MPC selects Sledgehammer for third Potter film

Maximum Throughput, a developer and provider of high-performance, networked storage and media management solutions, announced today the sale of a Sledgehammer system to The Moving Picture Company (MPC).
One of the world’s leading post-production facilities, MPC creates high-end digital visual effects and computer animation for the advertising, music, television and feature film industries. The newly acquired Sledgehammer will initially be used in support of MPC’s post-production work on the next Harry Potter film.
Sledgehammer provides growing operations like MPC with the ideal centralized storage solution by supporting simultaneous access from huge numbers of clients – including render farms. With this in mind, MPC purchased Sledgehammer specifically to address increasing bandwidth requirements in their Digital Film department. Sledgehammer has been installed to more efficiently manage the volume of 3D content rendered daily by the company’s recently expanded 1000+ processor render farm. This includes the 3D contents’ approval and release, as well as its subsequent use by the 2D compositing artists working on Harry Potter.
Steve MacPherson, Technical Manager at MPC said: “With disc drive prices being what they are, it’s no longer a question of mere capacity, but also reliability, availability and access. For Harry Potter 3, we needed a high-speed ‘data bridge’ between our CG and Compositing (2D) departments.”
“During periods of peak activity, we needed a system that could catch a high volume of CG rendering while simultaneously releasing that material on approval to the next step in our pipeline. This involves a huge amount of writes (from CG) and reads (to 2D). The Sledgehammer is deployed in exactly this capacity and has performed flawlessly.”
Maximum Throughput is a networked storage and media management tool developer. The company’s unique solutions provide many times the storage bandwidth of other NAS and SAN products, using smart software that runs on industry standard hardware.
Based in Soho, London, The Moving Picture Company has worked on a number of high profile ad campaigns for Nike, Levi’s, Stella Artois and Adidas, features including Harry Potter, Tomb Raider and Troy, as well as landmark drama, history and science programs for the BBC, Channel 4 and Discovery channels.
Maximum Throughput, www.max-t.com
The Moving Picture Company, www.moving-picture.co.uk
(KmcA)