Editors of The Green Mile Put Avid's Fibre Channel to the Test To cope with a high volume of dailies, editors Richard Francis-Bruce, Robert Leighton and Alan E. Bell employed Avid's new fibre-channel networking system on Castle Rock's The Green Mile. The film is a Stephen King adaptation being directed by Frank Darabont, best known for The Shawshank Redemption. Prior to the start of the project, Alan Bell investigated methods for increasing the capacity of the editing team's two Avid Film Composer systems. Working with Tina Fernandez of 3 Point Digital in Burbank and Michael Phillips of Avid Technology, he settled on a network consisting of two JBODs (an engineering acronym for Just a Bunch of Drives), each containing 10 fibre-channel drives. Each of the 10 9-GB drives is two-way striped, forming a pair of drives that presents an 18-GB partition on the Avid desktop. "Right now we have 180 Gigs on line," Alan said back in September, "but we're going to need more. We're getting roughly 7,000 feet of dailies a day, where your average show is around 3,000 or 4,000. At the rate we're going I estimate we'll have between 500,000 and 600,000 feet." In addition to the increased capacity it allows, fibre channel proved invaluable when Alan and Richard Francis-Bruce needed to work on the same media simultaneously. "I had cut a scene where I felt we needed to ask for another shot," recalled Alan. "Richard decided he'd better have a go at the scene as well, to make sure there was no way around it. We were both working on the same sequence at the same time, and the fibre channel worked beautifully."   Reprinted from The Motion Picture Editors Guild Newsletter Vol. 19, No. 6 - Nov/Dec 1998   Guild Home | Newsletter Home | Top of Page   Copyright © 1998, All Rights Reserved by The Motion Picture Editors Guild, IATSE Local 700