CATA

Storage Challenge

SGAE, the Sociedad General de Autores y Editores, is a Spanish organization devoted to the management and defense of intellectual property rights for its 80,000 plus members (cinema directors, screenwriters, composers of all genres, playwrights, librettist, choreographers, mimes etc. CATA, the technical branch of SGAE, is responsible for a variety of technical projects, from providing training and services for the creative industry to planning and building movie theatres. The most recent project was to build a brand new, technically advanced post-production facility for audio, video and movie post-production, built around a centralized storage system to support the ground-breaking infrastructure for end-to-end 2K and 4K workflows. Key components that needed to be supported by the infrastructure include the most sophisticated CINEVATOR system, DVS CLIPSTER, Arriscan 4K film scanners, HS-ART Diamant 4K film restoration systems, Apple Final Cut Pro editing Bays and a number of other systems including Autodesk's Flame, Smoke and Lustre Software Suites.

A key challenge was to find a storage system that would minimize construction costs for the new building, so the physical size of the storage system along with total weight, power and cooling requirements, were key factors in the decision-making process.

Another requirement was to be able to easily scale storage capacity, enabling CATA not only to become a pioneer in 4K workflows in Spain, but also to grow their environment to support a number of parallel 2K and 4K projects throughout the world.

Solution

CATA selected DVS, a DDN partner and turn-key solution provider for post-production facilities worldwide, to implement the storage solution. In addition to the DDN xSTREAMScaler file storage system, DVS provided its own CLIPSTER all-in-one Digital Intermediary (DI) workflow product and SpycerBox as intermediary storage for ingest from the ARRI film scanners.

Benefits

CATA implemented a scalable, high-end Post-Production and DI infrastructure enabling seamless, parallel workflows from SD and HD to 2K and 4K. The easy to manage, centralized storage solution dramatically accelerates project completion and thus accelerates revenue generation, while increasing workflow efficiencies and overall productivity.

Extreme Storage

CATA is quickly on its way to become a leading 4K post-production facility, not only in Spain but worldwide when looking at the state-of-the-art systems and software tools made available to its members.

There are multiple audio, video and movie studios and editing bays available for a number of parallel projects. Core editing systems include AVID and Apple Final Cut Pro. 2K and 4K film scanning is done with an ARRISCAN scanner and film restoration is done with HS-ART Diamant.

Compositing software available at the facility includes Adobe Studio, Shake and Toxic and Autodesk Flame and Smoke. 3D work is done with Autodesk Maya and 3D Studio Max. Encoders come from Digital Rapids and conforming is realized by DVS CLIPSTER and DCI Mastering. A number of projectors are used to proof the results, including a Dolby-certified Sony 4K RSX-105, as well as 2K, HD and 35mm projectors. A CINEVATOR FIVE film printer, one of only a dozen in the world, provides 24fps real-time film printing including subtitles and audio.

Furthermore, in order to provide complete services to clients, CATA also provides a 300 square meter stage. In fact, SGAE, whose members include the most famous artists in Spain, has already completed several highly visible projects with industry luminaries in its new studios. Projects such as the audio recording for the latest Pedro Almodovar picture, featuring Oscar-award winner Penelope Cruz, soundtrack work by composer Alberto Iglesias for Oscar-award winning director Steve Sodenberg's film "CHE", Marc Foster's Kite Runner and color grading and DVD and BLURAY authoring for Seven Days, a documentary by Norman Foster. In addition it has been used for postproduction for the Spanish Music Awards and the Spanish Arts Awards.

"The DDN storage provided us with the scalable capacity, small datacenter footprint and extremely high performance that we needed in order to design the state-of-the-art post production facility and having the system support 4 concurrent 4K streams at 1.2 GB/s is proof of that", said Roberto Quintanilla Herranz, Supervisor Post-production and Chief Image Department for CATA. "We chose DVS to implement the whole solution to ensure that all of the components would integrate and work well with each other. Also knowing that DDN and DVS have successfully deployed over a dozen solutions together was key in our selection process."

"DVS and DDN have been outstanding partners throughout this project, said Angel Quintanilla Vega, Director for CATA. "Their service has been fantastic and we are absolutely impressed with the solution. It has far exceeded our expectations and we are looking forward to working with them again to further expand the solution in our environment."

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