Harbor Picture Company became the UK’s first post facility to install Avid's NEXIS | F2 SSD shared storage engines for audio production, with a 100GbE network connection and 20 drives.
James Corless (left) and Paul-Sisley at Harbor Picture Company
Post-production specialists Harbor Picture Company handles all stages of post for feature film projects, episodic dramas, documentaries and advertising. Launched in 2012, it has facilities in London, Los Angeles, New York, Chicago and Atlanta. In the UK, its recent productions include Eric, True Detective: Night Country, Star Wars: Acolyte, Scoop, Heart of Stone, The Last Kingdom: Seven Kings Must Die and Great Expectations.
This London location has extended its relationship with Avid to become the first facility in the UK to install Avid's shared storage engines, Avid NEXIS | F2 SSD, for audio production. Adding the NEXIS to the existing toolset helps Harbor to meet all the demanding production requirements from the five studios of its London facility – including a theatrical Atmos suite, two Atmos Home Entertainment suites and two ADR rooms.
The installation of a two-media-pack Avid NEXIS | F2 SSD system, which is an all-flash array, gives Harbor a sizeable 76TB of storage, capable of playing back up to 10,000 audio tracks simultaneously via a 100GbE high-speed network connection. Avid NEXIS systems are built from modular building blocks – for instance, each set of 10 media drives is called a media pack, and each NEXIS storage engine type can house one or more media packs. Fitting the array with two packs means Harbor’s system has 20 drives.
As well as Avid, Harbor has worked on the installation with HHB Communications, one of Avid's pro audio channel partners, to make sure the set-up’s product specifications are correct for the performance and workflow Harbor wants to achieve
Harbor has been an Avid customer since the company launched in 2012. Harbor Head of Post Technology Paul Sisley said, "We are pleased to carry on our relationship with Avid and HHB in this way, as it means we can maintain the quality of the content we produce, even for clients that have demanding audio workloads and delivery schedules across multiple locations."
Avid NEXIS is built for use as flexible, scalable storage tiering on premises and in the cloud. Optimised and powered by virtual file system software, Avid NEXIS | VFS, the most recent release enables audio and video post-production teams to deliver fast-turnaround content with a closely integrated picture and sound workflow.
This improvement to the platform’s support for collaboration between audio and video creatives includes easier access to audio clips, session files and video sequences for faster project turnaround. The entire music and sound library can now be accessed quickly, accelerating sound design workflows and helping users take advantage of remixing, reissue and music licensing opportunities. Avid NEXIS secures sessions and audio files with disk protection features, automatic drive rebuilds and high availability.
The Avid NEXIS | VFS file system serves as the control centre of the system. It virtualises hardware and cloud storage into one pool of shared resources, and includes such capabilities as dynamically reallocating storage capacity, optimising bandwidth, and the automated drive rebuilds. It also supports other types of automation to help manage workloads as they change.
Through the NEXIS file system, media and projects can be browsed, discovered and shared either from the facility or remotely using various post production applications, and hundreds of users can be connected and access media simultaneously.
Harbor's installation of the Avid NEXIS | F2 SSD storage engines follows the post house's investment last year in an Avid dual-operator 48-fader S6 console, two single-operator S6 consoles and an S4 console all running Avid's audio production software Pro Tools.
HHB Communications Chief Technology Officer John Johnson said the primary advantages of the NEXIS F2 SSD installation are speed and efficiency. “Harbor can now run the Pro Tools DAW on more than 15 workstations across five studios, paired with a versatile control surface range, owing to the high-speed EUCON protocol,” he said. “They are also able to move projects between different studios to suit their clients' requirements." www.avid.com
