APRIL 2017
Aiming for the Stars We are in the Auckland offices of Rocket Rentals with their new manager, Aaron Hughes, fresh off the A380 from Dubai. Ed: Now Aaron, in Dubai you were fairly specialised I understand? Aaron: Yes and no, I was running a company that specialises in commercials and feature films, however it also supplies equipment rental to all and sundry. Similar to what we’re doing here at Rocket, but more involved in the commercial side plus the “go to” company in that region when it comes to feature films. The company is an Arri Rentals partner. Ed: So did you rent equipment other than ARRI? Aaron: Oh yes, ARRI was mainly a partner on the camera side of things, so we were running their products and they supported us on the glass. We were also supplying grip equipment, cranes, dollies, tracking vehicles, helicopter mounts, stabilised camera heads plus lighting – from 18k Arrimax’s down to LED panels. For the lights, it was mostly ARRI products, but that was our choice, not because of the partnership. Ed: Did you offer any other brand of camera? Aaron: Yes, we had RED Dragons, offered Phantoms for high speed plus sourced Sony and Canon cameras as required. Ed: Now with Rocket Rentals having gear in Auckland and Wellington, there must be a lot of movement between the two? Aaron: Yes for sure, with the equipment and the crew. Our DOPs Chris Terpstra and Matt Henley are now both partners in the company, so motivated more than ever to go above and beyond for clients. They are also available out of Auckland and Wellington, with or without equipment. We don’t bother clients with the logistics of the equipment having to travel up or down; we just do whatever is required to get it to the right place.
Aaron with an ALEXA Mini.
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Ed: I notice on your website that the first cameras that appear are the ARRIs? Aaron: Yes – maybe that’s just coincidental, but we do have the ALEXA Minis and the ALEXA XTs. They seem to be the most popular flavour at the moment, followed by the Sony FS7’s, C300’s and the Dragons. Definitely the ALEXA Mini is the “go to” camera at the moment. Ed: So this is what the clients are choosing – they’re coming in here and saying “we’ve got this job and this is the camera we want”? Aaron: For certain projects, yes. At the moment the FS7 is still requested for some of the lower end commercials plus television or documentary work, then above that, you’ll have the Mini, though it actually goes out on all sorts of jobs – it’s a very popular camera with DOP’s. Ed: For the people who started out in film and have progressed to television, is it that the ARRI form factor is something that’s very important to them? Aaron: Well personally, what I’ve found with the ARRI cameras is that they’re compatible with all the accessories that you’ve been traditionally using previously with film. I started in those film days too, so all of the stuff that I used to have my hands on I know will fit with the ARRI cameras. There is a slight difference with the Mini because of the way that they’re built, which is effectively a cube, so you now need the cages and mounts in order to use the accessories. But generally, especially with the ALEXA, the latest being the SXT, the ARRI cameras are designed well, are robust and everything will fit onto them.
Chris Terpstra.
In years gone by, you might buy a camera and know that you’re going to get a certain number of years out of it, but these days, the technology is being updated
Ed: I guess that’s also important from a rental point of view, that it’s robust, you know it’s going to work, it requires a minimum of maintenance when it’s returned? Aaron: Yes, definitely. The ALEXAs are very robust – I’ve never had a problem with them mechanically. I know that when the Minis first came out, there were a few teething issues with viewfinder cables etc, but since then I haven’t heard of anything major going on with them. Ed: It must always be an issue for you that, at every major show, some new technology comes along and people say “oh we’ve got to have that” but yet you’ve bought cameras or equipment in previous years, you still have to make a dollar on that. How do you manage that – just by pricing alone? Aaron: Pricing comes into it, but at a certain point, we have to give the people what they want.
Matt Henley.
Go to https://sites.google.com/site/nzvideonews/ for more news. P 6 Big Lighting. P14 The Hard Facts. P17 Rates and email reminder. P20 Help our children. Page 2
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much more regularly. We need to keep in touch with the demands. Ed: I guess that’s another good reason why ARRI is such a popular rental camera – they don’t tend to have lots of models one after the other, they do software upgrades? Aaron: Yeah – they tend to build a platform and then they will just upgrade the firmware for it, which is a pretty good system. The ALEXA platform has been out for years now and they just keep upgrading it, although they have thrown the AMIRA and the Mini into the mix more recently. Ed: But not everybody’s got the budget for an ALEXA so, as you say, you’ve got some Sonys, you’ve got some REDs here – you’re always ready to do a deal if somebody comes in and has an idea, great plans but little budget? Aaron: Yes definitely. I’m a straight shooter, so if a client says “look we’ve got a project, we don’t have much of a budget” then my first question will always be “no problem, can you tell me what that budget is?” and if they can, then we’ll create a package for them so they get the best possible gear they can, for their budget. We are not just about ALEXA Mini’s and have all of the other options to chose from. Ed: But they’re still current? Aaron: Still current yes, but I think the industry sometimes moves on and forgets about those camera models that might no longer be “in fashion”. The C300s for example are still a very popular camera and great for the lower budget projects. Likewise other Sony variants such as the F5, F3 and even the EX’s which are still great cameras. We’re working more and more with the people creating those smaller projects, and that’s a great thing, because the hope is that they will move on to bigger projects and we’ll be there alongside them when they do. Ed: In those situations, where they’re coming in and they’ve not actually decided on the camera that they want, and they’re asking for your advice, do you ask them “have you used this style of camera before?” because from the list you’ve just mentioned, there’s quite a variety there? Aaron: There’s quite a variety of cameras, but generally, they all go together the same way, and all the bits that you’re using are the same or very similar. We try to find out what the end use is, so that we can suggest the best tools.
