Virident and JMR Electronics Deliver Next-Gen Digital Cinema Finishing Systems

Virident Systems, Inc., in flash-based storage class memory solutions, and JMR Electronics, Inc., provider of scalable storage solutions, announced the availability of high-throughput digital content solutions for digital cinema finishing developed as part of their strategic partnership.

The digital cinema finishing systems deliver simultaneous I/O operations orders of magnitude greater than systems equipped with traditional HDDs in a small form-factor that can be stored on a set for nearly instantaneous processing. This would enable, for example, a production planner to save time on workflows and increase the number of setups from 15 to 20 in a single day.

The systems are custom-configured for each customer. One configuration consists of JMR’s SilverStor eight-bay desktop server, featuring next-generation processors and Virident’s FlashMAX PCIe SSD. This solution powers a 4K and 5K stereoscopic color-grading workflow featuring Blackmagic Design’s Davinci Resolve color corrector with performance accelerated by multiple graphics processing units. Data is moved from the FlashMAX to the internal eight-bay SSD RAID and onto the high-performance 3U network storage server via Solarflare’s low-latency 10GbE adapters and an LG/Ericsson 10GbE switch.

"We chose Virident because its benchmarking results displayed graphs of unconditional sustained I/O performance, with no peaks and valleys," said Mitchell Guzik, COO at JMR Electronics. "Unconditional performance is a key requirement that our customers have for digital cinema finishing systems, so they can quickly deliver next-generation cinema experiences of up to 6K resolution and up to 60 frames per second."

"Virident partnered with JMR because of its 30-year history of excellence in delivering state-of-the-art server and storage systems to the film industry and other vertical markets such as military, aerospace, and enterprise high-performance computing applications," said Shridar Subramanian, VP of product marketing at Virident. "Our mutual customers share a need for the highest sustained I/O performance and low latency for their advanced work in digital cinema and high-performance computing."

FlashMAX, a PCIe storage-class memory solution, ensures that application performance is 10 times faster than with HDD systems, at one-third of the TCO. It offers capacity in the smallest footprint while delivering twice the performance of competing solutions. FlashMAX SCM has been designed to exploit today’s computer architectures, which leverage many fast CPU cores and the PCIe interconnect bus to deliver application performance.

Server solutions for digital cinema finishing are available in a variety of custom configurations from the two companies.