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Digital content creation—a new market opportunity

With filmmakers going for HD resolution, storage requirements have ballooned, says Mohd Shariff PA

Talking about how studios have started investing in storage and high computing servers and it has become an interesting market to follow, Subram Natarajan, Technical Solutions Architect, STG, IBM Asia Pacific said, “Often, storage in the studios for applications including animation, special effects, or editing, is simply a JBOD (Just a Bunch of Disks), directly attached to workstations striped together to get acceptable performance, measured by raw throughput. Projects that have grown in size and scope, along with a growing thirst for more sophisticated visual effects, have both caused a significant increase in the complexity of the creation process, and demand a rethinking of storage infrastructure for the studio.” Gone are the days when a trip to the movies involved marveling only at the cinematography. Today’s blockbusters are as likely to rely on computer-generated graphics.

When the storage infrastructure is incapable of meeting requirements for a large project, some studios have been forced to compromise on the creative side. This is done by reducing the complexity of the shots, often limiting the number of elements in a frame, which reduces the strain on the server and storage infrastructure. Other studios break the artists into shifts to try to spread the load across a greater part of the day. This, along with generally longer workdays due to infrastructure slowdowns, puts an undue strain on the creative and IT staff. Natarajan added, “The digital content creation (DCC) industry in has seen some of the biggest blade and networked storage deployments. There are compute-intensive applications that are used by digital content creators, which are driving the investments in high performance servers and storage. It requires a lot of computational power and storage and hence we are seeing a lot of blade servers are moving into digital content creation.”

DQ Entertainment limited, Toonz Animation India, Crest Communications (a customer of both IBM and HP), Prana Studios, UTV, My Entertainment are some companies that have invested in high end servers/blades and networked storage for their requirement. There are another half a dozen of studio houses/production houses investing in servers and storage that are currently not referenceable.

DCC pressures IT systems

Viswanath Ramaswamy, Project Lead, STG, IBM India/South Asia said, “The digital content creation industry has picked up pace in India in recent months and it has created a rage in the market place. You can see a lot of animations or cartoons with special effects being made in India.” Today toddlers are spending most of their after-school hours watching Power Rangers, Crayon Shin-Chan, Looney Tunes, Perman and more. These days, however, one of their favorite superheroes is a cool cartoon version of Hanuman, the monkey-headed Hindu god. In The Return of Hanuman, the adored deity is reborn as a boy who goes to school in khaki shorts, uses a computer, combats pollution and, most importantly, smashes the bad guys to pulp. Soon ‘Sultan the Warrior’ will also see Tamil superstar-actor Rajanikanth fighting villains in his trademark style, except that this time around he will be animated. A complete work of fiction, the film is being made in an animation studio in Chennai, on a budget of $ 10 million, with a crew of 80 members working on it. For The Return of Hanuman, Toonz Animation India used IBM servers and TotalStorage. The company is creating Tenali Raman next. It has also begun production on its next TV series titled, “The Adventures of Hanuman” (not to be mistaken with Hanuman 2 the movie). This action/adventure series will make use of a blend of 2D and 3D technology for its 13 half hour episodes.

Ramaswamy said, “India is producing a lot of mythological cartoons/animations and these developments are putting pressure on traditional IT systems used by movie makers. There is traction in the server and storage industry and while it is at a nascent stage it looks promising.

“Time to market is another driving factor for production houses to embrace technology that meets their requirements.”

Soumitra Agarwal, Marketing Director, Network Appliances India said, “The unprofessional approach and lack of efficient storage and other IT infrastructure by Indian studios has brought down the quality of digital effects in the movies, whereas globally much attention has been paid towards technology.” US based production houses have started outsourcing works to India, China and Taiwan and they demand quality output. Studios such as Walt Disney and Sony had started their own operations in India and local studios are getting projects from foreign countries. To fulfill the need, local companies are looking for high-end storage devices.

Manoj Suvarna, Country Head of Storage, HP StorageWorks Division, HP India said, “The cost factor has played a major role here. Outsourcing has happened in huge way. All the foreign clients looked at the talent available in this field and the money that they saved by outsourcing. Companies here have the capability to deliver the best in the market and this has paved the way for the adoption of high-end storage in India in this segment.”

Dramatic changes

To handle the growing requirements of post-production and animation, networked storage has had to change dramatically in many dimensions, including higher throughput, increased file system capacity and scalability, and improved availability. Although there are many technical trends that are driving changes to storage in the studio such as higher resolution formats, faster networks, and 64-bit computing, the primary driver of growing storage requirements in entertainment are the creative trends.

