The Hindi film industry is slowly waking up to the call of increasing use of technology in post production.
FXFactory, one of the leading production houses in Mumbai, is revamping its studio and introducing render farms for faster composition and editing. Ramesh Meer, CEO, informs, "We are installing a centralized storage system and have chosen Xfinity to provide the solutions."
He says, "Xfinity will set up render farms for us. The centralized storage system will enable our entire team to access data as well as pace up work distribution. It will have a high speed computer switch for faster data transfer and process."
Siddharth Meer, director, FXFactory, adds, "We will use one SAN for data and a WAN for archiving. The render farm will have 10 servers. At present, we are using core 2 from Intel Zeons processes for editing, animation and composting. The final act processes are on Apple. The Intel zeons will be shifted to the render farms and the new workstations will be based on Optron systems."
With a backbone of 2GB, the new machines will have an option to work on optical fibers. The total cost of revamping is Rs 21 lakh, the Meers disclosed. They add that the revamp will help them complete projects faster and acquire more business.
Explaining the need for effectively optimizing computers and networks, Pervez Diwan, CEO, Xfinity, states, "Using existing infrastructure and creating a collaborative environment completely eliminates the need for sequential data transfer among different workstations. It saves substantial amount of time and effort."
"Cost effective use of Hybrid SAN and NAS solutions with high performance computers empowers studios to work on large projects in a highly effective manner. Digital assets can give returns in terms of reusable content and alternately offloading of tasks to automated render farms," adds Diwan.
According to him, each year, production houses are intensely investing in latest technology. They are looking for an end-to-end digital infrastructure to simplify the production cycle and enable their creative staff to be more productive focusing.
"The Indian media & entertainment industry is undergoing a major paradigm shift, which has created a plethora of new opportunities for the Post Production segment. As a technology driven organization, ASUS aims to offer a product portfolio that would cater specifically to this kind of a niche requirement. Having had the experience of working with this segment internationally, we would now like to use this platform to share ideas & experience of maximizing productivity of the Indian digital infrastructure scenario," avers Andrew Tsui, MD & an Xfinity partner, ASUS India.
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