Swordfish Slashes Time Required to Render and Play Back Massive Files, Resulting in New Avenues of Growth
San Francisco-based Motion Design Studio – Swordfish is using the StorNext Pro Foundation shared storage system to take on cutting-edge projects involving massive high-resolution media files. Supplied by Advanced Systems Group, a systems integrator specializing in media and entertainment, the Quantum solution provides the high-performance storage and workflow efficiency the Swordfish team needs to manage its video content, including stereoscopic 4K and heavy 3D renders of high-resolution content up to 27K.
“Our incredibly skilled team of designers and animators boasts experience working on everything from user interfaces to the most complex visual effects at leading studios, so storage infrastructure is our only limiting factor in taking motion design to the next level,” said Matt Silverman, founder and executive creative director at Swordfish. “By enabling us to take on any project and almost any high-resolution file, Quantum’s StorNext Pro Foundation has given our little studio the capacity and performance to compete with large traditional postproduction houses.”
StorNext Pro Foundation is a complete solution that combines StorNext 5 software, redundant metadata controllers and high-performance storage in a simple-to-use preconfigured system. Users can deploy the solution as a new complete storage network or, as is the case with Swordfish, easily integrate it into their existing storage network. Sized for a smaller workgroup but able to provide the speed and power essential to real-time playback of massive files, StorNext Pro Foundation gives creatives at Swordfish the ability to work efficiently with huge volumes of 4K RED files. With the system’s exceptional performance preventing issues such as dropped frames during playback, creatives can perform client-supervised sessions — much like the well-established, high-end postproduction and animation studios with which Swordfish aims to compete.
StorNext Pro Foundation connects just as readily as any other drive in Swordfish’s Mac-based shop. In addition, it operates so seamlessly with all the different applications the studio uses — Adobe After Effects and Premiere, Blackmagic DaVinci Resolve, Autodesk Maya, MAXON Cinema 4D, Side Effects Houdini and Tweak Software RV for playback — that creatives and freelancers can easily enjoy the benefits of fast collaboration on familiar Mac systems.
“StorNext Pro Foundation sits at the heart of our operations, and it is the backbone on which we’re building Swordfish,” said Silverman. “As growing demand for higher-resolution content requires greater and greater storage resources, we can scale our StorNext® system with confidence and take full advantage of fibre-attached storage to push tremendous volumes of pixels through the pipe.”
“The deployment of StorNext Pro Foundation at Swordfish demonstrates just how game-changing the right shared storage solution can be,” said Alex Grossman, vice president, media and entertainment at Quantum. “Powered by the Quantum StorNext 5 shared storage platform, StorNext Pro Foundation has the versatility to address Swordfish’s evolving workflow requirements, from content ingest from multiple sources and collaborative high-resolution content creation to on-time delivery in the appropriate format.”
