Guava turns to Tiger Technology to streamline workflow

New York-based visual effects company Guava, part of the Nice Shoes family of full-service HD post-production houses, has selected Tiger Technology’s stoneGate and metaLAN Server to streamline its production workflow.

At Guava, many animators, producers, designers, 3-D and VFX artists combine their talent to produce high-end imagery for ad agencies. They come from different backgrounds and use a range of tools, such as Adobe After Effects, Photoshop and Maya, all running on a mix of Mac and Windows platforms.

Guava is using the metaLAN Server to simplify cross-platform integration by installing it on its existing file server and metaLAN licenses on its desktops. The efficient, built-in cross-platform protocol lets metaLAN mount the remote volume as a local drive on everyone’s desktop, whether it’s a Mac, Windows-based computer or workstation. There’s also no need to reformat storage, transfer content or configure any CIFS, AFP or SMB protocols.

With the bulk of Guava’s productions being finished on high-end Flame or Smoke systems, the efficient delivery of digital reels into DVD, Flash or MPEG files to their clients was also becoming an issue.

To deliver SD content, the VisualHub and QuickTime encoders access full-res images through stoneGate to output a 640 x 480 MPEG-4 stream. When compressing HD content, Guava takes advantage of stoneGate’s proxy mode to speed up the process and access quarter-res (960 x 540) images instead of the full 1920 x 1080. In both cases, the encoders grab the QuickTime-referenced data directly from Flame, eliminating the need to transfer frames locally prior to encoding.

See Tiger Technology in NAB booth SL6629, or visit www.tiger-technology.com.