Speed and reliability of render farm
With our render farm we have the capacity of reliable processing of half a million frames overnight, we can process a significant amount of footage quickly.
Projectors are disappearing from theaters to be replaced by Digital Cinema Packages (or DCP). A movie can be distributed on hard drives, via Internet, dedicated satellite links or DVDs and Blu-ray Discs. Digital movies are projected using a digital projector instead of a conventional film projector. Digital cinema is distinct from high-definition television and is not dependent on using television or high-definition video standards, aspect ratios, or frame rates. In digital cinema, resolutions are represented by the horizontal pixel count, usually 2K (2048×1080 or 2.2 megapixels) or 4K (4096×2160)
So, whether your project is family distribution (Bluray, DVD) or professional market, speed and reliability is a sine qua non.
When it comes to munching numbers one has to admit that the combination of render farms and Linux provides with some brilliant tools. The combination of RAID 0 / NFS / OpenDCP allows us to distribute a given task across a local network and subsequently reduce the time needed for converting 2k or 4K Tiff files to jpeg2000 and Digital Cinema Packages
First tests (above) were conducted on a optimized multi threaded zip compression (http://zlib.net/pigz/) on 15000 film frames 1600×1200 Tiff files in 48 bit
Once reserved for high end computing systems, render farms are getting easier to use and extremely reliable with automatic quality check.
Where several hours were needed to convert scanned films into a digital format with expensive licences, open source provides now with tools that can reduce a 10 hours session into 80 minutes at reduced cost.
The versatility of parallel computing makes it easier to process a large amount of frames or a large amount of complex processes to improve the quality of the restoration process.