Sonnet Fusion D400QR5 Chosen for Post Production of ‘Hell and Back Again’ Documentary

Sonnet
Technologies, Inc. announced that its Fusion D400QR5 four-drive RAID 5 SATA
storage system played a key role in the post-production editing process for Hell
and Back Again, the Academy Award nominated documentary describing the
experience of a U.S. soldier wounded in Afghanistan.

The feature-length film was directed by Danfung Dennis, a renowned
photojournalist whose still photographs have been published in Newsweek, TIME,
The New York Times, The Washington Post, and numerous other well-known newspapers
and periodicals.

"With more than 100 hours
of footage that had to be painstakingly edited into the final film, we needed a
large amount of dependable, high-performance storage – and the Sonnet 8TB
D400QR5 was ideal for the purpose," said Dennis. "As a medium-sized storage system, the
D400QR5 fills an important gap between consumer drives and large-scale,
enterprise solutions, offering all of the capacity and redundancy I needed as a
filmmaker."

Already a winner of the World Cinema Grand Jury Award for Documentary
and the World Cinema Cinematography Award at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival, Hell
and Back Again reveals the devastating impact a Taliban machine-gun bullet has
on the life of 25-year-old U.S. Army Sgt. Nathan Harris. The film transitions
from stunning war reportage to an intimate, visceral portrait of one man’s
personal struggle at home in North Carolina, where Harris confronts the
physical and emotional difficulties of readjusting to civilian life with the
love and support of his wife, Ashley.

For the editing task, Dennis converted his raw HD camera footage to
Apple ProRes 422 HQ files using the Compressor application on a 2.93-GHz
MacBook Pro. The files could then be stored in the Sonnet Fusion D400QR5 unit,
which was configured with four 2TB drives and set at RAID-5 for a
combination of performance and secure redundancy. When evaluating
storage systems for the project, Dennis chose the D400QR5 for its ability to
support up to four 2TB drives as well as its flexible and quad interface
options for connecting to the MacBook Pro, which enabled him to work with files
directly off the storage system using the Final Cut Pro editing application.

"Hell and Back Again is an
important work because it reveals the true cost of war for soldiers and their
families. Mr. Dennis’ use of the D400QR5 demonstrates its versatility and
portability of our RAID storage product," said
Greg LaPorte, vice president of sales and marketing at Sonnet Technologies.
"We’re honored that the D400QR5 played
such an important role in securing the valuable footage of this Oscar nominated
documentary through its post production."