News Feature

Technology on a Budget: How to Build a 1.5 Terabyte SAN for Less than $35,000

By Scott Berinato

January 01, 2002 — CIO — Lew Goldstein is a sound supervisor editor for C5 Inc. in New York City. C5 does postproduction audio for major motion pictures?which means it creates or embellishes every sound you hear in a movie from a dog bark to every spoken word. They put the hurricane in Cape Fear. The woodchipper in Fargo too.

Goldstein is also a closet IT guy. To store all those space-hogging audio clips, he built a 1.5 terabyte storage area network (SAN). He did this without a SAN vendor and for less than $35,000, a third of what vendors charge for equipment alone?never mind pesky consulting and integration fees.

His SAN has never crashed. Once, he unplugged it on purpose in an attempt to cross it up. When he plugged it back in, sound editors returned to work as if nothing had happened.

Goldstein didn’t set out to build a SAN because SANs are trendy. He did it because the transition from tape to digital editing was wreaking all sorts of havoc in audio postproduction. Digital audio files are big, and Goldstein has more than 45,000 of them. Every sound from the natural world?and thousands not of this world?is stored on a server’s hard drive at C5. Most of them are bigger than 1MB. Here’s a tiny sample: In Get Shorty, a 20-second clip of a 767 flying overhead was 8MB. Goldstein has gigabytes of "dins," which are long stretches of ambient city noise. Some dins run 15 minutes (120MB). Goldstein has a file called Aircraft Toilet Flush. He has a folder called simply Blowtorches.

C5 not only edits the sounds; it creates them. Each new movie (he recently finished Men in Black 2) involves 15 days of recording with "foley artists," people who are recorded knocking on a door or walking on gravel and so forth. Hundreds of audio files emerge from that work.

Work processes also contributed to C5’s storage problem. Because editors at C5 couldn’t share files, they made local copies of everything they worked on. They also made 6GB local copies of the movies in order to sync sound and picture. At any one time, C5 is working on four major motion pictures plus several documentaries and indie films, each having up to six editors. On top of that, directors will often change entire sections of movies during audio postproduction, which means everyone will stop what they’re doing, upload their work, wait for the new video file, make a new local copy and then start editing again.