LSI MegaRAID 6Gb SATA+SAS Controllers Selected by The Pixel Farm

LSI Corporation announced that LSI MegaRAID 6Gb/s SATA+SAS RAID controller cards have been selected by The Pixel Farm for integration with its PFClean digital film restoration and remastering platform.

The high performance I/O bandwidth available from LSI MegaRAID controllers helps The Pixel Farm reduce the time it takes to digitize, restore and remaster a feature-length film from months to days, delivering improved productivity and significant cost savings compared to older generation technology.

"When it comes to film restoration, time is of the essence, as vintage film stocks continue to deteriorate," said Michael Lancaster, managing director of The Pixel Farm. "With our PFClean platform, we have automated the restoration tasks and drastically accelerated the process by taking advantage of the latest multicore processors combined with leading I/O controller technology from LSI that allow data to keep flowing to the processor cores fast enough to realize the full performance capabilities of the processor chipsets."

PFClean is a digital image restoration tool that automates the removal of dirt, dust, scratches and excessive graining in older films. Before tools like PFClean, cumbersome, time-consuming frame-by-frame manual and chemical processes were required to remove artifacts and defects. The I/O capabilities of LSI MegaRAID cards help the PFClean platform automate many of these manual processes, enabling titles to be restored and remastered in record time. The MegaRAID also helps enable PFClean to combine digital tools and technologies that modern original productions have begun to use to ingest, color correct, edit, add effects or titles and render out at today’s high-resolution, large screen and 3D formats.

"We chose The Pixel Farm’s turnkey systems to boost our productivity. Having a client base including ITV, The British Film Institute and Icon Entertainment requires us to produce the best possible results to ever-shortening deadlines compounded by ever-growing back catalogues," said Steve Boag, managing director of Cineimage, London. "The automated toolset and pure performance of the PFClean turnkey system in conjunction with LSI storage is just phenomenal. The labor savings and productivity improvements have redefined the game for us."

In a typical Pixel Farm customer environment, LSI MegaRAID controllers are required to meet a minimum data I/O rate of 12MB/frame, 24frames/sec, or almost 300MB/sec for a single stream of 8-bit, 2K uncompressed video. The impact on the bitrate increases by a factor of four with a 4K pixel width, requiring I/O bandwidth of 1GB/sec or approximately 1.2Tb/sec throughput.

LSI MegaRAID controllers also help The Pixel Farm to scale storage capacity in a small footprint. With the high port count MegaRAID SAS 9280-16i4e, The Pixel Farm can take advantage of the card’s 16 internal ports and 4 external ports to support both internal drive storage and external JBOD expansion up to 240 SATA or SAS drives. This combination of performance and capacity provided by LSI MegaRAID controllers helps to drive greater efficiencies in the labs and post production houses that The Pixel Farm supports.  

"Film restoration is a critical part of preserving art history, and data storage technologies should not hinder these important efforts," said Brent Blanchard, director, worldwide channel sales and marketing, LSI. "As video and broadcast professionals work to digitize, restore and remaster these film stocks, the I/O capabilities of LSI MegaRAID cards help to accelerate the process, maximize productivity and reduce overall costs."

Additional information about The Pixel Farm/MegaRAID solution