they think “I need a camera, and some lights”, but they forget about all the other bits and pieces they need. Aaron: Yes of course and that’s where we can use our experience to fill in the gaps for them. The glue that sticks it all together – matte boxes, filters, monitors, follow focuses and the like… Ed: Even stands? Aaron: Yes, stands too. More and more projects are being shot handheld with the help of a stabilised gimbal, so this can catch clients out – this means that a lot of that support stuff changes, you need to move to more lightweight accessories, a wireless video system, so that’s equipment that we’re investing in and it’s the stuff that we’re suggesting more and more now. Ed: You’ve got a decent sized portable green screen? Aaron: We do – yes, we’ve got some portable green and blue screens which are quite handy, along with portable lighting. Ed: And any moves towards offering 360 equipment? Aaron: The 360 side is still a bit of a specialised area, but the technology is definitely becoming more and more accessible. Some systems will now take all of that imagery and stitch it together for you. Price-wise, it’s still relatively expensive, so I think a lot of people are holding back at the moment. It’s important that you back-up new tech with the correct expertise, the right people who know what they’re doing. Ed: So to finish this up, even if you’ve gone out and bought yourself your own FS7 or C300, Rocket can still supply you all of the extra stuff you need for that bigger production, where it’s not just you, you need a crew and you need the lighting and you need the infrastructure that goes with something that’s a bit more upmarket? Aaron: Yes of course. Quite often clients have invested in their own camera, but perhaps they can’t stretch to the nice lenses or all of the accessories, so we’re quite happy to dry-hire our lenses and accessories or what have you. We’ll come to the party however we need to; it’s not a case of having to take our camera equipment, our camera – if you take our DOP you can still use your own camera kit. Ed:
That’s meeting the market?
Aaron:
Yes, that’s what we’re trying to do.
Ed: An ALEXA might be a bit of an over-kill? Aaron: Yes, but we will suggest the best compromises if the budget doesn’t match the expectations. Maybe a C300 with a set of Super Speeds or a Dragon with EF lenses. There are many ways to attack it. There are a few projects which we’re putting equipment forward for at the moment, and it’s exactly that thing. Ed: Now there are obviously situations where people come in and they haven’t done a lot of documentaries and they’ve got themselves a budget,
Auckland office. Page 4
NZVN
Big Lighting We’re here in deepest Avondale, Auckland with Sean O’Neil of Avalanche Lighting. Ed: I understand Sean, that you’re a lighting gaffer. Now I always thought that lighting gaffers were very muscly and tattooed but I don’t see a lot of tattoos on you – so what actually is a lighting gaffer? Sean: You may be confused with “grips” but a “gaffer” is essentially the head of the lighting department. There are two sides to being a gaffer – one is working with the director of photography to help him get his vision on the screen; the second side of it is running the whole lighting team in logistics. So, depending on what project I’m on, I would have a crew of up to 30 people on a big Hollywood movie, right down to 4 people on a commercial. When I would be on a big movie, for example the movie I did recently I had 3 months of prep time. That was overseas, and in that prep time, I did a lot of work with the art department, spent time with the cinematographer, drew up studio lighting plans, did recce’s, so very meticulously planned the project and had the time to do so. Then a month out, your crew would come online, you’d start to rig, start putting the ideas into physical form – basically start mechanically building the lighting. On another project, you’re thrown in the deep end on day one and you scramble it together.
easy. At the same time, the camera isn’t making the image, it’s capturing it, so we still have to build an image – that’s what our job is to do, and that’s where ( as I said at the beginning ) I come and work with a cinematographer. My job is to help him get his vision onto the screen, or into the camera, looking the way he wants it to look.
Sean has a truck full of lighting ready to go.
