Sonnet storage chosen for Oscar nominated documentary

Sonnet Technologies has announced that its Fusion D400QR5 four-drive RAID 5 SATA storage system played a key role in the post production editing process for Hell and Back Again, the Academy Award nominated documentary describing the experience of a US soldier wounded in Afghanistan. The feature-length film was directed by Danfung Dennis, a renowned photojournalist whose still photographs have been published in Newsweek, TIME, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and numerous other well-known newspapers and periodicals. “With more than 100 hours of footage that had to be painstakingly edited into the final film, we needed a large amount of dependable, high-performance storage — and the Sonnet 8TB D400QR5 was ideal for the purpose,” said Dennis. “As a medium-sized storage system, the D400QR5 fills an important gap between consumer drives and large-scale, enterprise solutions, offering all of the capacity and redundancy I needed as a filmmaker.” For the editing task, Dennis converted his raw HD camera footage to Apple ProRes 422 HQ files using the Compressor application on a 2.93-GHz MacBook Pro. The files could then be stored in the Sonnet Fusion D400QR5 unit, which was configured with four 2TB drives and set at RAID 5 for an optimal combination of maximum performance and secure redundancy. When evaluating storage systems for the project, Dennis chose the D400QR5 for its ability to support up to four 2TB drives as well as its flexible and fast quad interface options for connecting to the MacBook Pro, which enabled him to work with files directly off the storage system using the Final Cut Pro editing application. “Hell and Back Again is an important work because it reveals the true cost of war for soldiers and their families. Mr. Dennis’ use of the D400QR5 demonstrates its versatility and portability of our RAID storage product,” said Greg LaPorte, vice president of sales and marketing at Sonnet Technologies. “We’re honored that the D400QR5 played such an important role in securing the valuable footage of this Oscar nominated documentary through its post production.” www.sonnettech.com