StorNext a Superstar at Animation Park

StorNext Improves Animation Park Workflow Efficiency by up to 80%

As the animation industry advances into the 4K resolution era, animation producers at the Animation Park realized that their existing storage infrastructure was not able to keep up with the new standard’s demands. Working on 4K resolution projects creates very high-capacity and bandwidth requirements, since typical processes require up to 3.9GB/second performance, and a single frame of 4K content can consist of 48MB of data. The Animation Park’s storage infrastructure provided far less, so all of its production, playout, and mastering processes were negatively affected.

In the old system, the Animation Park creative team worked on projects using desktop DAS RAID. All the graphics workstations had to access local storage for production, and they would pool the data afterward using portable hard disks. The capacity and bandwidth of the system limited the real-time playing of the finished content to only a few seconds at a time. That made it difficult for the production team to work coherently, and had a negative impact on efficiency and even on the overall quality of the work.

StorNext Solutions Streamline Workflow and Increase Efficiency

The Animation Park’s solution was to deploy a full set of high-performance StorNext® solutions from Quantum. “We chose Quantum because it had the capacity and performance we needed for 4K projects, because it was already widely used internationally for media and entertainment applications, and because it was both cost-effective and easy to scale.”

"We implemented and used the scale-out system when we worked on our first 4K film remastering project for a Hollywood studio,” explains Dou Kai, Production Director at the Animation Park. “During the implementation process, Quantum provided us with valuable support … and the results have been just what we wanted. StorNext has greatly streamlined our overall workflow since. Now all our workstations can work simultaneously in a shared high-capacity, high-performance environment, and StorNext allows us to play out entire films at a native 24 frames-per-second rate when we are working on quality control. The new StorNext solution greatly enhances our … processes, and it improved our overall workflow efficiency by roughly 60%-80% compared to the old system.”

“The Animation Park has worked with many vendors during the deployment of our new IT infrastructure, and Quantum impressed us the most because of the professionalism and positive attitude shown by its entire staff. Their active participation was one of the main reasons that our infrastructure expansion project was completed on time. In future, we would like to be able to expand our use of Quantum solutions in the Animation Park and have the advantage of the Quantum team’s support in a wider range of applications.”