Ed: Do you find there’s a huge difference in the end result or is it actually, well, you’d probably get there anyway? Sean: You get there anyway … you’d be surprised what you can scramble together in an hour. Look, every project’s different and part of your job as a gaffer is to use your experience to help each project develop into a good end result, regardless of its budget and time constraints. When you show up an hour before a call time and you need to light something nice, you go “okay, well what can I do with the resources I have now and the timeframe I’ve got”, and you put something together. If you’ve got 3 months to plan it, and $150 million, then your world’s very different to a $30,000 commercial down the road. Ed: Tell me, is it getting easier now that the cameras are more forgiving, or is it getting harder because you’re now working at higher resolutions? Sean: A lot of people ask me this question and I don’t have the answer, but I have an opinion. Ed: We like opinions in this magazine – especially if they agree with mine. Sean: I think there’s a point where there’s too much resolution and that’s starting to ruin the image and I think we’re at the threshold of that now. We don’t actually need all that information. But at the same time, yes, I believe the technology’s come to a point where there are tools available in the camera that can make situations in lighting very forgiving, it’s true. We can push further into the darkness; we can hold more highlights; we can work longer in the day … in the old days of film when the sun was going down, “alright everybody, that’s it, we’ve run out” … now you can keep pushing. So the spectrum’s wider, our window’s wider of what we can operate in, so that essentially makes it
Ed: But how can you do that 3 months out if you’re dealing with an outside situation … I can believe that for a studio setup, but if you’re in an outside situation, you’ve no idea what the weather’s going to be like. There’s a huge number of variables surely? Sean: There are a lot of variables, but that’s what that time and that budget can help you do. You can plan for those variables. If we’re doing a big outside scene on a $100 million movie, we might put up 2 giant cranes holding up an 80ft x 60ft silk and have it sitting there ready in case the sun comes out. At the same time, we might have another crane sitting there with a 100K SoftSun on it, so we’ve got a sun, we’ve got cover, therefore a certain amount of that 3 months is logistics planning as well. You go through your schedule, you will plan every day and then you’ve got your other people, such as your rigging gaffer and best boys there to help you plan the logistics and, of course, when you put a calendar up on the wall and plan everything out, by the end of the first week it’s all completely different. Everything’s in flux the whole time, so you’re changing to suit on the fly. Ed: But at least you’ve got a range of scenarios that you could probably work through? Sean: We’ve got a range of scenarios, that’s correct. Part of that job is getting yourself into a position where you are ready to cover yourself outside and of course in studio lighting. Recently I did The Great Wall which is on here at the minute, the Matt Damon thing in China, and we had big sets and big studios. You can visualise a set and you can design some lighting around it and what I tend to do is spend time with the art department; often they build 3D models which is great, because then you can go “okay, this is how it looks.” So you’d stand there and look at
Page 6
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the model, there would be reference photos and they have computer artists who will show an image with lighting and everything, how they would like it to look. Then you go “okay”, but you only take that with a grain of salt because it’s the graphic artist’s idea of what it should look like. And you start to build around that. Often you’ll design something and it’s a strange phenomenon in lighting that sometimes you can put a couple of lights into a set and turn them on, and you just go “look at that, that’s great” and another time you can put up a whole lot of lights into a set and it looks like crap, and you can’t figure out why and you go “okay, well this doesn’t look good, let’s try something else or let’s just start shaping it.” Ed: So you’re saying there’s no real handbook, there’s no template that you can just bung in – put in there and it’s sorted? Sean: No, there’s no template. I’ve been a gaffer for 20 years plus and I always say that every day I go to work I learn 100 new things. You never stop. Ed: A shining light in our industry, Mr Dedo Weigert, once told me that it’s not all about the amount of light – it’s about the quality of the light? Sean: Oh absolutely, absolutely. The biggest sin in lighting is over-lighting. When I go to a movie and it’s over-lit I can’t watch it. Less is more. There are two things I always say are my little lighting mantras – light needs to feel like it belongs where it’s landed and the light needs to feel like it’s travelled a bit. Ed: So you mean through a scene, so there’s some change in the light through a scene? Sean: It can’t look like it’s been dumped there; it needs to feel like it’s travelled there. It’s hard to explain, but putting too much light into something … Ed: It becomes too flat – is that what you’re saying? Sean: Well it’s not necessarily flat, it’s just that when I watch a movie that I can’t see has been lit and how it’s been lit, to me that’s great lighting, because I go “that looks really good”, it doesn’t look to me like it’s a studio and I know that it is. Do you know what I mean? Ed: What’s an example of a movie that you’ve seen recently … I come back to one of my favourite movies for the images Memoirs of a Geisha and it doesn’t matter what the story was about, I just thought cinematographic-wise …?
Familiar Auckland location lighting.
amount of light, so if you’re doing an outside shoot, the sun can actually be a negative, something you’ve got to get rid of, or tame? Sean: Yes we’ve got a lot of tools in our armoury that we use to control the sun. We just call it “daylight control” – you know anything from 6ft silks, reflectors, right up to what we carry in the truck. Once we go over that, we start building big ones, we suspend them off cranes, you know anything up to 80ft giant silks. You need a crew of people to wrangle those, riggers, it’s expensive to put that stuff up, and mostly it comes out on big budget movies, you don’t do that on a little commercial down the road. There’s a lot we can do. The big thing is if you’re on a big movie, you might shoot one daylight scene over two days, so you’ve got to try and keep the continuity of light somewhat consistent in those two days. One movie in particular that we did, Yogi Bear for Warner Brothers, we shot out here in Woodhill Forest some years back … and in a forest your sunrise is incredibly late because you’ve got 50 feet of trees. We’d start at 7.00 in the morning, the sun wouldn’t pop over the trees till 10 o’clock, then there were shadows going in one direction and then you
Sean: Dion Beebe shot that and he won an Academy Award for cinematography. Ed: Well perhaps I am on the right track! Sean: I did a film with Dion a long time before that. He’s a good man, he’s a fantastic cinematographer without question. So yes, things like that … I can’t pick one off the top of my head, there are too many. Ed: A badly lit one? Sean: Oh look you don’t ever in print. I know what they are, your imagination. There’s plenty out there, you don’t need me to tell
put that but use of them you.
