Buffy special effects house goes Gigabit

One of the companies behind the special effects for Buffy the Vampire Slayer and CSI Miami has rolled out a Gigabit Ethernet network to support its bandwidth-intensive digital editing work.

Los Angeles production house Zoic Studios said that it needed to upgrade network capacity to deal with the ever increasing data traffic generated from its digital imaging for clients such as Fox, UPN and the Sci-Fi channel.

"Downtime is a killer in our business. Besides $50,000 a day in lost productivity, it's the fastest way to lose clients," said Saker Klippsten, chief engineer at Zoic, in a statement.

The company's Gigabit infrastructure is based around a 3Com SuperStack 3 Switch 4950 and a SuperStack 3 Switch 4924, using Zoic's existing Cat 5e copper wiring.

The system delivers Gigabit Ethernet links to 24 artist workstations, four servers equipped with PCI Gigabit NICs and another SuperStack 3 Switch 4924. This switch distributes bandwidth to an additional 18 artist workstations.

The switches also feed further switches which, in turn, carry the network to the 250 PCs used as a video rendering farm.

"It puts us on an equal footing with our bigger competitors and is invaluable to the creation of our visual effects," said Klippsten.