Noted Early Adopter Offhollywood Rolls Out Red Carpet for Cache-A
“Having a Cache-A archive appliance that can provide source masters for digital acquisition and project archives for postproduction, while becoming part of the workflow at any point in the process, removes many of the barriers we face to accessibility, productivity and reliability while offering long-term preservation of assets.” -- Mark L. Pederson
Cache-A spoke with John Eremic (“Pliny”), Partner/COO/Director of Post Production to learn about how our products were being utilized in their facility. “In this business, change is constant and accelerating, whether or not you embrace it,” said Pliny. “As an early adopter and innovator, our constant in-house research and development gives us the unique ability to leverage the best technologies through every stage of the process -- from point of capture, to point of view, to point of delivery.
“By actively partnering with leading hardware and software vendors, such as Cache-A, Offhollywood is tapped both by major studios and independent producers to tackle the most challenging projects.
“Archiving DI projects, for example, has always been a challenge. Back when many projects were acquired on HD tape, there was an argument for archiving elements and deleting source media, knowing you could (probably) re-digitize a tape later on, if you had to.
“However, as digital acquisition grew, we realized that the problem was not simply archiving DI projects, but answering the question, 'What is my digital negative?' The RED camera and its imitators have caused this problem to explode, and at this point there really is only one good answer -- LTO archives.
“Without an LTO archiving solution, one would have to rely on something shakier -- like hard drives -- for storing digital neg, project media and deliverables. I know plenty of folks that still do. However, the clock is ticking before they get that media onto a better archival format or watch their masters slowly die off in a closet. So, for starters, it’s saved us from that fate.
The Cache-A archive appliance allows us to free up valuable online and nearline storage. We churn many terabytes of data every week, between production media coming in and DPX, DCP or DCDM going out. I would have to deploy significantly more online and nearline storage if I didn't know I could safely offload and archive it onto LTO using Cache-A’s device.”
