Offhollywood Used Sonnet Portable Two-Drive RAID

Offhollywood, a digital cinema company based in New York City, used the Sonnet Technologies Fusion F2 portable two-drive RAID SATA storage system to support the rapid production of the original scripted series ‘Puppy Love.’ The program was created by writer-producer Amy B. Harris and other ‘Sex and the City’ writers for L Studio, an Internet-only channel created by automaker Lexus.

Offhollywood treated ‘Puppy Love’ as an indie feature, shooting 10 episodes over the month of August and working at a variety of sites around New York City’s West Village. The compact, rugged design of the Fusion F2, along with its bus-powered operation, high-speed drives, and eSATA interface, enabled the production team to adopt a highly efficient style of on-location shooting and storage.

"The Sonnet Fusion F2 heralded a new level of efficiency for us, both in terms of speed and the ability to work without power, whether out on location in a park or in an urban loft," said A.J. Del Cueto, producer at Offhollywood. "Grace Naughton, the co-executive producer, had stressed her desire to maintain a light ‘run and gun’ approach to production, and the Sonnet system made this possible. With few wires and a compact case, the Fusion F2 is a streamlined, thoughtfully designed solution that makes it easy for us to pick up and go. We can work anywhere, work quickly, and still maintain the type, scale, and quality of our production work."

Available in 1TB and 640MB configurations, the cool, quiet, and energy-efficient Fusion F2 storage system is about the size of two stacked CD cases. It uses eSATA data connections to deliver the fastest performance yet from a two-drive portable storage system, with transfer rates up to 134 MB/sec. Side-by-side placement of the drives increases the thick aluminum shell’s cooling surface area, thereby eliminating the need for a fan and allowing the unit to be bus-powered when no grid power is available. Each of the Fusion F2’s high-performance drives is individually shock-isolated, not only protecting the drives during transport, but also virtually eliminating cross-coupled vibration — a potential source of soft-error-induced skipped frames in video capture and playback.

In the field, each Offhollywood tech works with a MacBook Pro equipped with a Sonnet Tempo SATA ExpressCard/34 adapter and with the Fusion F2, now a standard component of all Offhollywood production kits. Configured as a RAID 1 mirrored volume, the 640MB Sonnet system provides 320GB of redundant storage, enough for a full day of media shot with a 4K RED camera.

During shooting of ‘Puppy Love,’ the Offhollywood team worked at a new location each day. Rather than worry about the logistics of finding grid-based power at all of these locations, the company simply connected the Fusion F2’s power cable to a FireWire port on the MacBook Pro, and swapped out laptop batteries as needed. Each time the scene changed, the Offhollywood tech simply found a seat and work surface, plugged in the Fusion F2, and began offloading and checking footage.

Offhollywood used the Sonnet storage system for backup all day long and then shuttled the unit to its studios, where the Fusion F2 was docked to an eight-core Mac Pro, and files were transferred to nearline storage that fed into a SCRATCH color-grading system. The high data transfer rates of the Fusion F2’s eSATA interface and the ability to mount two drives at once combined to enable much faster offloading of media, which saved technicians valuable time, often at the end of a long day.

‘Puppy Love’ features Famke Janssen, Ally Sheedy, Kristen Johnston, Martha Plimpton, and Dan Hedaya, among others.