Ed: Okay, just going back a bit, you talk about the film days when the sun got low, that was the end of the shoot, you couldn’t do anymore, because then they needed that amount of light to actually make things work. These days you don’t need that Page 8
had the sun beaming straight down on you in the middle of the day, so this was a challenge to try and keep lighting continuity throughout the day. We were busy; we had a myriad of silks strung up in the trees, so we’d create sun in the morning, then let the sun do its thing and try and control it in the middle of the day, and then try and create it at the end of the day. So those are the challenges you’ve got in trying to create a continuity. It’s not so bad on commercials where you’re just grabbing shots reasonably quickly and sticking them together, but on a film it can be a challenge. Ed: On the smaller shoots, say you’re looking at doing a commercial and you have the minimum crew and you have the minimum budget and therefore you’ve got to be very careful in your choice of lights. Is this something that’s difficult for you to bring that movie knowledge where you’d like to do Ben-Hur but in fact you’ve got to do it in a day and in quite a small location? Sean: It is. Lamp selection is part of your job; it’s part of the vision. When you’re a gaffer and you look at a scene on a set or an exterior thing, you know what you want it to look like, so then you select a lamp from your inventory that’s going to do that. Yes, if people don’t have the budget for the big lamps, we select something smaller, but going back to your previous question about which lamps, now you’ve got these higher output lamps, like the M-Series PARs, like the SkyPanels, coming in a smaller package, you can do that now. You can put up an M-90 PAR … Ed: With a couple of lights you can make it appear as though you’ve got a whole lot of lights?
Sean: Yes … well not a whole lot of lights, you’re just getting bigger outputs from smaller lights, so it’s manageable and it’s quick. I’d go into a house now to do interior stuff on commercials and I’ll poke a couple of PARs through the window and take a SkyPanel or 2 inside and it’s done you know. You’ve got much more usable tools that you can do with fewer people. Ed: Okay, that leads me into the technical side of the lights themselves – obviously the technology has changed in the years, especially now with fluros, LEDs and plasmas coming along, is the new technology helping you a lot? Sean: Absolutely. The technology is advancing, the LEDs are fantastic now, they are replacing the smaller incandescent units. We used to use small tungsten and daylight units; now you’ve got high output LEDs, you can dial in any colour. Ed: That ability to dial in any colour, is that really valuable to you because you don’t have to be rushing round with gels to compensate for the time of day? Sean: Oh absolutely. I think most gaffers would tell you that the day we get rid of gel altogether will be a happy day. Trying to wrangle it, it’s a mess, you know burning out and stuff. But it’s part of the game, creating colours. Ed: Is it creating colours or is it balancing for colour? Sean: Oh it’s both. It’s not just balancing, it’s creating a look, and when you’ve got big lights and you’ve got to put heavy gels on them, they’re cooking and burning … you know it’s a bit of a task. Now that we have these lights that are high output and versatile in that we’re not using gel, that’s a good thing I think.
Page 9
Realistically we’ll never see the end of gel because there are other fixtures at the higher end of the output. I don’t think the LEDs are going to end up replacing that big unit. Ed:
HMIs for example?
Sean: Yes, the HMIs. In saying that, I don’t know, but you can’t get an LED to project a lot of light 100 metre down the road, which you can with an 18K Arrimax for example.
Ed: Did you have to “sing for your supper” at the symposium? Sean: Not at all. But over the last 4-5 years, I’ve been doing a lot of films around Asia, and I’ve met ARRI guys when they’ve come to the set, so it was great to be invited. It was a fantastic event, it really was, in such a beautiful setting and it was great to be there and meet
Ed: I think they tend to get a bit hot in their backsides. Sean: Yes they do, but you know, technology will advance. Ed: Well I’ve seen the plasmas and I’m interested at this year’s NAB to research that a bit more as to whether there has actually been further advance in plasma technology. I understand that you’ve had a recent trip to Lake Fuschl near Salzburg courtesy of Mr ARRI. What was the reason for that? Sean: ARRI have their lighting symposium there every 2 years and it was great to be invited. I’ve had a long relationship with ARRI. When I started my lighting company in 2000, I bought ARRI equipment, we know it to be reliable and long lasting and 17 years later most of that gear’s still working in my truck and coming out on the set every day.
A big set in China. Page 10
a lot of amazing people, and actually put faces to the products. When you’re stuck down here at the bottom of the world, cardboard boxes arrive and you unpack them and they’re ARRI and they’re shiny and beautiful and you put your sticker on them and you take them to work. But to actually meet the people was really special and they’re a fantastic group, they really are like a big family and we had such a great time. The symposium was a mix of some really useful workshops and education, showing us the new products that are coming which I can’t tell you about, because it’s top secret and only those there are allowed to know, but you’ll find out in due course … and a bunch of fun. Then we visited the factory just to see how it’s all put together … I’m one of those people who likes to know how stuff’s made. I watch those documentaries about factories and things like that, so it was cool, it was a really great trip. Ed: Well if you read the recent February issue of NZ Video News, you’ll see there’s a full tour of the ARRI lighting factory near Rosenheim that you went to. Now Sean’s going to tell us his favourite bit of ARRI kit. Sean: I guess the favourite stuff’s always going to be the latest to an extent. The SkyPanel of course is fantastic – we all know why, it’s so versatile and it’s upgradable and there’s new firmware that comes out with it, with variations that I can’t tell you about either, because it’s top secret. But that’s a great asset and having that versatility in a lamp is fantastic. ARRI are at the forefront of that game at the moment and it can only get better. The other lights that I’ve purchased recently I really like are of course the MSeries HMI PARs. We’ve got rid of the lens system and now we’ve got these versatile high output lamps with a fantastic reflector that hold the quality of light through the focus. A lot of lamps, when you start to spot them, it not only increases the output but it sort of changes the texture of the light to an extent. Ed: Texture – I’m interested in your definition of “texture of the light”? Sean: I don’t have a definition of that; I can’t actually explain it. If you like … we know what soft light is, we know what hard light is, so they’re 2 ends of the texture of the light. But what happens in between is that there’s a whole spectrum of the quality of light, not just the amount, there’s a “quality” in the light. Some lamps you put up have a good quality that comes out straight out of the fixture; some don’t. It’s hard for me to explain, I can just see it. When I turn a light on and go “oh that’s nice light”; if I turn another light on it’s
“It’s only a model.”
