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Many facilities have come to rely on systems from Autodesk. Max-T's products are unique in their ability to integrate within an Autodesk environment, and to improve the workflow between Autodesk and non-Autodesk systems.
Autodesk effects systems (Discreet® Inferno®, Flame®, Flint®) and editing systems (Discreet® Fire®, Smoke®) powerhouses are used for projects of many different resolutions, from standard definition video right up through 2K and higher film resolutions. These systems employ direct attached storage (DAS) in the form of stone disk arrays to deliver the guaranteed I/O rates that the demanding applications require.
What has proved challenging has been integrating the Autodesk systems with the rest of a facility. When systems employ DAS with proprietary file systems or structures, proprietary software is required to get material into and out of the system. As such, for new material to arrive on the system from somewhere else in the facility, the transfer must be initiated from the system itself. Our Xstoner™ technology overcomes this limitation and offers the bridge between Autodesk systems and the other components of any facility.
It's rare these days that a facility relies on tools from a single vendor to get the job done. There has been a strong move to PC and Mac based applications as the power of the hardware and available software applications has increased. This trend started with 3D and has now made its way into the 2D realm with offerings from such vendors as Apple, Autodesk, Adobe, Digital Fusion, and others. With this move comes the added complexity of how these systems are networked as the DAS model of connecting local storage on all the systems is problematic on many levels (e.g. duplication of data, backup, points of failure, etc.).
Our Sledgehammer™ system effectively addresses all the issues raised above. It is the high-speed centralized file server for all PC and Mac based applications, and provides via Xstoner, the ability to move data quickly between Sledgehammer and any Autodesk system in the background while artists continue to work.
Xstoner software running on both the Sledgehammer and Autodesk system communicate directly, and all required file formatting is taken care of transparently. Data moved to the Autodesk system even appears inside the selected clip library. It should be noted that Xstoner can also be deployed without Sledgehammer for moving data between PCs or Macs (with local storage) and Autodesk systems.
In addition to providing the facility bridge between desktop and Autodesk systems, Sledgehammer can add a lot of other value when used in conjunction with systems from Autodesk:
Multi-Resolution Archiving
With the latest Autodesk software releases, a multi-resolution capability has been added whereby users can mix different size image resolutions inside a project. While this brings new efficiencies to the users, it causes the side effect of no longer being able to archive finished projects to video tape. Users must instead archive mixed resolution projects in a data-centric format. Sledgehammer is the perfect archiving target in such environments as (1) it offers access speeds easily double those of SCSI-based tape devices, (2) its capacity can easily and cost-effectively grow to many, many terabytes, and (3) it can simultaneously support many Autodesk systems archiving to or unarchiving from it. As such, Sledgehammer is the ideal network buffer for near term archives.
Digital Intermediates Infrastructure Behind Discreet® Lustre®
Discreet Lustre is the premiere digital color grading system available today and powering the quickly emerging domain of Digitial Intermediates (DI). DI poses some daunting IT challenges, especially considering the sizes of required HD, 2K, and higher resolution imagery. At the core of any successful DI capable environment is a shared storage scheme that couples tightly with devices producing and consuming said data. Sledgehammer has been validated as interoperable with all major telecine and film scanning solutions, and given the extremely high data rates at which it can supply such data to multiple simultaneous network clients, forms
Tapeless Telecine Interface
The truly tapeless environment has been an oft-sought goal for many years. The advent of digital disk recorders (DDRs) brought part of the solution as they appear as VTRs on an SDI or HD-SDI routing switcher, but they still remain to this day black boxes incapable of delivering their contents over data networks at anything approaching appropriate from a throughput perspective. Sledgehammer changes this dynamic because it is simultaneously both a DDR and a high-speed file server. And with the latest upgrades to Autodesk software adding "Soft Import" capabilities, telecine'd material can be accessed in a single step by any Autodesk system on the same LAN as Sledgehammer.
QuickTime Exports
If is often the case that a QuickTime movie must be generated for material residing on an Autodesk system, most often so that it can be posted to a private web site for off-site client review. Xstoner provides a one step method for doing exactly this operation. A clip can be read from the Autodesk system, again in the background, and a Quicktime version of it published to a web server.
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