked on in pop-up labs or provisional studios scattered across locations, Fusil told.
“It’s not a glamorous set, or some far-off location. It’s a dark room in the metropolis somewhere. All the machinery to make a film is at somebody’s knees or in the closet. If you’re lucky, it’s in a little data center that has some real cooling.”
“VFX companies have their own data centers where things are very well maintained, but still people work in the self-contained manner, and for reasons of both content security and performance, the data needs to be really close to the people who use it and to the workstations that access it.”
Like all industries, the media sector too has adopted new ways of working after COVID. “Since the pandemic, we’ve seen these workflows to be distributed. Now the data needs to be in multiple places, and it gets heavily replicated. Instead of having one copy or two copies, you now have 16 copies because the data needs to be here and there, in the cloud and at the edge, all at the same time,” he said.
Not only does this digital way of moviemaking require robust data management capabilities to tackle the ever-growing file sizes, but also high-speed storage that can support and enable rapid on-device data processing, while allowing easy and cost-effective transportation of data across various locations.
A Mobile Data Solution for Digital Filmmaking
The Tsecond BRYCK platform is an advanced storage solution that revolutionizes the way data is captured, transported and processed at the edge. With density of up to 1 PB, and performance up to 20GB/s, the BRYCK is a compact, ruggedized solution weighing 14lbs. It is a data solution designed to provide high throughput, in this case letting powerful workstations have super-fast access to the data they need.
Users can directly plug the BRYCK into the server tray.
“Throughput depends on the configuration of the server, and we’re not religious about what type of server it is, but the connectivity between the tray and the server is up to 40 gigabytes a second, and the connectivity out of that server to a workstation is 10 gigabytes a second,” he said at the launch of BRYCK AI at the Edge Field Day event.
Already, hundreds of users have BRYCK devices deployed on the sets where they are picking up volumes of high-resolution data every day. The devices are driven back to the production houses nearby where the data is post-processed for theatrical release.
“A lot of our customers connect the SMB or NFS over RDMA so they can take full advantage of the performance, not across 100 links, but across just 20,10, 5 or 3 links.”
Fusil recalled some customer stories that explained how creatives use BRYCK for use cases in media and entertainment.
In one case study, Fusil told Tsecond helped a company move 130TB of data coast to coast within a day. The entire block of data was copied to a BRYCK device within a few hours, and flown into LA to a studio where it was plugged directly into the workstation and the data was processed immediately.
BRYCK offered more than the required 1.5 GB throughput that the director needed, allowing a quick editing job without having to reconstitute the file system, or move the data to another physical location.
In another case, BRYCK supported 16K 60fps rendering, he told. With BRYCK, the client was able to make copies of 16K videos from a separate storage device at 5GB per second speed via NFS over RDMA, enjoying 9GB seconds of read speed for multiple concurrent streams at the end of the process, he told.
Through the final customer story, Fusil highlighted what makes BRYCK an excellent fit for rugged non-datacenter environments.
Among high-end cameras used in big-budget movies, RED cameras are a well-known brand. RED’s advanced digital cinema cameras are used by film makers the world over for their top-notch image quality. BRYCK has integration with RED Connect which allows it to record and store volumetric, immersive and multi-camera videos.
In this particular case, Fusil told that the film was being shot in the Atacama Desert in Chile. Filming went on 20 hours a day for a month in the extreme heat and dusty conditions.
The BRYCK single-server architecture provided the crew a way to directly store volumetric video footages on the device, sidestepping the pain of swapping out memory cards mid-process, and allowing recording and processing to happen simultaneously. Additionally, copies of the whole 150TB chunk were produced for insurance and security purposes.
Fusil highlighted that the soon to release BRYCK Mini is particularly suited for harsh edge environments like this, because of its compact and highly portable form factor and low power consumption.
At present, Tsecond is working on supporting the set of use cases around multi-camera filming, and on-site processing at the edge. The focus is to let recording happen directly on the BRYCK, and allow the devices be carried to close-by laboratories for fast processing, Fusil told the audience.
Check out Tsecond’s presentations of the BRYCK platform from Edge Field Day to learn about more such interesting use cases and scenarios it serves.
