Jungle Beat Producers

Sunrise Productions earned a place in history for creating Africa's first-ever animated feature film, The Legend of the Sky Kingdom. Today, the company is best known as the creative force behind the fun, family-friendly kids series Jungle Beat and its spinoff Munki and Trunk, which are broadcast in over 180 countries. Millions of viewers subscribe to their videos on YouTube, and the Jungle Beat audience is about to expand even further, now that the feature-length film Jungle Beat: The Movie has been released. LumaForge was thrilled to help set up a workflow with the Sunrise Productions team to continue to scale productions using a OWC Jellyfish and Resilio Connect.

"All our productions require intensive collaboration between many different artists here in our studio in Cape Town but also in our partner studios in Mauritius, Singapore, and Indonesia," says Sunrise Productions Head of Technology, Luke Marchant.

"We were coming to the end of some 5 to 7 years of building our own shared storage systems based on Supermicro servers and we had been struggling to maintain them with the increasing amount of volume in productions that were coming in. Also, as technology becomes faster and faster, generic RAID-based storage systems started to lag behind."

"As we were moving from our building in Westlake to a brand-new facility in Chapman's Peak, we decided to review our technical infrastructure for the new offices and we considered migrating to a dedicated shared storage solution specifically designed for high-end media workflows".

"CG and Animation workflows pose very specific challenges with regard to asset management and storage," Marchant explains

• We have 60 people working in the pre-production, production, post-production, and marketing divisions at our site. They use many different kinds of software on all kinds of workstations and operating systems, and they all need to connect to our central storage. 70% of our computers are Linux, 20% Mac, and 10% Windows.
• 3D-models, composites, and animations can take up a massive amount of space and hold thousands of assets. Also, many of our artists work with uncompressed 16-bit DPX image sequences that they need to be able to playback in realtime.
• On top of this, we have a 60-node render farm that continuously hits the server and we regularly need to exchange and sync multiple Terabytes of computer-generated textures, models, and high-resolution renders with the artists in our partner studios on the other side of the world.
• Security and user management are both very important. We need to be able to limit access to the server so that the people working off our network only have access to the files they need. And, ideally, we need to be able to encrypt sensitive data on a volume basis. We couldn't do this with our general RAID system.

"When you speak with big server companies, they just go: 'Oh, you are in the media industry, you will need a million-dollar SAN and you will need these and these switches.' They don't even ask about your workflows. So Matthys Pretorius from After Dark Post advised me to take a look at LumaForge OWC Jellyfish storage.

"So we were looking for a new storage solution that would provide a very high sustained bandwidth combined with intelligent caching to give us the high number of IOPS and the low latency that we require. A system that also would integrate perfectly with our existing network, our render farm, our IPA directory server, and our file syncing solution."

"I have worked in the tech industry for a very long time," Marchant continues. "One thing that always captures me when talking with tech companies is that you get a pre-sales pitch saying 'Oh, yes it’s gonna be faster...we have these technologies and all these weird and wonderful things'...But when it actually comes down to receiving the hardware, installing it, setting it up, that’s when the pitfalls come. And I have to say, when the team from LumaForge came here and we set up that server... everything they promised that it would be able to do, it did."

1. Performance

"Our reads and writes are amazing. We can playback multiple concurrent high-bandwidth video files and DPX image sequences in realtime. Thanks to the buffering technology that LumaForge has developed, all our workstations and render nodes can hit the server at the same time without affecting performance or latency. And we still have a lot of headroom for future expansion".