Oscar winner Walter Murch selects Seagate for 'Cold Mountain'

Oscar-winning picture and sound editor Walter Murch opted for a Rorke Data Storage Area Network (SAN) loaded with 1.2 terabytes of Seagate disc drives for postproduction editing of the Anthony Minghella film 'Cold Mountain'.
The workflow and scale for Cold Mountain was enormous, consisting of 4,900 takes, 830 daily rolls, 225 video tapes and 190 sound rolls, all used for recording the film’s 211 total scenes shot over 113 days. The Seagate-powered Rorke storage system ultimately handled all of the data storage tasks required by the Cold Mountain team with ease.
Murch, whose credits include 'Apocalypse Now' (Oscar for Best Sound, Oscar nomination for Picture Editing), all three of 'The Godfather' films, 'Ghost' (Oscar nomination for Picture Editing), and 'The English Patient' (Oscars for both Picture Editing and Best Sound), required a system that could provide storage performance, flexibility, and reliability, while working in a real-time and data-intensive environment. Reliability was especially critical for the system that was first built and configured by DigitalFilm Tree in Hollywood, California, before being shipped halfway across the world for deployment near the Cold Mountain film set outside of Bucharest, Romania.
“The Rorke storage system loaded with Seagate Cheetah drives performed flawlessly during Cold Mountain's six months of production in Romania and eleven months of post-production in London,” said Murch. “There were almost 600,000 feet of dailies (110 hours) and the first assembly of the film ran five hours, six minutes in length, which would be a challenge to any system. After many months of intense re-cutting, the running time of the film was reduced by half to two hours 35 minutes.
DigitalFilm Tree provided expert consultation early on and delivered the perfect system that fulfilled all of our workflow requirements while working within budget.”
Murch, along with his team and First Assistant Editor Sean Cullen, spent months prior to production discussing the various system options with DigitalFilm Tree. For storage, the solution was clear: A Galaxy 60 fibre channel SAN from Rorke data with Seagate Cheetah drives totalling 1.2 terabytes would provide the storage power for the team’s four networked work stations. The first two workstations were used for editing, while the third was dedicated to digitising and synchronization, and the fourth for exporting files and storing the large media files to DVD.
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