New Hat Selects DataDirect 300TB SAN

DataDirect Networks, Inc. announced that New Hat, of Santa Monica, Calif., has selected the xSTREAMScaler SAN Solution, based on the S2A9900 Extreme Storage platform, to power its Apple Macintosh and Linux-based uncompressed 2K color grading post production workflow. New Hat was founded in 2008 by the legendary award-winning post production team of Bob Festa, Clark Muller and Darby Walker and represents the most technically advanced Mac and Linux-based color grading post environment in Hollywood.

Bob Festa

New Hat, which provides advanced color grading post services for commercials such as BlackBerry ‘Storm,’ Lexus ‘Video Game’ and NBC’s Super Bowl XLIII promos, as well as for visual effects houses such as Radium and Stardust, selected a 300 terabyte DDN xSTREAMScaler SAN solution. It provides up to six gigabytes per second of un-interrupted bandwidth and extremely low-latency access, enabling the quality-of-service required for the concurrent operation of three Pandora Revolution color grading bays, a Baselight color grading system and two Thomson Grass Valley Spirit DataCine 4K Film Scanners.

The DDN solution enables multiple colorists at New Hat to work in parallel, accessing the same uncompressed 2K content from a centralized pool of storage, increasing the company’s productivity by eliminating file transfers and accelerating workflow.

"The biggest challenge in these shared workflows is to ensure that read-intensive processes are not interrupted in the event of simultaneous write-heavy workloads generated by the 4K film scanners," said Clark Muller, Colorist, New Hat. "DataDirect Networks was the only company that had a solution which guaranteed un-interrupted, low-latency access to our four color-grading bays while simultaneously scanning new content from our Sprit 4K scanners, thereby ensuring that the workflow is consistently operational while providing a truly collaborative platform with a single global namespace."

"Once we scan a client’s film we ensure it is securely archived and never have to go back to the film source to retrieve the original content," said Darby Walker, Managing Director, New Hat. "The SAN-based film scanning system we have architected enables New Hat to maintain a completely digital history of all of our clients’ projects, significantly accelerating their time-to-market when updating or creating new content. We have completely transcended the days of the ‘film-to-tape’ process with this modern, technically elegant approach."

"In the current economic climate, it is more important than ever for companies to extract maximum value from their IT investments," said Bob Festa, Colorist, New Hat. "With the DDN xSTREAMScaler solution, we can ingest data as fast as we can playout; we can complete projects on schedule and accommodate more client projects than ever before; and we can provide blazing fast access to content using cost-effective SATA disks. Having been deeply involved in the post production industry for over 20 years, it is rather obvious to us that DDN is the only vendor that enables us to achieve all of these benefits from a single, integrated storage solution."

Commenting on today’s announcement, Dave Fellinger, Chief Technology Officer, DDN, said: "A digital intermediate workflow of this magnitude leveraging cost-effective SATA disks is an industry-first. It’s made possible with the DDN SATAssure patented technology, which provides real-time data error correction, ensuring that hosts receive only the correct data. We look forward to continuing to work with the founders of New Hat as they expand their post production business and deliver the latest services to clients using DDN Extreme Storage as their data backbone."

DataDirect Networks’ Global Services organization ensured a seamless integration of its data infrastructure solution into New Hat’s post production environment.