Getaway Productions Chooses Small Tree Shared Storage

Having finished shooting on the feature film Getaway, an action
movie starring Ethan Hawke, Selena Gomez and Jon Voight, the Getaway Productions,
post-production team knew they needed to add visual effects artists to work on
the project.

With the addition of up to six VFX artists and two post-production assistants,
the team also knew a robust storage solution would be necessary to meet tight
deadlines. As such, the group installed a Titanium16 Ethernet-based shared
storage system from Small Tree
Communication, LLC

Titanium16, a 3U rack-mount solution configurable up to 20 GbE or
12 10GbE ports and storage capacity from 32TB to 320TB while delivering up to
72 streams of ProRes 422, has improved workflow for Getaway Productions and
provided peace of mind. Multiple editing applications including Final
Cut Pro, Adobe Premier Pro, After Effects, Media Encoder, Cinema 4D and
Illustrator were used by the team, all worked with the Titanium.

The crew used a variety of cameras during filming of ‘Getaway’,
including Red One, Red Epic, Canon 5D, Canon 7D, VIO POV HD, Iconix and Flipcam
in formats ranging from XDCam HD and AVD HD to R3D and DPX Image Sequences. In
addition to loading footage onto the Titanium, all of the source footage was
backed up over three sets of external 12 TB drives and LTO tapes.

"Before installing the Titanium16,
we spent a lot of time copying files and reconnecting projects," said
Elliott Houston, assistant editor at Getaway Productions. "With all of the source material – up to 30
different cameras during the shoot – and offline editing files for ‘Getaway,’ we
were looking for a storage solution that could handle all of that data. At the
same time, we didn’t want to have to deal with substantial changes to our
infrastructure. To that end, the simplicity and power of the Titanium16 has
been ideal."

As the project
progressed, Titanium’s scalability became increasingly important to Houston and
the rest of the Getaway post-production team.

"We started out with three workstations, but
we knew we would be introducing more in the future, so we wanted a storage system
that would allow us to add as many as we needed to get the project done,"
Houston stated. "With the Titanium, we were able to add additional VFX
artists to the project easily with room for more. The ability to connect iMacs,
Mac Pros, Macbook Pros and Mac Minis to Small Tree’s shared storage also has
been a major bonus for the team."

Houston was also impressed with Titanium’s all-in-one features, which made life
easier for the editing team.

"Titanium is all-inclusive and that
is a major benefit over FC, which requires a separate computer to control
metadata," Houston remarked. "Additionally,
the ease of use with Mac systems – it mounts like a HDD, but with attached
storage so you don’t need third party software – makes Titanium an easy system
to install and operate."