The Power of the Pipeline

摘要

As postproduction houses and visual effects studios continue their quest to build digital production pipelines, more attention than ever before is being focused on the data storage components at the hub of these new systems. Whether used in the production of commercial spots or full-length feature films, digital storage devices are now viewed not only as essential to improving the productivity of studio artists, but also as vital to enhancing the quality of their work. This will be a watershed year for storage in digital content creation environments, says Tom Shearer, a 30-year industry veteran in both the storage and entertainment fields and executive vice president at Bright Systems, a storage integrator in Reno, Nevada. He attributes the turning point to a confluence of issues, including significant price drops for Fibre Channel components and new low-cost options for disk storage such as disk arrays based on high-capacity Serial ATA disk drives. "We've reached a time when you can put your money into tape recorders for single users or, for the same price, have multiple users on the same disk storage," says Shearer. "The kicker is that you can put any resolution on disk, and after it's been edited, you can push it to any resolution you want." This transition from resolution-dependent "islands" to resolution-independent, disk-based storage, he contends, represents the future direction of production houses.