Blackmagic Design announced today that animation production company
Typhoon Graphics is using Blackmagic Cloud Store 80TB to support a huge amount of post production on three of the company’s top anime shows.
Typhoon Graphics, based in Tokyo, handles everything from planning to production of anime works. The company utilizes Blackmagic Design's Cloud Store 80TB for anime compositing and editing.
"When I visited Blackmagic Design's booth at last year's Inter BEE show, I learned about Cloud Store," said Takashi Sakurai, the company's representative. "I was already familiar with the convenience of working with shared storage from my days as an editor. However, network storage is expensive and not something we could introduce right away."
Sakurai continued, "We originally had a media server in house and mainly copied data from there for work. However, copying data took a lot of time, so we upgraded our network from 1Gbps to 10Gbps. We thought that if the media server supported 10Gbps, it would be faster, but there weren't many options available. When we heard about Cloud Store at Inter BEE, we found it had multiple 10Gbps ports and was affordable, so we decided to introduce it."
They first used Blackmagic Cloud Store 80TB for compositing work in anime production. "Due to the nature of anime, there are various materials, like backgrounds and digital frames, and we aggregate all that data into Cloud Store. Previously, we saved all the data on each staff member's computer, worked it on their own machines, created movies, and then uploaded them back to the server. During retakes, we had to access each person's computer to make corrections. Now, with everything accessible on the Cloud Store, anyone can access the data," said Hideki Imaizumi, the director of composition.
Imaizumi continued: "We were once in a situation with tight deadlines during retake work. With all the data on Cloud Store, we could work directly from it, eliminating the need for data copying, which was a great help."
The introduction of Blackmagic Cloud Store 80TB has also improved stability in rendering. "When we did network rendering, there were occasional failures when reading data from several different computers. We sometimes had to copy and consolidate data before rendering. Now, with all data on Cloud Store, there's no need to access each staff member's machine, making rendering more stable,”Imaizumi explained.
The company’s 80TB Cloud Store supports working on three anime series simultaneously. "We move data elsewhere after a project is completed, so the current capacity is sufficient. Besides compositing, we also do editing. We used to copy data from the server to local machines for editing, but since Cloud Store worked well for compositing, we tested it for editing with 10Gbps connections. It’s much more convenient," said Sakurai.