Case Study Going Going Productions
Film Makers Use Maxtor SCSI Drives To Edit HDTV Baseball Documentary Client: Going Going Productions Challenge: Enable disk-based HDTV editing Solution: Maxtor® Atlas™ SCSI drives, nStor enclosure, Atto host adapter Los Duros are the strong ones, the ones who refuse to give up no matter how many obstacles are thrown in their way—the ones who eventually escape the poverty of the Dominican Republic for a chance at baseball stardom and fabulous wealth. Los Duros, the Making of the Dominican Hero, is a documentary video of their story, being put together by a band of young American filmmakers known as Going Going Productions, headquartered in Gloucester, Mass. “Our commitment is to push the documentary format into the feature film arena," Chad Carlberg, 30, the creative director of Going Going Productions, has said. "These stories of simple beauty are about a handful of baseball players, but they are also the stories of human struggle and triumph.” For this project, Carlberg chose high-performing Maxtor Atlas™ SCSI drives to edit and store the work, saving precious time and thousands of dollars over the traditional editing process. The Dominican Republic produces one out of every five players contracted to Major League Baseball, according to the documentary. This happens because virtually every boy in the country plays the game, and because there are few other avenues there to a better life. The footage assembled for the documentary— approximately 100 hours of HD (high definition) video—visits shoeshine boys on the streets of Santo Domingo as well as established major league stars such as 2002 American League MVP Miguel Tejada of the
Oakland A’s. Camera crews film $3-a-month training at beisbol academies and games in both the Dominican Republic and the United States. Included are interviews with Dominican players past and present. The documentary aims to capture the passion, heartbreaks and triumphs of their common quest. With the help of Maxtor Atlas SCSI drives, Going Going is about three-quarters of the way through editing the rough cut of Los Duros and hopes to have the completed documentary ready for showing by the opening of the 2003 baseball season. Carlberg said it would have been impossible for them to make the documentary before the recent advent of 24-frame HD video, which produces a print equivalent to 35mm film in quality at a fraction of the cost. The Atlas drives also provide hundreds of megabytes per second sustained throughput to meet the demands of editing uncompressed HDTV footage.
Going Going Productions chose high-performing Maxtor Atlas™ SCSI drives to edit and store the work, saving precious time and thousands of dollars.
Carlberg estimates the rough-cut editing will also be finished in about half the time it would normally take—three months versus six—due to the editors’ ability to use Maxtor Atlas SCSI hard drives to store the digital footage for editing. Instead of the usual process of winding and rewinding tapes in order to find the right clips, the editors can just scroll through the footage electronically, a much faster process. “I can’t imagine going about it another way than on a SCSI hard drive—not anymore, at least,” Carlberg said. “Using drives for compressed media storage is a revolutionary method for organizing and editing documentaries fast. And it allows for much more creative freedom.” For the Los Duros project, Going Going has the use of nearly a terabyte (one trillion bytes) of storage on RAID arrays of Atlas drives provided by Maxtor, which has been active in HDTV documentary sponsorship for the past two years. The editing system incorporates 12 Maxtor Atlas 10K SCSI hard disk drives split into two channels of six drives each on a dual-channel SCSI host controller card. The 12 drives are arranged into a RAID 0 configuration for speed and performance while reading and writing video data between the edit system and the drives. “The AV-ready Atlas drives plugged into the system straight out of the box and did not require any configuration changes to work with the HDTV editing system," Carlberg said. He found this to be a tremendous advantage, since having to reconfigure parameters and features on 12 drives could be confusing and potentially problem-causing. Other sponsors of Los Duros include nStor Technologies, Atto Technology, Apple Computers and Pinnacle Systems. Maxtor worked with nStor and Atto to assemble and deliver a ready-to-use storage subsystem to Going Going Productions
to begin post-production and editing work as quickly as possible. nStor supplied a U320-capable 12-bay SCSI rack enclosure to hold the Maxtor Atlas drives while Atto supplied the dual-channel SCSI host adapter for the editing system. After installing the SCSI card and connecting the storage array, Going Going had nearly a terabyte of storage ready to go. Carlberg got the idea for Los Duros after watching a 1999 American League playoffs game between the New York Yankees and the Boston Red Sox, with Dominican pitcher Pedro Martinez on the mound for the Red Sox. Carlberg had spent a year in the Dominican Republic as a college student. In a synopsis of the documentary, he evokes the passion—that of the Dominicans and his own—that led to the making of Los Duros: “This is the story of kids chasing in the dirt of the Dominican Republic. In dirt ball fields they’re chasing a chance to swing a bigger bat under arc lights in Cincinnati or Los Angeles or Boston. From miles away they come, from hovels, from cinderblock houses, from rambly squares in the city and after shining shoes— to play. “Sometimes men are there to coax them, to urge them, to berate them. Sometimes it’s just themselves and the long innings buzzing with insects and the Caribbean sun. Every day they play, nearly. And every hot liner they snare and every pitch they scorch means another step toward the exit a rare few have made. The strong ones. Sammy Sosa. Pedro Martinez. Vladimir Guerrero. Just kids in the dirt with a stronger arm, a faster glove. “Right now there are Hundreds of Dominicans playing professional baseball in the United States. They come from one of the poorest countries in the Western Hemisphere. They play in the richest country in the world. They are Los Duros, the strong ones, and this is their story.”
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“Using drives for compressed media storage is a revolutionary method for organizing and editing documentaries fast. And it allows for much more creative freedom” – Chad Carlberg Creative Director of Going Going Productions
