Rome’s Cinecittà Digital Factory Upgrades Facility

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Tue, 05/26/2009 - 20:00 -- Nick Dager

Cinecittà Digital Factory of Rome worked with Hanover-based 
DVS when it recently reorganized its facility and upgraded its post-production workflow. The new storage infrastructure consists of a 48 TB online DVS-SAN complemented by three SpycerBoxes with 72 TB near-line capacities. As one of the leading European film studios Cinecittà has to rely on a high-availability storage infrastructure offering openness flexibility and security. Several Arri film scanners simultaneously ingest 2K-film material on three SpycerBox systems for further processing. During conforming only selected film sequences are transferred to the DVS-SAN. This central online storage enables five uncompressed 2K data streams for parallel color grading on two da Vinci Resolve workstations in real time as well as data access for restoration finalizing and mastering. To prevent fragmentation as well as time- and resource-consuming transcoding and copying processes DVS-SAN has no need for proprietary container formats for pre-allocation. Cinecittà benefits from the openness of the DVS-SAN by directly connecting SAN clients from a wide variety of manufacturers such as Arri da Vinci Digital Vision Thomson and Quantel. This allows data workflows to be organized according to the customer's needs instead of being determined by a particular vendor's proprietary tools. Fabio Filoni head of digital services at Cinecittà Digital Factory says After thoroughly analyzing the SAN systems on the market we opted for the DVS solution because it delivers excellent performance in a customized vendor-independent workflow. On top of that DVS has been a supportive and competent partner right from the outset. The service capability of DVS was a key factor in our decision-making. As a result we have been able to launch a completely new era of post production at Cinecittà. Ernst-Joerg Oberhoessel sales director at DVS says Cinecittà is a thought leader in the post production industry and requires high availability and performance as well as openness and flexibility. We are delighted to have made a significant contribution to the redesign and optimization of Cinecittà's production processes with our future-proof solution.