With an increasing appetite for more sophisticated visual effects, one obvious change is that blockbusters have more shots then ever before and these special effected sequences are becoming lengthier—earlier animated episodes used to be 20 to 30 minutes long. Today the length of animated movies has expanded to 90 to 120 minutes. The number of shots per movie has gone from a few hundreds for a major production into potentially thousands of shots spread across multiple studios. These shots are also longer and more complex, with more elements in every frame. The creative side is also driven by directors being more involved in DCC which can lead to revisions as they see what is possible and push technology to its creative limits. With the increase in the number of shots, even when projects may be distributed to multiple studios, production houses have had to augment their creative staff, and prepare for a scalable and collaborative post-production environment. With studios growing, the storage infrastructure can quickly become a bottleneck, forcing studios to use high-end centralized storage solutions that can scale with their requirements.

Ramaswamy said, “For a 30-minute episode, there could be 90 odd blade servers (off course sizing would be required) and most of these machines run Linux.”

“For us, DS 4700 networked storage has become the sweet spot,” added Natarajan.

Speaking about technology driving business dynamics, according to FICCI officials, “Earlier business was driving technological applications but now these applications are driving business models. The time is ripe for the Indian entertainment sector to reap the benefits of technology. Digital cinema is a prime example of how Indian technology whizkids have adopted technology to deliver the best of content even to remote towns and villages.”

High throughput has always and will always be a requirement for studio storage, but now with the increased complexity, transactional performance is critical as well. The ever-increasing complexity of CGI (Computer-generated imagery) and animation has added transactional requirements to storage as well. To create these complex frames, many reference files are required, which need to be accessed by the artists to create them and by the render farm to complete each frame. These files can include information for every element in a frame from particles for effects such as smoke, flame, clouds or even fur, as well as layers containing textures, color, shadows, lighting and other relevant elements for each frame. Natarajan said, “Typically production houses would require a SAN solution that can handle anything from 400 Mbps per port to 4 Gbps of data per port. Higher frames per second, bit rate, number of frames per second, number of pixels, sound effects and the like considerably increase the file sizes.”

Digital Content Creations are demanding a high performance computing infrastructure such as high performance servers or blades and networked storage as the files are getting bigger and software—parallel file system as well as the application stack consisting of Maya and other 3D rendering applications—is becoming more complex. Srini Rao, Chief Technical Manager, Hitachi Data Systems said, “Today, data storage within most organizations is increasing by about 60% each year including production houses, with many experiencing growth in excess of 100%. Additional drives are the growth in traditional data-intensive functions such as the databases, online transactions and business applications.”

Solutions deployed by studio houses

IBM is pitching its Blade Center E (with a wide array of fabrics, such as Ethernet, fiber channel, Infiniband and iSCSI), which is a blade server with Intel’s dual/quad core processor with high memory (8 GB) for 3D capabilities such as rendering and the like. It also pitches the workstation blade HC10 for 2D work. Jim Simon, Director, Marketing, Asia Pacific, Quantum said, “Quantum’s StorNext is designed to consolidate storage and enable data sharing across application suites so that business can create cutting edge broadcasts faster and eliminate time consuming, often linear, content transfers between creative staff.” By reducing storage complexity and consolidating disk resources, customers who use StorNext FX find cost savings as well.

A high-performance NAS platform drives improvements in rendering speeds and reduces artist wait times from file transfers to downloading shadow masks. Rao said, “The Hitachi Content Archive Platform is the first solution in the industry to enable customers to scale archive server nodes and storage capacity independently. While other archiving solutions require additional servers and additional processing power to scale storage, the Hitachi Content Archive Platform V 2.0 reduces the number of server nodes required to scale, resulting in considerably lower heat emissions and power consumption and greatly simplified management.”

Suvarna added, “UTV is our customer and they are using a range of product suites such as HP Virtualized storage solution, blade servers, workstations, ProCurve (networking) for creating their work that is highly scalable to meet the rapid growth. This collaboration further showcases HP’s domain expertise in providing customized solutions to the growing animation and media industry in the country with its powerful end-to-end solutions.

“With the growing demand for high-end services and increasing market excellence in the Indian animation space, there was a clear road for vendors to catch this market with their existing solutions.”

India is riding the growth curve and most of the sector in the economy is growing. As the economy is pacing ahead in the age of convergence, everything is getting automated.

Vendors understand the pressures and are offering a full suite of file and storage management solutions designed specifically for media and entertainment. As studios can increase their number of projects, there will be more traction towards investment in storage and servers. In the coming days media and production houses would become new areas of opportunity for the storage/server vendors.

mohammed.shariff@expressindia.com