Over the next few years, as movie goers will continue to enjoy films in theatres, the quality of their experience will change drastically. Causing this is a major shift in the film industry's business model for production and distribution of movies. As more and more movies are shot on digital equipment, post-production services and video editors are using digital workstations for processing and editing. Digitally, they create special effects, add graphics and titles, and turn raw material into a finished product.

Digital movies are of advantage for everybody involved with making or watching films. Unlike celluloid, a digital file will not wear out after repeated viewing-it's always in mint condition. There is no fading or scratching. The files can be transmitted quickly via satellite or other high-speed connections; nobody must wait for the slow distribution of limited copies of a film on tape. Theater operators can show any digital movie to as many people as want to see it, as many times as they like. They don't need to turn audiences away or play a less than popular movie to an empty house. As a result, they may be able to increase their revenue. Cinema operators do, however, need to make the investment in digital projection equipment and servers. In Europe , China and India , many operators are converting to digital format this year. The momentum in the United States is a little slower, but expected to catch up as audiences learn to expect the improved image and editing quality of digital production.

A new way of editing movies

Superior editing capability, even for independent film makers and smaller post-production companies, is another major benefit of the digital movie format. In a digital file, it is much easier than in a film to insert special effects, subtitles and graphics, or to adjust colors and frames. Digital processing specialists use video workstations in a process called "non-linear editing." Traditional, linear editing works by copying and manipulating film in one tape deck to film in another deck. Non-linear editing lets the editors manipulate and move sections of film freely, usually based on to the movie's timeline. In any digital shot, non-linear editing can modify the images with much greater precision and control than could ever be possible with linear editing.

The productivity, efficiency and profitability of non-linear editing depend to a high degree on two factors: the ease and efficiency of working with the often very large data files, and the cost-effectiveness of the editing equipment. Both of those factors, in turn, are impacted by the hard drives in the digital editing workstation.

Enter Enhance Technology , a data storage systems provider headquartered in Santa Fe Springs , California . Close to 60 percent of Enhance Technology's customers are involved with digital editing. To support its customers more effectively, enhance Technology designed a new product, the UItrastor 16, and tested its performance in non-linear applications on Windows workstations. Ultrastor 16, released in April 2004, includes 16 Serial ATA drives from Seagate Technology. The overall results of the benchmark tests compelled Luis Rodriguez, Enhance Technology product manager, to state, "By now, I have no doubt that Seagate Serial ATA will help revolutionize the media storage industry."

Seagate's industry leadership delivers Serial ATA drives early

Seagate Technology is a founding member of the Serial ATA Working Group and the first to supply Serial ATA (SATA) drives to the industry. Designed to replace parallel ATA drives with a new interface, Serial ATA drives deliver higher performance, increased reliability, and better cost-effectiveness than their precursors. With redesigned serial cables and connectors, SATA drives also provide systems builders with superior flexibility in creating effective storage solutions for their customers. It is noteworthy that Seagate SATA drives are truly native, meaning that the drive controller electronics use SATA protocol throughout the drive, as opposed to translating SATA to parallel ATA protocol at the drive interface.

Serial ATA drive capabilities include the following:

Native Command Queuing and Deferred Spin were offered by Seagate Technology before any of its competitors did.

Verifying the value of SATA for high-definition video editing

Asked why Enhance Technology used Seagate SATA drives for its new system, Tinno Chen, Director of R&D, explains, "Consistently, Seagate has delivered the best levels of reliability and performance in its products. When they came out with SATA, it was only natural for us to jump on the opportunity to help users become more productive and save money." Rodriguez adds, "Seagate was wise enough to see very early in which direction drives needed move, and their strategy was a perfect for the needs of our video-editing customers."

To test SATA performance, Enhance Technology set up a typical high-definition, non-linear editing environment on the Microsoft Windows platform. Tinno Chen and his team conducted the SATA performance tests using a Liquid Chrome system and benchmark parameters from Pinnacle Micro, a leading provider of optical storage systems. 16 Seagate 250GB SATA drives were configured in two aggregated RAID 5 arrays. The Fibre Channel host bus adapter for the tests was supplied by QLogic.

The testing took place over several days. In typical high-definition video editing tasks, editing file sizes tend to be between 200MB and 300MB large. Enhance Technology tested using a wide range of file sizes between 4MB and 5000MB, and block sizes of 64KB, 512KB, 1024KB and 2048KB. The testers established performance measures for linear reading, random reading, and linear writing of the SATA drives. Average disk usage was for play, ranging from 27 percent to 47 percent, and record, at a consistent 11%.

The following table shows only a few of the values produced and maintained during the testing process:

"With these strong results in hand, we want to show what the performance will be like on an Apple Macintosh platform," says Chen. Enhance Technology will conduct a similar series of benchmarks using a Final Cut Pro video editing workstation running on the Mac operating system.

Why Seagate SATA makes good business sense for systems providers and the film industry

The video editing industry has been using mostly SCSI and parallel ATA drives, and systems providers as well as users are reluctant to abandon a reliable, working solution unless they are offered compelling advantages. Enhance Technology feels that the new Seagate SATA drives may lead to dramatic changes in the way digital films are created, produced and stored. Near-line editing workstations today can cost from approximately US$25,000 to $50,000. SATA drive technology offers significant flexibility in lower-end systems while keeping their costs down. Customers can still use SCSI drives for higher-end performance needs. "Systems providers can now offer video-editing workstations with SATA-based storage systems that give you a higher performance than Parallel ATA-at a fraction of the cost of the higher end systems," says Luis Rodriguez.

In addition to the SATA features already mentioned, hot plugging was attractive to Enhance Technology and its customers. Users can swap out SATA drives without powering down the entire system. Parallel ATA is not designed to accommodate hot plugging. "It happens sometimes," Tinno Chen says, that users need to replace a drive in a hurry. When you're working under a tight deadline, it helps if you can do so without completely interrupting your work. This is definitely a situation where Serial ATA helped us overcome a limitation of Parallel ATA, and it means a great deal to customers."

The economy of high-end video editing may well be transformed by the availability of Seagate SATA drives. Digital film editing is a crowded and highly competitive field. Post-production service providers are always under pressure to squeeze in more projects in less time, and with smaller margins. Now, with SATA drives, they may be able to offer their clients high-quality work at a very reasonable cost, and can get as much or more work done as they did when they were using legacy drive interface technologies. The improved affordability of Seagate SATA drives may also make it easier for independent and emerging film makers to complete their editing processes and get their work in front of audiences. Which means that, as a movie buff, thanks to Seagate SATA drives, you may have a lot more to look forward to as cinemas adopt the digital format.