Aberdeen Powers Sony Digital Motion Picture Center

Server and storage manufacturer Aberdeen LLC, in conjunction with Sony Electronics, Inc., announced that the Sony Digital Motion Picture Center (DMPC), located at Stage 7 on the Sony Pictures Studios Lot, is now networked with post-production workstations sharing Aberdeen NAS storage.

The DMPC is dedicated to the training and development of on-set and post-production workflows for the ever-growing world of 4K production. Since its opening in June, the DMPC has focused on Sony’s camera, the F65, but will soon add the recently announced F55 and F5 CineAlta cameras to the Center. The addition of Aberdeen’s central storage system will network the DMPC’s post-production islands into a unified system that will emulate a real-world post house; enabling the exchange of both RAW and HD files from Sony’s growing line of large-imager cameras among the industries’ most popular applications.

"Aberdeen’s system gives the DMPC the ability to quickly share files produced by Sony’s cameras amongst the DMPC’s many workstations through a centralized storage system capable of moving any file size with the speed to meet the demands of multi-stream, real-time video manipulation," said Dan Perry, director of the DMPC. "Their technology is a perfect example of the types of workflow solutions that the DMPC was designed to highlight."

To handle Sony’s 8K and 4K RAW files with on-set and post-production workstations, Aberdeen fine-tuned its 5U, 96TB AberNAS N51L NAS. Aberdeen installed all of its hardware, including one of its own Stirling 474G workstations, in a 21U rack and tied in all of the DMPC’s workstations with a complete 10GbE and fiber infrastructure, which includes an Arista Networks 10GbE switch and a Hot Lava NIC card along with Emulex NIC cards in every workstation. The Aberdeen network delivers 10GbE and GbE connections to the application workstations through the switch with 40GbE bandwidth aggregated to the AberNAS storage device itself.

Sony 8K/4K Optimized, Aberdeen AberNAS N51L Specs:

• Aberdeen 64 Bit Linux NAS OS
• Dual Intel Xeon E5-2667 2.9GHz Processors
• 192GB DDR3-1600 Total Main Memory
• 24 x 4TB Enterprise Level Hard Drives Configured RAID-10
• Mirrored 300GB 15K SAS 6G OS Hard Drives
• LSI 24 Port SAS 6G RAID Controller

These software applications (listed alphabetically) are being demonstrated at the DMPC by their respective developers on workstations in the Aberdeen network:

• Adobe Premiere
• Assimilate Scratch
• Avid Media Composer
• Blackmagic Design DaVinci Resolve
• Codex Vault
• Colorfront On-Set Dailies and Express Dailies
• Filmlight’s Baselight and Truelight
• Fujifilm CCBox
• MTI Cortex
• YoYotta

With the addition of Aberdeen’s system, the DMPC continues its mission to educate the motion picture and television industries on high-resolution image capture and workflow with weekly training sessions and to establish common practices for the fast-paced world of post-production.

"As we migrate from film and tape acquisition to 4K and even 8K production, the DMPC continues to be a crucial facility for the evaluation and development of standards that will benefit the future of high-end production," according to the DMPC’s president, Alec Shapiro.

Sony and Aberdeen look forward to working together to fill this vital role to lead the way in 4K production.