Facilis TerrBlock Turbocharges Need for Speed Post Production

Indie production company Bandito Brothers tapped Facilis Technologys TerraBlock 24D as an on-set shared storage solution to accelerate 4K post production for director Scott Waugh's Need for Speed, which released in theatres on March 14.

Produced by DreamWorks Pictures and starring Aaron Paul, the film adaptation of Electronic Arts' series of Need for Speed video games follows street racer Tobey Marshall as he embarks on a thrilling cross-country race for revenge against the former business associate responsible for putting him behind bars.

Need for Speed' is our second major feature film, so we really wanted to push the creative and technical envelope. As with any cutting-edge project, we faced a number of challenges, but, with assistance from DreamWorks and Facilis, we implemented a finely tuned operation, shared Bandito Brothers Senior Director of Post Production Lance Holte. Having a high-performance solution like TerraBlock proved essential on this project, especially for working with 4K RAW footage galore; it allowed our editors to collaborate more efficiently, and handled everything we threw at it - even when hammering multiple machines with heavy volumes of data, giant file sizes and numerous streams.

To keep post production on schedule, Bandito Brothers stationed editors on-set in various locales across Atlanta, Detroit, Los Angeles and San Francisco, and began cutting the film during shoots.

Leveraging files stored on a TerraBlock 24D with 96TB capacity, the post production team completed offline editorial in Avid, conformed files to 4K RAW for online editorial in Adobe Premiere, color graded the footage using Blackmagic DaVinci Resolve 10 and simultaneously transferred 4K footage to Bandito Brothers Los Angeles-based VFX facility Cantina Creative. By the time filming had wrapped, Bandito Brothers had a complete rough cut of the film.

Connected via Ethernet to 19 Windows and six Mac workstations that run a combination of industry standard creative applications, TerraBlock provided Bandito Brothers with a flexible, high-capacity shared storage solution that facilitated a highly collaborative on-the-go editing experience. The transition from local storage to TerraBlock also simplified post production by removing formerly tedious administrative tasks.

TerraBlock powers efficient collaboration between offline, online and VFX work, and the fact that it's client agnostic is huge for us, said Holte. The system also makes admin work straight forward; it's robust, but simple to use, and there's something to be said for that. I also love the fact that it's scalable.

As file sizes and camera packages continue to grow in the coming years, Bandito Brothers will rely on the extensible architecture of the TerraBlock to easily expand storage for future projects. Should Bandito Bros want to double its capacity, the company can easily add another TerraBlock without interrupting the existing system.

LINK:	http://www.cgw.com/Press-Center/Web-Exclusives/2014/Facilis-TerrBlock-...
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