DVS Solution Chosen by Cinecitta Digital Factory of Rome

When redesigning and optimizing their workflow, Rome-based Cinecitta Digital Factory has decided for a future-proof storage solution by DVS Digital Video Systems AG consisting of DVS-SAN and three SpycerBoxes.The Cinecitta Digital Factory of Rome chose to enlist the services of Hanover-based DVS to completely reorganize and sustainably optimize their post production workflow.

The central storage solution by DVS now enables the Roman studios to efficiently process several film projects parallely in real time. The tailored storage infrastructure consists of a 48 TB online DVS-SAN complemented by three SpycerBoxes with 72 TB near-line capacities. The redesign has merged Cinecitta’s heterogeneous infrastructure into a homogeneous and powerful post production network.

As one of the leading European film studios, Cinecitta has to rely on a high-availability storage infrastructure offering openness, flexibility and security. DVS-SAN and SpycerBox have turned out to be an ideal solution for Cinecitta. Several ARRI film scanners simultaneously ingest 2K film material on three SpycerBox systems for further processing. During conforming, only selected film sequences are transferred to the DVS-SAN. This central online storage enables five uncompressed 2K data streams for parallel color grading on two da Vinci Resolve workstations in real time as well as data access for restoration, finalizing, and mastering.

To prevent fragmentation as well as time- and resource-consuming transcoding and copying processes, DVS-SAN has no need for proprietary container formats for pre-allocation. Cinecitta benefits from the openness of the DVS-SAN by directly connecting SAN clients from a wide variety of manufacturers such as ARRI, da Vinci, Digital Vision, Thomson and Quantel. This allows data workflows to be organized according to the customer’s needs, instead of being determined by a particular vendor’s proprietary tools. The enterprise-class security concept of the DVS-SAN offers RAID-6 data protection with background data restoration for unmatched availability.

The users of the new storage solution at Cinecitta also profit from the integrated Spycer content management capabilities. Spycer allows instant comfortable content search and previewing, metadata editing, fast copying processes over the entire Cinecitta network, as well as job scheduling for optimized data management. The DVS-SAN offers productive tools for SAN administration, performance monitoring and management.

Fabio Filoni, Head of Digital Services at Cinecitta Digital Factory, said: "After thoroughly analyzing the SAN systems on the market, we opted for the DVS solution because it delivers excellent performance in a customized, vendor-independent workflow. On top of that, DVS has been a supportive and competent partner right from the outset. The service capability of DVS was a key factor in our decision-making. As a result, we have been able to launch a completely new era of post production at Cinecitta."

Ernst-Joerg Oberhoessel, Sales Director at DVS, said: "Cinecitta is a thought leader in the post production industry and requires high availability and performance as well as openness and flexibility. We are delighted to have made a significant contribution to the redesign and optimization of Cinecitta’s production processes with our future-proof solution."