HITS

Qumulo Prasied for ‘La La Land’ Work

Data-aware scale-out network-attached storage (NAS) company Qumulo is marking a behind-the-scenes win for the hit film “La La Land,” with boutique visual effects studio Crafty Apes, which handled 2D compositing for the movie.

Crafty Apes — known for its work on “Doctor Strange,” “Captain America: Civil War,” and “Pete’s Dragon” — used Qumulo to handle the hundreds of renders and terabytes of data associated with the film, including the five-minute-long opening shot, which itself included more than 8,000 frames, renders of CG cars, transitions between takes, wardrobe adjustments and more.

“With critical high-profile projects, you want to know exactly what you’re going to be leaning on for successful delivery,” said Tim LeDoux, founder and VFX supervisor for Crafty Apes. “When the La La Land project came around, it was make or break, and we were never down for a moment. Qumulo is our rock, allowing us to focus on the visual effects with absolute confidence the data is safe.

“Speed is directly related to our work; if artists are waiting for shots to play back then output drops and that can put an entire project in jeopardy. Having a solid storage system that I can easily and affordably scale as needed to meet growth means I’ve got one less thing to worry about.”

Crafty Apes’ looked to Qumulo for its storage cluster solution, in order to keep costs down while still having reliability of overall storage, capacity and performance. The company used Qumulo’s QC24 hybrid storage appliances, specifically, deploying a six-node, Windows-based production system, which is capable of storing more than 70 TB of data.

Crafty Apes is adding several more nodes to its Qumulo cluster, in order to support data replication between its L.A. and Atlanta officer.

For more on the agreement, see Qumulo’s case study (study,http://bit.ly/2iV2EGh).