different and I go “oh okay, I don’t really like that light.” I guess it’s just your eye. Ed: It’s a bit like baking? Sean: A bit like baking. Sometimes you put the same ingredients in the oven and they don’t always come out the same! Ed: Now how do you pass all this on … obviously you’ve got a passion for this business, do you take on apprentices, do you do any lectures, talk to industry people? Sean: I have in the past. I’ve got a team of people who have worked with me for a long time – I guess you pass your knowledge on that way. There are young people coming through all the time but it’s hard to take on apprentices though we call them trainees. But we should and the industry as a whole needs to have a look at this because we haven’t embraced that and, at the moment, we’re in deep trouble because there’s no crew. We haven’t spent the time doing that over the last 10 years but, to be fair, the industry was in a slump for a long time, so that’s probably one of the reasons. People also need to survive and make a living,
Page 11
and sometimes to get trainees on, production companies don’t want to pay them. So this is a thing the industry as a whole needs to have a look at. We need to invest in training more young people to a high standard; I know they go to film schools and the film schools are great for the technical knowledge, but working in the environment is a whole different game and adapting that technical knowledge into the working environment is what they’ll learn on the set. So yes, we all need to take responsibility for that and sooner rather than later. Ed: Sean’s got a story to finish us off. Sean: Well for me, it’s interesting to note that I’m doing an article in a video magazine. My first job in the industry was with a company called Marmalade Video in Wellington in the mid-80s. I was the runner there and the studio sweeper and teaboy and that’s where it all started. Ed: You developed a passion for the lighting rather than the camera, or is that where they pushed you? Sean: No, I just ended up going out on the shoots and doing a little bit of lighting. Grant Lahood was the cameraman there, he’s a top man and I’d help him carry the lights and set up a few lights and then on the bigger jobs they’d get gaffers in and I sort of ended up going out with some of the local gaffers and that’s where it all started.
More big set in China.
Ed:
So you haven’t actually got a degree in lighting?
Sean: No. Ed: A degree in life perhaps? Sean: Yeah. Look, at the end of the day, lighting’s something you learn by doing it and you’re learning every day, you don’t stop. You can’t teach lighting in a 3 year course – it’s a lifetime course. Ed:
And it’s absorbing?
Sean:
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Yes it sure is.
NZVN
The Hard Facts aka “they’re going to fail – it’s just a question of when?” We’re here at the offices of VST New Zealand with Douglas Leung and engineer Edward Tong. We’re here to find out some facts about hard drives and a bit more in general on the whole development of storage including some of the myths and some of the ways that you can protect yourself. Ed: Now Douglas, my understanding is that there are 3 basic types of drive – there’s an optical drive, there’s a spinning disc hard drive and there’s an SSD drive or solid state drive. Could you just run us through the differences between the 3? Douglas: Optical drives are not our speciality so let’s just look at hard drives and SSDs. A hard drive ( spinning disc ) is more designed for everyday use and long-term archiving, the performance is not going to be as great as a solid state drive. SSD is always going to be faster because it is NAND storage, SSD’s may have better performance, but have a limited write cycle. They’re not designed to store for long-term meaning they’re not ideal for archiving. Most people put the front end with SSD if they need the performance but then, when they need to archive, they will back it up to their hard drive. The next thing we also need to consider is …
Edward: Actually performance will not drop, but you can say it will push the lifespan closer to its end in SSD. However, in a hard drive, the longer it runs the performance will drop because of wear and tear, because it is mechanical, so the rotor may not be as efficient as before, so it might need more time to search for stuff and the performance might drop. However, that doesn’t mean that the hard drive will die soon though, which is the main difference. An SSD would continue to perform until it reaches that state and potentially die suddenly. Ed:
That’s a bit of a downside?
Ed: Just a point here – you say that SSDs don’t have such a long-term life, so you mean they’re going to fail earlier than a spinning disc hard drive? Douglas: When you reach the maximum write cycle of the SSD, they are pretty much guaranteed to fail, the question is when? You have a set number of terabyte you can write on the SSD before it will die. All SSD will have a mean number, it’s different on each model, Endurance TBW is what it’s called, so the more you write on your SSD the sooner it will reach its max write cycle, after that the SSD would have reached close to the end of its life, is it guaranteed to die? Probably not, but it’s only a matter of time. Ed: How do you know you’ve reached the max write cycle? Edward: There are ways that will show you that figure, usually it is under a list called SMART. The SMART list is a list of all the essential hard drive status. All SSDs and all hard drives have got one and so by monitoring the status of your hard drive, you will be able to know when it reaches that max write cycle. Ed: So it’s just software that you have loaded in your machine? Edward: For end-users, you will need to install software to read the SMART list from the HDD or SSD. If you have a stack of SSDs or hard discs that work together in an array, those systems will normally have inbuilt software or a feature that will run this test and monitor the drive’s status, some of them even have a report feature. Ed: Is an SSD like a big flash drive in that the performance reduces over time as you continue to write, and rewrite – the amount of space that is actually available decreases because sectors go bad?
