Take 2 Films Uses StorageDNA’s LTO LTFS Archiving for “Paddington”

Take 2 Films deployed StorageDNA’s DNA Evolution for a feature film project, Paddington, recently nominated for two British Academy Film Awards and scheduled for release in the U.S. on January 16, 2015. Take 2 provided services for Marmalade Films on behalf of Studio Canal for the production of Paddington, one of the many film and television projects Take 2 has provided services for since 1999.

Paddington was shot in the 4:3 (full height sensor area) ARRIRAW format, generating a large volume of camera data at approximately 2TB to 4TB of content per day. StorageDNA’s DNA Evolution was used by Take 2 to archive, restore, and access the ARRIRAW frames directly from LTO LTFS tape for Paddington. A 50-slot autoloader with four LTO drives was deployed to increase efficiency, and DNA Evolution wrote four archives in parallel while tracking the frames across all of the LTO tapes.

“For archiving, restore, and conform from LTO LTFS there is nothing else that comes close to what DNA Evolution offers,” said Adam Shell, post supervisor for Take 2 Films. “In addition to significant performance increases, DNA Evolution allowed us to do clip-based conforms directly from LTO tape for selected VFX turnovers, which created some big workflow advantages. DNA Evolution’s web-based interface made it simple for us to find exactly the content needed and restore it directly from the LTO tape.”

Faster offload of ARRIRAW content was achieved to reduce the cost of field media for the production, with DNA Evolution’s management of multiple LTO drives. DNA Evolution’s built-in conform engine, Smart Conform, provided time and cost savings in post by accelerating the conform process for the selected VFX turnovers. By creating secure, verified, searchable, and accessible archives, DNA Evolution helped to make the ARRIRAW pipeline more cost-effective for Paddington.

“When you consider the enormous number of small files that are generated in an ARRIRAW workflow, and other data management issues inherent to archiving frame-based media, it was important to provide a high performance workflow solution to securely archive and manage the millions of data files captured for Paddington and to reduce the time-consuming manual conform process in post,” said tC Chakravarty, CEO and president of StorageDNA. “We’re delighted that DNA Evolution was selected as the LTO LTFS archiving solution for Paddington and future Take 2 projects.”