Fox Newman Studio

Digitalization, increasingly complex scoring technology and ever tighter time frames present media professionals with new challenges. Fast, high-performance storage systems are often outside of budget or complicated to use. TrueNAS, the open storage from iXsystems, offers cost control and improves operational efficiency with integrations and standardized interfaces.

Over the past few decades, media production has become increasingly digitalized. With this, storage requirements in the media and entertainment (M&E) industry are also increasing. Increasingly complex editing studios are being set up to manage digital files. Productions must simultaneously edit the data in a secure environment and maintain the performance required to meet tight deadlines.

The Newman Scoring Stage, located on the Fox Studios lot in Los Angeles, is one of the oldest global scoring facilities. The famous and historic facility has regained its rightful place at the top since its reopening in 1997. The magnificently appointed control room features a state-of-the-art scoring console and high-quality systems to meet even the most demanding scoring requirements.

Professional audio editing workflows start with recording, move through post-production, and finally into broadcast. This process can take anywhere from months for a major motion picture to hours or even minutes for some productions. After upgrading the dubbing and editing systems, the studio needed to improve its storage systems to keep up with the data generated by modern dubbing and recording technology. Studio professionals also need multi-stream performance and flexibility in sharing files across departments. Data must be reliably stored, securely protected, and quickly accessible at all times.Professional audio editing workflows start with recording, move through post-production, and finally into broadcast. This process can take anywhere from months for a major motion picture to hours or even minutes for some productions. After upgrading the dubbing and editing systems, the studio needed to improve its storage systems to keep up with the data generated by modern dubbing and recording technology. Studio professionals also need multi-stream performance and flexibility in sharing files across departments. Data must be reliably stored, securely protected, and quickly accessible at all times.

TrueNAS was able to prevail over other solutions due to its performance characteristics, value and compatibility with 40 Gbit/s networks. Proprietary systems based on Fibre Channel not only had lower system performance, but associated investments such as in corresponding switches or complicated licensing models had a negative impact on operational efficiency. The seamless integration into existing network environments and the price-performance ratio per terabit (TB) were clear deciding factors for TrueNAS.

For M&E studios like Fox’s Newman Scoring Stage, TrueNAS offers additional benefits for audio post-production. Studios with workstations and rendering farms encompass a wide range of computing environments. The integrations and interfaces, as well as easy sharing options, make life easier for the teams required for post-production. At Fox, engineers can access virtually any computing environment and even sync with major cloud providers such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft® Azure and Google Cloud.

TrueNAS Enterprise Storage Appliances offer a range of features ideal for scoring and the scalability needed for planned workloads given the volume of data managed. TrueNAS’s built-in caching engine and maximum bandwidth enable high-speed transfer, editing and sharing, as well as easy integration into existing environments. The multi-purpose systems can be configured as all-flash or hybrid disk/flash designs for use in a variety of editing environments, including Windows, macOS and even Linux clusters and rendering farms. This flexibility makes TrueNAS ideal for a mixed M&E environment.

Fox chose TrueNAS M40 for its high-availability (HA) implementation because of its balance of performance, scalability and cost. Two storage controllers per chassis with an active/standby configuration also ensure that the systems are available 24 hours a day. The systems are connected to a 40 Gb/s network via Brocade and Cisco network switches. The client machines are connected to the storage via a 10Gb Base-T copper network (Sonnet). Streams from Pro Tools are transmitted via both Mac Pro workstations and new Mac Pro towers. The TrueNAS storage environment was set up and partitioned with one pool each for high-speed production (using flash drives) and long-term storage (using spinning disks). The storage systems also have a 1 Gb/s connection for third-party access, including backups and client downloads. The scalable ZFS file system ensures maximum performance with a two-tier caching system: ARC in memory and SLOG G L2ARC in flash. ZFS ensures data integrity with checksums and protects files from bit rot and other file errors. Copy-on-write and snapshots prevent loss or accidental changes to files. The file system is essentially infinitely scalable. The supported appliances have no limit on LUN or data set sizes, allowing studios to easily scale from terabytes to petabytes.

“With TrueNAS, the rich, voluminous sound of the recording hall is captured in our work and made available to our post-production audio experts, making these systems critical to our workloads.” – Erin Rettig, Supervising Engineer, Sound Scoring, Fox