Best Deployment (Silver): Digital Waves : Creating Big Waves

Adding value to projects is what Benguluru-based Digital Waves does best.
This is why when Reliance Big Entertainment approached it for set-up an entire
production pipeline for the studio, post its international tie-ups, Digital
Waves not only executed the project but also helped them invest in cost-saving
technologies.

This approach and the ingenuity it displayed in creating a work scheduler for
its client, thereby helping it save costs is why the company won the Channels
Excellence Silver award in the Best Deployment category.

Reliance Big Entertainment had recently announced development deals with
Nicolas Cage's Saturn Productions, Jim Carrey's JC 23 Entertainment, George
Clooney's Smokehouse Productions, Chris Columbus' 1492 Pictures, Tom Hanks'
Playtone Productions, Brad Pitt's Plan B Entertainment, and Jay Roach's Everyman
Pictures. It will create a development silo for each of these production
entities.

Therefore, it wanted an information pipeline which would deliver 14-15 films
within three years time and the creation of an animation studio to be used in
long format film animation and broadcasting.

The setting up of the end-to-end animation studio included workstations to
networking.

Kaushik Sonawala of Digital Waves receiving the Best Deployment Silver Award from Sudhir Nayar, Director-Partner Sales, Sun Microsystems.

Digital Waves was supposed to pipeline the processing in such a way that it
could be scaled up to 4K resolutions. Basically the client wanted to pump in
huge number of data to all the work stations.

Typically there are 25 frames/second in a film and one frame is of 1.6GB. So,
if the film runs for 1.40 hours, then the data might extend up to several
terabytes. The challenge was to seamlessly throughput the pipeline into the
system so that none of the users feel bogged down by its speed.

The project was recognized by the panel of jurists for the Channel Excellence
awards for the creativeness that the team bestowed in it, especially the
creation of work schedulers, as the client didn't want to invest in additional
hardware and wanted to utilize the existing hardware.

Initially, in terms of manpower, for negotiation and closure there were about
four people and subsequently up to the implementation and handing over the
project, six engineers were stationed at the studio.

Kaushik Sonawala, MD, Digital Waves rates the engineers worked on the project
as the best in the country, as he feels that those engineers worked in a
scenario that very few people could handle till date.

There is one rule for industrialists and that is: make the best quality goods
possible at the lowest cost possible, paying the best wages possible. Sonawala
and his team did the same. He claimed that the project deployed by Digital Waves
was around 25 percent cost-effective and has the capability to perform several
times more as compared to any other studio present today.

The project took about 2.5 months to take the final shape, and was ready to
use in August 2008. Sonawala attributes its success to the right selection of
technology along with the inputs from client side as well. Digital Waves worked
with TYAN for the workstations, AMD for the processor, Foundry for the storage
and BlueArc for a part of storage. Remaining storage part was built and
developed by Digital Waves on an open platform.

NR Sethuraman

sethuramannr@cybermedia.co.in