Hi, my name is Terry Dale. I am the Vice President of Infrastructure and Training here at Arc Productions in Toronto.
Arc Productions is a 45,000 square-foot studio.
We specialize mainly in 3D CGI animation, but we also specialize in special effects as well as feature films and series as well.
Here at Arc Production our infrastructure is fairly substantial.
We're running about a petabyte of production storage, tape backup libraries, central core infrastructure. We have a 4,300 processor render farm that we also use.
We have 3 or 4 real-time playback systems, one of which we have custom built for a new production we are working on.
We did some work on Spiderman and we used Kingston SSDs (solid state drives) to fire that system up.
When we worked on Spiderman we have a very, very tight production timeline.
So we needed to really speed up the quality control process.
We wanted to put together a system that was very quick to load the final imagery and quick to play it back; without any hickups, without any problems.
So we started looking at some of the SSD technology to be able to create a system that would do that flawlessly.
We go some SSD drives from Kingston.
We wanted to test the I/O properties of these drives to make sure we would be able to do stereo playback, doing two streams at one time.
We loaded up a systems, we grabbed some of the test footage that we're using, some preliminary footage from the project.
We ran two streams continuously for about a full day/day and a half. Not a single problem, not a single hiccup, nothing.
So the production crew was really excited because we had been on spindles (hard disc drives) before and had all kinds of problems with continuous playback.
With the SSDs it was no problem at all.
So basically when we went to go into production to do this for real we used an HP workstation and we used three solid state drives.
It was dead stupid simple to set up.
We just hooked it right up to the onboard RAID controller on the montherboard, striped it as a JBOD (just a bunch of discs) array and we were good to go.
Previous to that we've been using 24 and 50 spindle drive systems (HDD) to do the same type of bandwidth.
This was small, light, and really, really quick. Really easy to use and setup.
So once we put the SSDs into production and actually started looking at shots we ran into all kinds of very interesting benefits that we didn't realize.
One, the shots played back flawlessly.
The crew loved it. They were able to go through the shots quickly.
One benefit that we didn't realize was that load speed was 30% to 40% quicker than any other system.
In being able to load shots very quickly and look at them quickly it allowed us to go through more iterations of the shots during the production.
It allowed us to spend more time on the art and creating a better final product.
One of the real measurable benefits that we go was that we were able to put together a much smaller system with much higher performance than our spindle based system.
The spindle based systems run 24 to 50 drives. This thing had three drives in it, it was a single workstation.
We were able to get stereo 2k playback out of it. It was small, light easy, inexpensive to put together but it gave us really, really high end performance.
During production with a spindle based system if you have a drive failure that can take you anywhere from 4 to 6 hours while you rebuild the array, put a new drive in.
Sometimes those systems don't fail too gracefully. With the SSD system we had no failure at all. It performed flawlessly and very, very high performance.
With the SSD-based system we put it in to do the work on Spiderman but since then we have been using it on other projects as well.
So far we have been running it every single day, really, really hard and we have yet to have a single failure.
Based on our success using the SSDs we are now looking across the production pipeline as well as through our infrastructure to see other areas we can start utilizing SSDs to be more cost effective, to speed up processes to make things run more smoothly.
So based on our experience with the SSDs we found that we are able to do productions quicker, we able to get the art through quicker, it allows the artist to spend more time on the art and less time on the technology.
So, moving forward, we're going to continue to look at the SSD and future out where we can slot it into our production pipeline.