Douglas and Edward.
Edward: It is very much a downside, so that is why people would not use SSDs for archiving, it is too dangerous. Ed: So that means it is really important to have that monitoring software on your machine if you are using SSDs and I know especially for people doing high end graphics, they’re using SSDs because of the performance? Edward: They should monitor their SSD regularly. For end-users I suggest they run the test after a year of using the SSD; once the write cycle builds up, you might even consider doing this twice a year. There is not really a suggested period of time of when to monitor the SSD, it all comes down to how the user is using it – obviously if you write a lot, you might want to check it more often. Ed: What you say about the life of an SSD brings to mind people who are using MacBooks and Windows laptops for editing; if they just used the hard drive in the laptop, is this going to cause them a problem quite soon? Douglas: Yes it would do if they put the video data on to the SSD in the MacBook, because they do a lot of “write cycles” that would actually shorten the lifespan of the SSD. With the introduction of higher resolution
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footage, it is not common for us to see users putting the footage on the SSD. Usually, most of the postproduction houses or video editors put their footage on a direct attached storage device through USB or Thunderbolt connection, otherwise they put it on the NAS or a video editing SAN; if they do it on the Mac itself then they will kill the drive pretty quickly.
putting a spindle drive in to store data. This upgrade path would let you benefit from the speed of an SSD and the archiving function of a spindle drive.
Ed: And that means their operating system and everything else goes too?
Douglas: Basically all the time. In the old days, when you had a hard copy of a file – printed or photograph – you would store it somewhere you know it’s going to be safe, but now that everything is digital – you have your video, you have your photos – if you store it on your hard drive, even though that hard drive is more safe than SSD, you don’t know when it’s going to fail, and if it does fail, it’s out of your control and you are going to lose everything. So what we teach the reseller and the user is that backup and backup the backup of your data, because you don’t know, you’re not in control; if something does fail, you can’t get it back.
Douglas: Yes, if you are storing everything on the same SSD. This is why we always suggest that they backup their data as often as possible, so that they can always retrieve their critical data when needed. Ed: Just on the spinning hard discs again, I know this is something that I have found in the past, that I’ve turned my machine on and one of the drives just seems to be slow to start up. Is this an indication that things aren’t going as they should and that’s the point when you should think about transferring that on to a new disc? Edward: Yes, absolutely. Usually that means that there are 2 things you need to look into – after you run a PC or even a Mac for a long time, you will see some “fragmentation” on the drive. Sometimes, by running a defragmentation, you will be able to speed up the process again. But, like I said, over time, because hard drives are mechanical, they will suffer wear and tear, the performance would drop. In that sense, you should look into upgrading the hard drive. Because SSD pricing has dropped more people are getting an SSD to use as the main drive for their OS but at the same time,
Ed: So that works because you’re actually reading most of the time off your operating system, rather than writing to it, although I understand Windows is a bit naughty in that way, in that it writes stuff all the time?
Ed: But it’s been well documented that you don’t leave a hard drive sitting on a shelf. So you might back something up, but if you’ve got a spinning disc and you take it out of your machine and you put it on the shelf, you should fire it up every now and again to make sure it spins. Is that true or not? Edward: If this is the backup method the user has in place, yes exactly. So in that sense, yes, from time to time you actually have to check on the hard drive. Ed: What’s a time period – 3 months, 6 months, a year?
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Edward: My suggestion is if you’re worried about that, then you should do your backups frequently and also check it no less than once a week. Ed: You should make sure all your hard drives spin up at least once a week? Edward: Yes, you should, so if the backup copy is lost you can quickly back up to another medium Ed: Wow. there?
That’s going to scare a lot of people out
Douglas: Yes, but this back up method is quite dated, a lot of people in the market are using a portable hard drive as their backup. First we have to keep in mind that a backup is having two copies of your data, we have heard customers telling us they move all their data to a portable hard drive and that is their back up strategy. Also you’ve got to think about how you treat the portable hard drive, you unplug it from the USB, the drive could still be spinning down, and you put it in a car. Now this drive is a device that’s been designed by aerodynamic engineers to spin at 7200 rpm with moving parts, and you throw it into the car! These parts will break quite easily which is why we see a lot of people with broken portable hard drives – it’s because of the way they treat them. The better way to backup your data nowadays would be by using a NAS device which stands for Network Attached Storage. This is a storage device that is plugged into your network with its proprietary operation system that allows you to send the data through the network to your NAS device. Now most of these NAS devices will have multiple bays, so they use 2 or more hard drives. In the event that one of the hard drives fails, your other one will still be running, so you will have the hard drive redundancy there. When the hard drive fails, it will send you a notification or some sort of alert, you then change the faulty hard drive, you still have your data mirrored on the other hard drive. So you always have an N minus 1 on your hard drive for your backup. The system will also have the SMART test we have mentioned earlier on, to give you information on your hard drive health status plus much more. This is a better way to set up your backup strategy as opposed to a portable hard drive.
