South Park - Creative COW Magazine

changed, getting it into audio post as quickly as possible.
Shared storage would seem to be the easiest alternative
— but it’s simply not an option: the Avid Media
Composer and Digidesign Pro Tools systems they use
don’t work together on Avid Unity storage.
David describes the process this led to. “First, I
asked our lead editor, Keef Bartkus, if he could stop
what he was doing to allow me to have a few minutes
to update the current sequence. After copying the se-
quence, I’d throw down a dummy track for audio to
reference new edits.
“Then I would initiate the conform, basically consolidating
media into an OMF and then copying the
media (upwards of 8 or 9 GB) onto as many as 3 external
FireWire drives.”
With five to ten new cuts of an episode on Tuesday
night alone, the copying process was sucking down 8
to 12 hours when the team could
least afford it.
They’ve recently turned to
StorageDNA 360, a software bridge
for data distribution and synchronization
across multiple storage
systems. All the video media is constantly
being pulled across from
the Unity to local hard drives for
the Pro Tools stations. When a cut
is completed on the picture side,
the media is on the drives for audio
post, fully synced and ready to go in
closer to 2 minutes than the previous
30-45 minutes for each cut.
J.J. says this means that “Matt
and Trey can throw out a random
idea and we can say ‘Sure, we’ll give
it a shot,’ because we feel relatively
confident that we can turn anything
around in a certain amount of
12
time.”
While distributing to local drives, the StorageDNA
360 is also passing everything to a nearline archive,
freeing up space on the primary storage that would
have been tied up by mirroring. They’re also automatically
preserving every version of the episode remotely.
“It gives us a disaster recovery scenario if the Unity
were to die, allowing the editors to get back to work
with a minimum of downtime,”
says J.J. “With the timeframes
we work under, every safety net
counts.”
“IMAGINATIONLAND”
The idea for the Emmy Awardwinning
“Imaginationland”
came from the summer before it
aired. “They called in the whole
crew for about 6 weeks and we
just worked on random stuff
that the lads had come up with,
basically developing concepts
for episodes in advance of the
run,” says J.J. “‘Imaginationland’
was one of those concepts.
The shortest version of the
concept is that a battle between
all of the good and evil characters
ever imagined spills over
into the “real” world. Featured players run from Aslan
to Zeus, and include Charlie Brown, both a Predator
and an Alien, Al Gore, Gandalf, Luke Skywalker, the
Blue Meanies, Michael Bay and Strawberry Shortcake.
And that’s a really, really short summary.
“The number of elements that we had to design
from scratch to produce these episodes was enormous,”
says Frank. “I think we approached about 120
September / October 2008 — Creative COW Magazine
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