Speedracer - Better Management of Digital Assets


Jerry Henzel of Precipice Development International was recently contracted to assist OTC Productions of Burbank to help optimize and tune the digital asset management system that was being used to manage all the assets used in the movie Speedracer. 

The movie is heavily animated and heavy use is made of 'green screens' or chroma keying. A technique where an actor is filmed in front of a green screen and then later imposed onto an animated scene. A movie like Speedracer has 10's of thousand of digital media assets that are used and tracked during production. These include everything from 3D models made in Maya or 3D Studio Max, to mockup's of scenes, to Quicktime clips that are eventually edited and strung together. All of these assets need to be tracked and managed and have metadata associated with them.

Working with OTC Productions of Burbank, Precipice went in and helped tune the systems behind the digital asset system to make it faster and more responsive. We looked at everything from the physical server and how it was set up, e.g. what type of RAID arrays it had and how they were used, to tuning the database server engine, to examining the data model and architecture and queries, to looking at the application architecture and offering advice on how to better tune it.