down the track the monthly fee you pay could have got yourself a physical unit. When you push your data to the Cloud, do you know who has access to it, have you read the fine print of the Cloud storage agreement? You actually don’t have ownership of it. Where is your data actually hosted – in New Zealand or somewhere overseas? Do you have hot or cold Cloud storage? If it’s hot storage, you can access it quite frequently but if it’s cold storage, that’s not designed for you to always be pulling the data down, more of long term archiving. Also the performance … how much are you paying for the performance? None of the Cloud servers are going to give you the performance of a local Network Attached Storage, because you just can’t outperform a local storage. So there are lots of considerations to do with what you need a storage unit for. Ed: Now another question arises from that, in that a lot of our readers are small operators, they might be like myself, a cameraman who does his own programmes and edits his own programmes and so your editing computer might only fire up once a week or even less. Is it better to leave that running all the time, or to turn it on once a week? Edward: You don’t need to leave it running all the time. I believe that, as long as you have a good backup strategy, as long as you know that you can always retrieve your data, I don’t think you need to keep your machine up and running all the time. Besides, like I said, no matter if it’s SSD or if it’s a spindle, as long as you keep it running it definitely will shorten the lifespan of the devices. Ed:
Ed: What about using the Cloud? Douglas: Well people do use the Cloud because it’s heavily marketed, but then we question “are you a longterm storage tenant, or are you a storage owner?” Store it on the Cloud and you “pay as you go.” The hardware for the typical Cloud storage provider is very similar to what a NAS can offer to the end user. The difference is if you use the cloud you don’t own it. Looking a few years Page 18
It’s just basic friction?
more on page 21
Edward: Yes, as long as you keep it running it will do that, so that is why I think a backup strategy is more important than whether you should leave it running or not. Ed: I know with my Hewlett Packard PC that, after a few minutes of no action, it slows down the drives or it puts them to sleep for a little bit. Is that a good thing? Edward: Yes absolutely. This is how Windows and all the other manufacturers are trying to extend the lifespan of the hard drive, so that it doesn’t run all the time. It is actually a good thing, yes. Ed: And it is another good thing that Windows seems to automatically defrag your drives because, every time I go on the defrag tool it says “no it’s all defragmented” so you should actually leave that to your operating system unless you’re back in the days of XP? Edward: Yes exactly. Starting from Windows 7, there is a tremendous improvement on previous Windows operating systems. Traditionally, Mac’s are already very good because they’re running a Linux system and the fragmentation is not so severe as with NTFS, so in that sense yes, the end user shouldn’t need to worry about fragmentation so much nowadays. Ed: Now VST – you are actually the authorised distributor for Western Digital hard drives in New Zealand. What’s the benefit that having an association with Western Digital brings? Douglas: Well WD is one of the world’s biggest hard drive manufacturers and they understand that there is no one drive type that will be the best fit for every single purpose. I’m pretty sure they were the first in the industry to start launching the different colour of hard drive to indicate their specialisation. So you have the Blue, the Black, the Red, the Purple and the Gold – each one for a different specific application. You have the Blue for everyday computing, Purple for surveillance, you have Red for NAS and you obviously have Enterprise Gold drive as well. So it depends what you are doing with your storage, then you pick the correct drive for it. Ed: It’s not just a case of picking the most expensive, because it’s not necessarily designed for your particular purpose? Douglas: Yes correct, because some of the Enterprise drives spin really fast and so they get really, really hot, which is common given that you put it in the correct storage unit with adequate cooling.
