Éclair Installs Three MaxT Sledgehammer Systems for Film Restoration

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Tue, 05/12/2009 - 20:00 -- Nick Dager

French digital post-production company Eclair Laboratoire has purchased and installed three MaxT Sledgehammer HD!O network attached storage systems at the heart of its film restoration facility.   
  Installed in early April the three Sledgehammer systems have been dedicated to the restoration of many films from the Gaumont Film Company’s historical film archive including 35mm classics Un Taxi pour Tobrouk Les Yeux Sans Visage and Les Tontons Flingueurs.  Founded in 1895 Paris-based Gaumont Film Company has amassed one of the world’s most impressive film archives and Éclair expects to restore over 70 Gaumont motion picture classics this year using the Sledgehammer systems. “For film restoration and remastering in HD and 2K Éclair wanted to build an industrial digital cinema workflow from scanning to mastering ” says Frantz Delbecque technical director for Éclair Laboratoires in Epinay-Sur-Seine France.  “After considerable evaluation we determined that the Sledgehammer HD!O was uniquely qualified to meet all of our requirements. To merge video and film workflows onto centralized shared storage we needed an extremely fast reliable NAS that would support our scanners color grading systems and restoration tools without compromising realtime HD 4:4:4 input/output [I/O] - even when network demand peaks.” 
 At Éclair the three Sledgehammers—each configured with 24-terabytes of storage for a total capacity of 72TBs—support a high-intensity workflow that encompasses an Arriscan and Northlight film scanners; Spirit telecine for transferring film to digital video; da Vinci Revival color grading/restoration system; and Autodesk Flame visual effects compositing systems all linked to Sledgehammer via HD-SDI video or 10-Gigabit Ethernet and Gigabit Ethernet data networks.  Several film restoration workstations also have direct access to Sledgehammer’s contents to perform automated dirt and scratch removal and image enhancement including the Digital Vision ASC3 MTI system and three of Éclair’s own proprietary in-house Colorus grading systems.  
  
 “With the Sledgehammers our workflow is totally tapeless even when images are uncompressed which saves us money by reducing our use of costly HD VTRs ” says Delbecque. “And our productivity is boosted thanks to our ability to work on several projects at one time and the elimination of network transfer bottlenecks.”
  
 “Sledgehammer is unique as an open scalable platform that can multi-task to serve the needs of any production pipeline ” says Stephen Elliott sales manager for the EMEA region for MaxT Systems.  “And Éclair is a unique installation in that they are using all of Sledgehammer’s high-performance features to their fullest—with multiple video I/O’s high-speed 2K HSDL between devices and workstations and shared central storage on a 10Gb Ethernet network—as well as MAXmedia software for the preview manipulation and management of media.”  
  Éclair Laboratoires www.eclair.fr MaxT Systems www.max-t.com