Molinare prepares for 4K with storage investment

The new storage system uses five X410 storage nodes integrated into a single cluster using a high speed Infinaband backbone.

The storage, which will replace Molinare’s current SAN, sits at the heart of the company’s 4K workflow and will serve its Baselight and Flame suites.

“Isilon is very easily scalable but its scalability also brings about improved performance with the performance aggregating as you add more storage to the system,” said Molinare chief technology officer Richard Wilding.

“And it give us improved connectivity with each node having its own network connections, so as we bring more nodes in, we can broaden out the connectivity from the system itself. It means we don’t see bottlenecks in the same way we would have in a SAN infrastructure.”

Molinare has also recently invested in Sony’s BVM-X300 OLED 4K reference monitor, provided by WTS Broadcast, for grading upcoming 4K TV drama productions.

Wilding noted that the influx of 4K work is sometimes accompanied by queries around HDR.

“We’ve had a number of productions now where we’ve delivered an ungraded timeline, typically in an EXR format, which gives the greatest possibility for doing an HDR grade at a later stage.

“That’s dictating the whole workflow for companies like Netflix, which are currently pushing for an EXR workflow throughout post-production, and that gives them the option to use that ungraded master which stays in their archive until they choose to do an HDR version.”

Wilding hopes the new EMC Isilon storage will be attractive to both the increasing number of companies wanting to deliver in 4K and those who want to future proof their assets.

“We’ve had a number of projects with 2K deliverables, but with camera-native 4K resolution ungraded timeline deliverables. I think more and more productions now are looking to maintain that resolution as an asset going forward,” he said.