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AMSTERDAM, Netherlands -- The Film Unit, the Peter Jackson-owned New Zealand post production facility, has become the first customer to benefit from a coupling of Quantel and SGI(R) InfiniteStorage technologies designed to enhance the digital film post production pipeline. Illustrating the impressive openness of both systems, the company's Quantel iQ Resolution Co-existent(TM) finishing system has been integrated with SGI's(R) CXFS(TM), the industry's fastest shared filesystem for storage area networks. The result is an ultrafast, highly productive environment for Digital Intermediate (DI) color correction that eliminates transfer bottlenecks and makes the process more creative and flexible. Quantel and SGI will build on their pioneering work at The Film Unit by working together to qualify elements of the SGI(R) InfiniteStorage SAN solution to work with iQ and other generationQ systems. The two companies expect to roll out the DI system worldwide in the near future. Working with 2K film images demands up to 300MB/sec throughput, so the high performance of both the iQ and the SGI CXFS shared filesystem technology was an important factor in The Film Unit's choice of equipment. Equally important though was the openness of the technologies involved. CXFS has heterogeneous client support, allowing IRIX(R), Windows(R), Linux(R), Solaris(TM) and soon Mac OS(R) X platforms to directly share data off a SAN without creating multiple copies. iQ meanwhile provides all the hooks and links needed to interface with such advanced digital infrastructures as a background task whilst maintaining all its foreground operator interactivity. "The Quantel iQ is actually running some SGI code -- the SGI CXFS client," comments Ian Bidgood, Technical Director at The Film Unit. "With Freeflow and CXFS it's great to be able to partner such a versatile piece of equipment as the iQ with the real-time color-correction tools of Pandora, along with the fast cross-platform infrastructure that SGI CXFS provides." "The powerful combination of Quantel iQ and the SGI CXFS shared filesystem delivers a welcome improvement in workflow flexibility," says Chris Golson, Senior Director, Media Industries, SGI. "Quantel shares our vision of the open facility and we are most encouraged by the eagerness they have exhibited in integrating with our InfiniteStorage infrastructure. iQ is already beginning to leverage the benefits of our open filesystem to create a truly equitable production environment where all the workstations in the facility share simultaneous realtime access to content." "iQ is all about delivering new services for post," comments Nigel Turner, Quantel Marketing Director. "Combining SGI CXFS and iQ together lets our customers build new post infrastructures that realize new levels of creativity and productivity. It's also an excellent illustration of the openness of SGI and our generationQ products. We're looking forward to working with SGI to roll out the combination worldwide."