Origo Film Group
Origo Film Group recently built the largest post-production facility in Europe, with nine sound stages totaling 180,907 square feet on the outskirts of Budapest, Hungary. Origo came to GPL Technologies to design the facility because of GPL’s track record for great service, its technological expertise, and its innovative approach to studio and pipeline build-outs.
GPL architected the Origo facility with state-of-the-art equipment in two phases. The first phase consisted of a hardware platform that will scale to handle the needs of thousands of users working with many different file formats. The second phase involved a pipeline design that was cross-functional and could tie into all aspects of the production.
For the core of the system GPL Technologies chose Cisco’s Nexus 7018 switch for its ability to handle 15TB of throughput, to handle future port speeds of 40GB, and eventually to scale to 100GB per port. The Nexus 7018 offers a collapsed core and distribution layers that are virtual layers. The edge of the network is the 3730-e with 10gig connections to the core.
GPL chose Isilon IQ-S Series as the first tier of storage. The S series offers 10K HD speeds. Its use of 10gig accelerator nodes significantly decreases the time it takes for artists to access the storage, which ultimately allows for more iterations or more shots to be rendered. Isilon’s nearline storage was chosen as the second tier, giving Origo the peace of mind that their data is mirrored.
For Origo’s render farm, GPL implemented the HP BladeSystem c7000 enclosure. It provides the necessary power to render out 128 frames at a time. The enclosure is 10U high and holds up to 16 render blades plus interconnect modules. Each module connects to the core network via four 10gig network connections.
Baselight was used for the DI Suites. Featuring 96TB local storage capacity, Baselight EIGHT not only boosts performance, it allows you to play and grade multiple 4K streams in real-time. Doubling the power of Baselight FOUR, the Baselight EIGHT enables real-time grading of 4K scans or multiple real-time 2K streams and is ideal for a high-end grading suite for commercials or film grading. Baselight EIGHT includes Blackboard, which is a digital color-grading suite that enables data migration to a software color grading solution.
From start to finish, the entire engagement took 6 months, and provided Origo Film Group with state-of-the-art-solutions that they could immediately put into action.