When Reuben Lima began working in film post-production, he realized storage equipment for digitized images of films was much too expensive. As head of his own post-production firm, he heard similar comments from colleagues at other companies. In an era when most films are edited on computer, and storage equipment is expensive and sometimes unreliable, Lima figured out a better way. “We’d been storing our own material with our own equipment, and it seemed like that’s something that we could do to help other filmmakers,” Lima said. So in 1999, Lima founded Archion Digital Storage Inc. in Burbank, where he began to create and distribute his film storage equipment to fellow film industry professionals. “We wanted to cater strictly to the film industry and address some of the questions that they face,” said Lima. Now two-year-old Archion (archive in Greek) has come up with an alternative to storing motion picture images digitally using banks of inexpensive hard disk drives linked together that sell for $20,000, or about half the price of existing systems. In November, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Inc. purchased four storage units with a combined 1.3 terabytes of storage space for its new comedy hit “Legally Blonde” and other new films: “Windtalkers,” “Rollerball” and “What’s the Worst That Could Happen.” For MGM’s “Legally Blonde,” Archion for the first time installed a remote monitoring device so that technicians in its Burbank facility could detect and repair any storage problems while editors in another location were working. The company has also sold units to Spyglass Entertainment for its feature film “Reign of Fire” and, just recently, another unit went to MGM for a Bruce Willis vehicle, “Hart’s War.” Archion has grown from four employees at start-up to about a dozen this year, with net income of about $100,000 on revenues of nearly $5 million last year, said company CFO Shane Wilhoite. “We’ve seen some slowing due to the economy, but there is strong demand,” Wilhoite said. “We expect to grow in revenue by about 35 percent over last year.” Just in the past 10 years, film editing has entered the digital age, creating the need for reliable and cost-effective digital storage of film images, Lima said. “Everyone is editing with Avid (digital editing machines) and you need the storage space to back that up if something goes wrong,” Lima said. The son of Cuban immigrants, Lima grew up in New York City where his parents owned a restaurant and he first became fascinated with the film industry. “I was a photographer for a while, but I really wanted to get involved in the film industry from the beginning,” said Lima, who moved to Los Angeles after graduating from high school. A business management graduate of Azusa Pacific University, Lima worked at a number of post-production companies before opening his own firm in 1990, Eagle Eye Digital Film Corp. The company, which he still operates, featured state-of-the-art film editing and computer-based optical effects equipment. “I saw this as a way to expand my interest and creativity in the medium,” Lima said. Archion’s workhorse, the 720 gigabyte Fibre Channel RAIDBay, can store up to the equivalent of 1 million feet of film, quickly making it the industry’s most sought-after storage system because of its cost and efficiency, said Eric Rigney, manager of digital picture editorial for SPS Postproduction in North Hollywood. “It’s very reliable. You can’t blame the system if something goes wrong,” he said. These groups of hard drives are called RAID, or Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks, in which the video image can be stored in two drives at the same time so, if one drive fails during the editing process, a backup copy is left intact. “The second drive would then be repaired as the user continues to work,” Lima said. In the post-production stage, raw footage can be transferred to digital files that can be mixed with special effects, music and overdubs for a final version of a film or television show. “You could have hours of editing work down the drain if you don’t have a backup of the work. But (other systems are) expensive and some people can’t afford that,” Lima said. “That’s why storage has become so critical in this business.”