SSD division so they own pretty much all 3 of the storage areas. Ed: Because they see the market as heading towards more solid state rather than spinning disc, or do you see spinning disc as continuing? Douglas: I think spinning disc is definitely in a declining state for normal home users, but then it’s something that we can’t run without. So SSD is definitely growing at a tremendous rate because people obviously need it for the fast OS storage and the operation system and so on. But then, as we talked about, you still need the archive storage on the hard drive. So on the big mainframe systems, we are still seeing the growth in read-write discs for Network Attached Storage; we’re seeing a growth in the Purple drive which is for surveillance storage, because of the demand for higher resolution surveillance footage; we’re seeing a growth in the Enterprise storage because more people are moving their data into the Cloud and, as we know, the Cloud is just a big stack of spinning discs in a data centre. So it’s true, it’s declining in some areas, such as the normal household desktop drive, like the Blue, but then there is growth in other areas. Ed: Now in terms of the overall area that VST looks after, it’s not just reselling Western Digital drives, you’re also heavily into Storage hardware and one of the areas that I’ve seen in the television industry is that there’s a move away from proprietary connectors, SDI which has just been for the television industry mainly, to what I call a LAN cable, what is it – CAT-6 or something – and everything seems to be connected by CAT-6. Is this a good thing or does this have limitations? Douglas: I think again it goes back to what people are trying to do with their storage. There are actually more classes but it’s easier if we just break it down into either direct attached or network attached. For direct attached storage that would normally be connected through fibre channel, 4 gig, 8 gig and now the 16 gig. If they’re even older, they would use a SAS connection which is a 6 gig connection. If they are on the lower budget side, they will use USB, e-SATA and the Mac will use FireWire or Thunderbolt. Now on the network attached side, they actually connect through the LAN cable or CAT-6 cable. The move to Network Attached Storage is growing quite fast, traditionally you’ve got a gigabit LAN so you’ve got a gigabit connection, some of
If you are going to put these drives in a normal PC you might as well cook some bacon and eggs on the hard drive; it’s also not going to last that long. So it’s really important to know what you’re using your drive for and then pick the correct drive. In general it will still fire up, but then we would say it’s not optimised for that purpose. Looking at the background of WD, they’ve recently acquired HGST which is a well-known Enterprise storage company. Last year, they also acquired SanDisk which is wellknown in the flash storage and SSD market as well. So now the WD corporation has HGST which is the Enterprise division, they have the WD division and they also have SanDisk’s Page 21
the units have 4 ports, so you can run what we call a “link aggregation” to increase the bandwidth – so 4 times gigabit to increase the bandwidth. Ed: So you’re spreading the signal across those 4 ports? Douglas: Yes, correct. So there are 2 ways you can use this. If you’re one user and you want a really fast throughput, but you don’t want to invest too much money, you can have 4 cables into your PC and 4 cables into your switch and then into your storage unit, so that will have a faster throughput. Another way is what we call “increasing the bottleneck”. If you have a lot of people using the storage unit as essential storage, then you have all these gigabit connections connecting to the unit and then the line that’s coming out is the 1 gigabit that’s still going to be the bottleneck. When you increase to 4 gigabit ports, you’re going to increase the bottleneck to have a better performance. Now with NAS, with running a 10Gbe network is quite standard. You can also have a 40 gig network if you wish. So if we compare that with the traditional direct attached storage, the performance is very close to what it is and it’s also more flexible. That’s where we see a lot of the users, especially in the production houses, moving towards the Network Attached Storage because obviously of the cost, the scalability and the flexibility of this storage unit. Ed:
And this is still using just CAT-6 cable?
Douglas:
Yes, it is just using the CAT-6 cable.
Ed: And wireless performance at this level is not yet viable? Douglas: At the end user level, yes, but for most of the industry it’s not even close. Ed: Let’s discuss RAID storage. I understand that you’re spreading data across a whole lot of drives rather than increasing the total capability of that storage. So you might have say six 4 terabyte drives so if you spread the data across all six, you still end up with the 4 terabyte drive, but you’ve spread it across those six drives. Or you could have those drives working one after the other, so you had six 4’s = 24 terabytes, but then you have no backup. I guess that’s a simple explanation of how RAID works? Douglas: In simple words, all the hard drives work together to create a single unified storage providing increased performance and an increase in capacity with redundancy, I think that would be the basic definition of RAID. There are different levels of RAID to give you different redundancy and different performance. Again, it really depends on your application.
step” and that’s exactly the same with networks. Now, to finish us off, I’m sure there are a lot of people out there who are scared shitless by this stage but don’t be worried, my advice would be to be very careful if you’re buying yourself drives or network stuff off the internet. Unless you really, really know what you’re doing, it’s much better to go and talk to somebody who knows in this area. In our television world, there are resellers that VST work with, so I guess Douglas, they’re the people that they should talk to first? Douglas: Yes it’s very important to talk to people who know about the storage field, especially for postproduction. All your data is on there, on this big storage unit, can you really trust your data based on faith or someone that doesn’t even work in the same time zone as you? You want to keep your data backup running as quick as possible, that’s why you want to work with these resellers, and all of our authorised resellers will have a very close relationship with VST and we have a direct connection with our vendors. So in the event that anything goes wrong, we can contact our vendor immediately and get your data back up and running. That’s one of the goals we try to stick to – get the customer back up and running as soon as possible. Ed: Is there a website they can go to, to learn more about this and sort of check some of the facts and figures? Douglas: I would like to say “yes” but obviously, you can see from this interview we still haven’t learnt much, so I think you can check out our website at VST.co.nz but it’s best to contact us on our phone number 094448448. We like to do it the old-school way by talking over the phone, this gives us a better understanding of your environment and situation and allows us to provide a tailored solution, because obviously with internet everyone is the “professional in the field.” With this sort of technology and the knowledge required, I would like to say “yes, trust the website”, but we would like to differentiate ourselves as a value solution distributor. Ed:
And also it’s still changing.
Douglas: Yes – one day you think you know it all and the next day everything is going to be different. That’s why we work close with our vendors on the latest technology. Ed: Well, on that note of confidence we’ll say goodbye and you guys go and stand by your phones. NZVN
One of the things we see a lot is that a user comes to us and says they’re using fibre connection JBOD. They believe their 8 gig fibre channel, twelve disc unit is going to give better performance compared to a Network Attached Storage but they don’t consider the 8 gig fibre is the throughput – the maximum it can go through your cable. You have to consider how many drives you’ve got on the back end. Each drive has its max throughput, if you don’t have enough spindles in the optimised environment, you’re actually not going to get that 8 gig fibre throughput so this is just a term, this is how big the pipe is, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that the storage unit is pumping that much through. Ed: It’s analogous to the fact that “the rate of a chemical reaction proceeds at the rate of its slowest Page 22
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