Advanced Audio Tapped for "Avatar" Film Score

Advanced Audio provided a complete 10Mhz based ProTools HD film scoring system to the Newman Scoring Stage at 20th Century Fox Studios for the recording of "Avatar", the mega-blockbuster 3D sci-fi thriller from James Cameron.

The scoring system was built around the Antelope Audio 10Mhz atomic clock reference. All of the ProTools HD systems locked to this master clock reference, as well as the stage's house distribution system. Advanced Audio also provided modified Genex audio converters to achieve even lower noise and distortion. A 3D feature film with so many music, FX, and dialog tracks needs to gain signal to noise wherever possible in order to deliver an aural presentation in-line with such intense C.G. and video graphics as this movie contains. 

Storage requirements for "Avatar" were no less demanding. Advanced Audio provided SAS/SATA technology developed specifically for ProTools HD. Working with Atto Technology, Advanced Audio provided SAS RAID cards for the main record drive array. A non-RAID SAS card was installed to operate in tandem with the RAID card in order to perform simultaneous background transfers so the ProTools operator could backup film cues while recording a new cue on the main RAID array. This methodology greatly reduced the time that it took to backup data so that the session could enjoy an uninterrupted workflow. One terabyte Hitachi hard drives were used for both the main RAID array as well as the backup drives.

Duplicate systems were also provided for the music mix at Record One Studios in Sherman Oaks, CA. Careful attention to details were made by chief tech Chris Miles and ProTools tech Michael Matta to ensure that scoring mixer Simon Rhodes had a rock-solid system for both the score and the mix. ProTools operator Kevin Globerman also enjoyed being able to concentrate on the tasks at hand without having to worry about all of the hardware running in the background.

Advanced Audio is the industry leader in ProTools HD and digital audio equipment rentals to the film and post-production community in Los Angeles and abroad.

For more information on our full range of rental equipment, contact us at: inforequest@advancedaudiorentals.com

One of the most important components in your ProTools HD system is the record/playback media. Too often, hard drives are treated as an afterthought, even though they are at the heart of the entire system. One of our busiest clients approached us in 2008 and asked if we could come up with a drive management scheme that would eliminate the problems caused by having to daisy-chain FireWire hard drives. The ProTools technicians here at Advanced Audio had their hands full trying to keep up with various Firewire related issues, including clients bringing in their own drives and then daisy-chaining them to drives provided with the rental system, creating all kinds of errors in ProTools software.

After years of designing and implementing FibreChannel SAN's, we wanted to give our clients similar capabilities without its' expense, and support curve. Many different adapter cards, drives, and enclosures were tested until a combination was found that met our design goals, which were as follows:

• The system must have RAID redundancy
• The system must provide simultaneous background transfers
• All ProTools systems must be able to transfer data between each other
• Eliminate all Firewire connections (and the daisy-chaining problems).
• All hard drives must be removable, hot-pluggable, and able to be shuttled to other systems.
• Client must be able to easily move session data to/from their own personal systems.
• Provide feature set at a reasonable cost.

We finally settled on using Atto Technologies PCIe SAS adapter cards, a quad-bay enclosure from Maxx Digital, and 1Tb Hitachi SATA hard drives. Setting up Fibrechannel SAN's gave us invaluable experience on how to segregate ProTools systems from each other when sharing volumes. In an Fc RAID, systems share the same RAID controller, and thus the same controller memory cache. To avoid being kicked out of your ProTools session when another user reads/writes data, one must assign a dedicated drive channel to each system. We took this concept, and scaled it down to the local level. Most session workflows don't benefit from sharing files over a SAN anyway. It is complicated, and usually requires an administrator to keep track of RAID groups, volume admin software, and system stability.

The diagram below shows the configuration of a MacPro computer with the adapter cards and drive bays in relation to the PCI Express bus. Each PCIe "lane" represents a point-to-point connection between devices. Once all of the devices are installed into card slots, the computer groups lanes together and binds them to a single device. This is what allows drive activity to take place on the main RAID array (8x1Tb) while copying to/from the NRAID drive bay (4x1Tb) at the same time without being kicked out of your session.

PCI Express Device Configuration for ProTools HD

Per the PCIe spec, the card slot lane width determines the card's bandwidth. We use the Magma EB7 PCIe-PCIe 7 slot expansion chassis to attach the ProTools HD core card, and up to (6) Accel DSP cards. All of the Digi cards run as (x1) devices.The Magma host card (x4) must be installed next to the graphics card in slot 2, so this dictates where the Atto HBA cards can be installed. Even though the Atto R380 SAS RAID HBA is an x8 device, it runs as a x4 device because the only available slots left run at x4 maximum bandwidth. This is still more than adequate. Atto provides a GUI with the R380 HBA that gives you complete control over its' functionality. All of the devices shown in the diagram are PCIe 1.0 compliant. I am currently working on a PCIe 2.0 system utilizing Atto's new 6Gb/sec HBA's.

