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MillimeterSaving South Park
Dec 1, 2006 12:00 PM, By Craig Erpelding
For years, Comedy Central's South Park has been produced at Los Angeles-based South Park Studios. Today, the production team uses an Autodesk Maya-integrated digital workflow of 3D-modeled, animated, and rendered files slapped together in Apple Final Cut Pro.
Recently, producers pondered the possibility of moving production into the HD world, and so, they conducted some experiments last summer.
“We did two-and-a-half months worth of test renders to figure out the conversion stages it would take to update past South Park episodes to current HD formats,” says J.J. Franzen, South Park Studios' technology supervisor. “We mainly checked to see the overall manpower and time it would take to rebuild backgrounds and reanimate scenes that were originally created 4:3, up to a 16:9 format.”
Tests completed, Franzen burned multiple DVDs of the final footage, but the Final Cut Pro timeline and individual media clips were offlined to a 1.6TB FireWire drive for storage, and there, near disaster struck — the drive crashed. “We were in a panic state,” Franzen recalls.
Franzen shipped the drive to the Digital Arts Division of DriveSavers in Novato, Calif., where file recovery was supervised by John Christopher, DriveSavers' senior data recovery engineer. He warns that drive crashes such as this one are growing increasingly common, especially at small facilities with packed pipelines, stressful deadlines, and limited backup capabilities.
To recover South Park's files, the team at DriveSavers used proprietary hardware and software to create a clone disk mirroring each of the four original hard drive mechanisms in the 1.6TB drive. One of the four had significant media damage that required several rebuilds and cloning — work done inside DriveSaver's Class 100 cleanroom, a pristine, climate-controlled facility that eliminates the risk of air contaminant particles entering the hard drive's internal mechanism. The process was completed in a week, with all files resurrected.
