IT in cinema: the Rajtaru story

Rajtaru is a specialist post-production house that caters to all aspects of post-production including traditional and CG (computer graphics) animation, digital visual effects and non-linear editing.
Post-production is complex work. First, a concept must be shaped. Then it has to be translated into words, and a script has to be written after which its time for lights, camera and action. Post-production follows after the shoot is completed. This process involves extensive use of computers and software and massive amounts of storage. The growing need for digital processing has forced production houses like Rajtaru to adopt storage advanced devices. This is a tale of how Rajtaru Videosonic, a leading Indian production house, used disk storage to speed up post-production

Ahead of the curve

While hard disk drives are commodity items, an industrial strength hard disk drive can contribute significantly to the performance of a post-production company's systems. Says Ramesh Aggarwal, who is the chairman and managing director of Rajtaru Videosonic, "We started investing in Seagate drives in 1996. Earlier, in the case of high-end graphics, a lot of work used to be sent abroad as Indian post-production suites did not have the requisite expertise."
It is interesting to note that there was a boom in the Indian IT industry in the mid 1990s. The ICE players, global giants such as Disney and Warner zoomed in on this sector. In this situation having a world-class production suite was a must. Rajtaru invested around Rs 50 lakh to set up a fully-equipped post-production house in Mumbai at that time.
Before the coming of disk-based technology in the mid-1980s, post-production at the facility was done using sprocket-based editing machines such as German-made Steenbecks. These machines had a serious limitation: they only allowed for sequential editing. That's all changed, today audio-visual data can be written and retrieved in a non-linear fashion.
In the past, production houses followed a process of machine-to-machine editing that led to several complications. Firstly, tapes were the preferred storage medium. Repeated use of tape (forwarding and rewinding) led to wear and tear. Even a slight change in the depth or perspective of the image gets magnified when projected onto a big screen. Add effects to the mix and storage becomes critical especially if you're doing high-end rendering work.

A near-line RAID system

Rajtaru's storage system is based on near-line RAID storage that consists of several hundred Seagate Cheetah 10,000 RPM hard drives. Besides providing high-performance data throughput and the huge storage capacity needed for complex image processing, it also helps maintain a low cost of ownership. Using these drives, Rajtaru has built a speedy, error-free 9 terabyte storage silo that lets directors preview SFX sequences in a continuous run. Directors can view two hours of complete film at a stretch. The nearline disk subsystem lets directors see changes that they have made to the film in real-time using a proxy rather than viewing it from start.
Recently the company did some work for Main Hoon Na. For that film, the company executed a Matrix-style seven-second shot that required 120 frames with a running length of five seconds to be merged and synchronised. At 24 frames per second, each frame hogged 51 MB of disk space. Image manipulation for real-time rendering required 1.5x additional in-process storage.

Back to the future

Rajtaru wants to upgrade to the new Cheetah 15K.3 drives that it believes will provide better results. Indian audiences are hooked on Hollywood-style special effects, and our filmmakers are well aware of this. They are relying on production houses such as Rajtaru to help them approximate the quality and excellence delivered by global hotshops such as ILM and
Weta Digital.