Editing trailers for movies means moving fast. For Trailer Park, a busy and growing Hollywood-based facility specializing in trailers, standalone NLEs created roadblocks — especially on rush jobs. “With everyone using just their local storage, moving a project from one editor to another meant you'd either have to drag all the drives over [to another workstation], or consolidate all the media on one drive and take that to them,” says Charlie Austin, editor and lead tech at the seven-year-old editing house.

The solution? Rorke's StudioNet-FC, a combination of products that create a scalable Fibre Channel SAN. Austin says that besides centralizing storage, the network seamlessly supported the company's transition to Apple's Final Cut Pro from its previous Avid setup.

For Trailer Park, consolidating the flood of incoming media onto one high-speed server delivered much more flexibility. Previously, as each feature came in on ¾" cassette, individual editors spent their time digitizing up to hundreds of gigabytes of data onto storage that was individually tied to each of the nine Mac G4 workstations.

Splitting out work to other editors for help on rush jobs meant copying or redigitizing huge amounts of data, slowing everything down. The StudioNet SAN eliminates that problem.

While a do-it-yourself approach works for some facilities, Austin likes Rorke's all-in-one package; it includes all the gear to build a full SAN setup, minus the cabling. “It's nice to have somebody who knows how the system fits together, someone to call when things go wrong,” says Austin.

Besides two 750GB arrays, StudioNet-FC includes a Fibre Channel switch, HBAs (Host Bus Adapters) for every Mac G4 computer, and Rorke's VMS software for configuring and administrating the system.

Trailer Park also uses Pacific Bell's 270mBs service on a dial-up basis for realtime conferencing with the studios. Playout for those interactive sessions comes via output from Matrox's RTMac board through an off-the-shelf ADC audio/video patchbay.

Hardware

Rorke scalable StudioNet-FC for workgroups
1.5TB of Rorke Galaxy series Fibre-to-Fibre RAID
ATTO 1Gb Fibre cards
16-port Vixel 7200 FC switch
Ten Apple Macintosh G4s (500MHz single processors to 800MHz dual processors)
iMac file server
Cassette machines: Sony 950, 9000 (¾" SP), Betacam SP, Digital Betacam

Software

Apple OS 9.1
Final Cut Pro 2.0
Rorke StudioNet-FC Volume Management Software (VMS)

Graphics

Adobe After Effects, Illustrator, Photoshop
Electric Image Universe