ModernVideo Film Expands Archion Storage

ModernVideo Film, Inc. continues
to push the technology envelope at its facilities by expanding its Archion Technologies EditStor
ES shared storage system to 80TB.

Modern VideoFilm is
using the EditStor ES in its Video On Demand (VOD) ingest operations facility.

In
the early 1980s, Modern VideoFilm set a WW standard by establishing the first
dedicated quality control department in a post-production facility. The
facility also became recognized as a technology leader, a
position it continues to extend through its trend-setting iTunes and digital
intermediate work as well as with its Digital Distribution workflows.

"Since our founding
nearly 30 years ago, we have focused on providing the best quality, service and
environment for our wide range of film and television work, from Avatar and I,
Robot to Desperate Housewives and Modern Family, to name just a few,"
said Bill Watt, Executive VP of Operations at Modern
VideoFilm. "As part of that
commitment, we evaluate the essential parts of our workflow, such as shared
storage technology, very carefully. Archion’s EditStor ES outperformed
competitive solutions, offered more features and required a significantly
smaller investment in time and money."

"The EditStor ES had been
simply and quickly integrated as a key component in its VOD workflows, with
Digital Rapid Stream and Apple Final Cut workstations encoding real-time to the
EditStor ES," noted Ray Shantz, Vice President of
Engineering at Modern VideoFilm.

"The EditStor ES has been
such a success that we added additional capacity without hesitation," said
Shantz. "Not only were we amazed to learn how economical the expansion
chassis was, but we were delighted to learn how efficiently it scaled. Knowing
that it can scale up to 720TB was another major factor in our decision."

"We are very proud to
continue our association with Modern VideoFilm, which is truly one of the
world-class facilities in the industry, and that they see our products as the
choice for storage and digital workflows," said Mark Bianchi,
Archion’s Chief Executive Officer. "We
believe our more than 75 years of combined firsthand post-production experience
gives us a unique understanding and insight into the daily challenges that
these types of facilities face. We put that knowledge and experience to work
every day when we’re designing, manufacturing and supporting Archion products."

Making Media Sharing Easy and Affordable

EditStor ES makes media sharing for
creative professionals that work with Final Cut Studio, Avid Media Composer,
Adobe CS5, Sony Vegas and other popular media creation tools. It
facilitates the flow, conversion and management of media within the
production workflow by offering the richest media management feature set
available – and at a price that is less than half the cost
of competitive solutions.

EditStor ES is loaded with rich media management tools, such as
volume expansion, which enables users to create shared volumes of any size and
expand volumes on the fly. Volume expansion is all managed through a web-based
administrator interface that doesn’t affect workflow. Another innovative
feature, project sharing, extends to projects that use the most popular editing
tools. Avid project sharing, for example, will be transparent to the Avid Media
Composer system and doesn’t affect the Avid workflow. Project sharing for Final
Cut Studio and Adobe will also be available.

The rich media management feature set of EditStor ES has the
automation tools of an enterprise storage server, including storage pools,
volume replication and snapshot, data replication and volume manager as well as
support for tape back systems and virtual tape volumes created in the system. To
deliver connectivity to the workstations that drive workflow, EditStor
ES supports user and group management, user security and access as well as
industry standard IT protocols.

EditStor ES comes standard with hardware RAID protection and four
ports of 1GigE, which can either be connected to four clients
or to a standard Ethernet switch. These four ports provide up to 400MB/s bandwidth, and the addition of an optional second four-port GigE
card or a single 10GbE card increases bandwidth up
to 800 MB/s and 1000 MB/s, respectively.

With these throughput figures, EditStor ES supports
compressed workflows, including DNxHD, ProRes and QuickTime protocols, and can
be configured to support uncompressed SD or HD workflows.