The hard drives are Hitachi 1Tb SATA drives. We chose Hitachi from years of experience with them. They are bulletproof, and inexpensive. If you try to format and mount a 1Tb drive, ProTools will try to grab as much space as possible, causing eventual fragmentation problems. What we did was to partition the drive into (3) sections, the first two are 400gb each, and the last one is 200gb. As one writes data onto the drive, you begin to slow down as you go inward from the disc's outer edge. Rotational speed decreases, and so does performance. Session data is written onto the 400gb partitions. The 200gb inner partition is a 'bumper", a safety zone. By doing this, fragmentation is kept under control, and our clients will never run out of space!!

The drive enclosure is a 1U, 4 bay unit from Maxx Digital. We worked with them for quite a while until a configuration was developed that would address our design requirements. The bay has 4 removable drive sleds that can hot-plug. There is a multilane SAS connector on the rear that handles all drive connections. A single SAS-MiniSAS jumper cable connects the entire bay, forever eliminating the daisy-chaining nightmare. The Atto RAID card has an A and B port, so (2) 4 bay enclosures connect (8) drives with just (2) multilane cables.

The last topic to discuss is how the RAID grouping was addressed. Every RAID level that the Atto card was capable of was tested using DiskTester to establish performance baselines. Since the ProTools cards do not need high data transfer rates or fast seek times, there was no need for expensive 10k or 15k SAS drives that also limit volume capacity. Hitachi quotes an 8msec seek time, which is more than adequate. One of our design criteria was that clients should be able to take their sessions and transfer them easily to/from the RAID array.

The standard (4) drive allocation method was retained that everyone uses in order to run full track counts by using (4) RAID 1 mirrors. It is important that a one to one relationship is maintained when moving data around, or it will be difficult to properly setup your track allocation again. We have heard that another rental vendor is advocating use of a high-speed single volume method so one can simply dump all tracks for convenience. This would create a nightmare for someone who needs to go back to their own personal system that does not have a super high speed RAID box running!! The only time you would ever use single volume allocation is when you are sharing files over a SAN.

All Protools systems can transfer data between each other via GigE. We use a managed GigE switch to connect systems together. You can have transfers going on to/from RAID and backup bays within a system, or transfers between systems, all while recording and playing back on the main RAID array!!

For more information on HD Management, please contact us at: inforequest@advancedaudiorentals.com

1. Buy new drives, don't trust refurbished products. Make sure all drives are exactly the same model.
2. We use TechTool Pro 5 to optimize our drives. This utility defragments the entire contents of the drive, not just the directories as some other utilities do.
3. Use partitions on large drives to reduce fragmentation.
4. Disable auto-rebuild when using RAID groups, as this can crash ProTools if a session is active and auto-rebuild starts.
5. Periodically use low-level formatting to erase drives.

You want the latest, best-sounding, time-saving gear? You got it! he following new products are now available for immediate rental. Visit our site or give us a call at (818) 955-7100 to learn more.

• Optimal Setup for Enhancing PCI Express I/O Capabilities

• Expressbox7 expansion solution provides 7 full-length PCI Express slots. This is a stand alone chassis in an industry standard enclosure with its own power supply. The PCI Express slots are equipped to be hot swappable. This chassis allows the flexibility to seamlessly expand I/O capabilities of servers and workstations utilizing the built-in transparency of PCI Express architecture.

• Endless Application Options

• Expressbox7 is the box of choice when augmenting Blade Server capabilities by adding Blade compute engines built around Expressbox7.

• Expressbox7 satisfies the ever increasing requirements of PCI Express I/O fabric in servers that capitalize on inherent PCI Express architecture for I/O virtualizations and workstations that implement VMware.

• Expressbox7 provides the basis for 'carrier grade' communication equipment built around the Advanced Telecommunications Computing Architecture (ATCA).

• ExpressBox7 can accommodate up to 7 PCI Express cards with a MacPro providing users with the capability to achieve full track counts in this configuration.

• Easy Installation

• Expressbox7 consists of a PCI Express Host Card, a cable and a chassis. Magma's Expressbox7 is automatically configured by the System BIOS making all of the slots transparent to the host computer.

Where PCI meets PCI Express

The Magma PE6R4 is designed to match the through-put required by the majority of PCI cards on the market today.  The expansion chassis contains six PCI-X slots which are connected to the host computer through a 4 lane (x4) PCI Express host interface card and a high performance iPass cable.

Magma PE6R4 offers the fastest performance of all the Magma expansion chassis available. PE6R4 provides an easy migration path to new PCI Express based computers while maintaining a consistent PCI configuration. In addition, Magma PE6R4 provides increased I/O capacity and scalability because multiple expansion systems can be combined to provide an almost unlimited number of PCI slots to a single computer.  As defined by the PCI Local Bus Specification, the theoretical maximum per single computer is 255 PCI buses. This type of scalability is especially useful in industries such as telecom, data acquisition, video monitoring, server storage, and manufacturing test fixtures.

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