Modern Videofilm Continues To Push Technology Envelope With Expanded Commitment To Archion Storage

By October 15, 2013News

Archion EditStor ES Grows to 80 TBs as Essential Element for Critical Real-time Encoding & Final Cut Workflows

Acclaimed for its three decades of post-production excellence, Modern VideoFilm continues to push the technology envelope at its state-of-the-art facilities by expanding its Archion Technologies EditStor ES™ shared storage system to 80 Terabytes (TB). Modern VideoFilm is using the EditStor ES in its Video On Demand (VOD) ingest operations facility.

Known for setting the highest standards in the industry, in the early 1980s, Modern VideoFilm set a worldwide standard by establishing the first dedicated quality control department in a post-production facility. The facility also became quickly 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 Vice President 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 easy and affordable for creative professionals that work with Final Cut Studio¨, Avid Media Composer¨, Adobe CS5¨, Sony Vegas¨ and other popular media creation tools. EditStor ES easily 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 very affordable, 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 all of 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 maximum 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 1 GigE, which can either be directly connected to four clients or to a standard Ethernet switch. These four ports provide up to 400 Megabytes (MB)/second bandwidth, and the addition of an optional second four-port GigE card or a single 10Gb Ethernet card significantly increases bandwidth up to 800 MB/second and 1000 MB/second, respectively.

With these throughput figures, EditStor ES easily supports compressed workflows, including DNxHD, ProRes and QuickTime protocols, and can be configured to support uncompressed SD or HD workflows. The complete data sheet on EditStor ES can be downloaded here.

About Modern VideoFilm

Modern VideoFilm offers television and feature film post-production services (including editorial, telecine, digital intermediate, digital dailies and visual effects); digital content services (including encoding, transcoding, QC and content delivery); tape duplication and vault security services. The company also provides equipment rental services. Modern VideoFilm just completed construction of a new 96,000 sq. ft. location in Burbank and a 22,000 sq. ft. location in Santa Monica, CA. In the last half of 2011, it also completed the installation of a disaster recovery site in Arizona. Incorporated in 1979, Modern VideoFilm is based in Burbank, CA. www.mvfinc.com

About Archion

Archion Technologies, based in Burbank, CA, is a leading provider of intelligent networked storage solutions specifically designed for post production and graphic professionals. Founded by a team of post production, technology and entertainment industry professionals in 1999, Archion set out to create a new standard of data protection and performance for those creating video, audio and graphical content. Since then, Archion’s high-performance storage technology has been critical to the success of hundreds of TV and feature film projects and is prominently used in Avid, Apple, Adobe, Autodesk and Pro Tools environments. www.archion.com

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