ATTO SUCCESS STORY Concordia University Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema

The Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema at Montreal’s selected ATTO Technology’s ThunderLink TLFC-2082, Success in Brief Concordia University is Canada’s largest university- part of the company’s portfolio of Desklink devices based center for film production, animation, and designed to connect workstations and to • SAN solution allows shared film studies, serving a total of 635 students annually. high-performance Fibre Channel, 10GbE and SAS/ access to pooled storage for 200-student With the infrastructure to support film production in SATA infrastructures. film production department Montreal quickly disappearing, the school secured a For von Holtzendorff, the utility and performance • Turnkey solution with simplified workflow, 2.1 million dollar fund that enabled it to transition from offered by ATTO’s ThunderLink devices made them an management and maintenance 80% film to 98% digital cinema production. easy choice. “With the Thunderbolt Macs, you can’t put • Scalable, high- solution enables a Fibre Channel card in, so ATTO’s ThunderLink devices multiple students to perform online HD Challenge ended up being really crucial, both for moving material editing and color grading simultaneously around and doing a conform and grade. Now we have Prior to the school’s digital transition, its film production • ATTO ThunderLink devices provide edge 3-4 people color correcting simultaneously, pulling staff was tasked with maintaining multiple direct- material off the SAN in real time.” connectivity for workstations and laptops attached hard drives—a challenge when dealing with 200 students. And with the department producing With the school’s new workflow, most projects involve Related Products: 200-odd projects per semester, or about 10 feature students shooting in 4K or 2K using Alexa, RED and films worth of material, the amount of time consumed Blackmagic digital cinema cameras. The raw image • Rohde & Schwarz Clipster® rendering and copying files was creating a bottleneck. files are then stored on a 150 Terabyte SAN specified • DDN SFA12K storage to handle six uncompressed 2K streams. Management An additional challenge was the need to balance • ATTO TLFC-2082 20Gb/s Thunderbolt™ 2 (2-port) of the system is turnkey — an important requirement staffing with an increasingly complex production to 8Gb/s FC (2-port) ThunderLink Device the department had set for the transition. Said Von process. Said Marcus von Holtzendorff, the school’s Holtzendorff, “If you can pool your storage, you’re Post Production Coordinator, “Given the pace of using it more efficiently. It gets copied once to the SAN technological change, we were aware that we needed and when the students come back with an XML or EDL to have a very limber, versatile system where only of their offline edit, they walk into the suite, and two a couple of people could manage the volume of minutes later they’re color grading with their raw 4K.” production.” Along with providing high-bandwidth access for the With the prospect of shooting in digital cinema format school’s Thunderbolt-equipped workstations, ATTO’s ooDual 20Gb Thunderbolt 2 with DisplayPort and storing the raw 4K image files on the horizon, ThunderLink devices enable connectivity to storage capacity was another concern. After discussing and device daisy-chain support the SAN. Project files are transcoded to ProRes or their needs with a few vendors, the school decided it ooExclusive Advanced Data Streaming DNxHD so that students can offline edit using laptops had to build a solution based on shared storage. (ADS™) Technology on their platform of choice. This step is for the most ooAuto Negotiation to 8Gb and 4Gb devices part performed offsite, a trend that von Holtzendorff Solution attributes to “comfort and convenience” factors. ooPluggable optical SFP+ LC modules included ooATTO Config Tool, a Graphical User , The system that the Mel Hoppenheim School of Reflecting on the school’s successful digital transition, for customized performance settings Cinema ultimately installed consists of a Rohde & von Holtzendorff concluded, “With a few people and Schwarz Clipster for conversion and DCP generation, the right technology, we’ve made a very complex oo3-year standard product warranty DDN SFA12K storage, and workstations running Avid system quite accessible for the students and faculty. ooFor more information on ATTO Desklink and Final Cut Pro for editing and DaVinci Resolve for And ATTO’s ThunderLink devices are right in the Devices visit https://www.attotech. color grading. To integrate its Thunderbolt-equipped middle of that.” com/products/family.php?id=15 workstations to the 8Gb Fibre Channel SAN, the school

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