Home > Storage > PowerScale (Isilon) > Industry Solutions and Verticals > Media and Entertainment > PowerScale OneFS with Baselight by FilmLight: Best Practices and Configuration > Caching in Baselight
Baselight makes extensive use of caching on the internal storage in both the Baselight ONE workstation and the processing nodes of Baselight TWO/X. As media is added to the Baselight timeline, that media is read from whatever storage it is originally resident on. For instance, if the media is on PowerScale storage, it is read from the PowerScale. When the Baselight operator applies processing to that media, the processed frames are rendered and stored in the local Baselight cache. During playback, Baselight switches between pre-rendered frames in cache and original media stored on PowerScale.
Another option in Baselight is to mark media for pre-caching (and pre-rendering). This option is helpful when playing back media that is especially taxing to the workstation. Examples include playback of PIZ compressed EXR and doing intensive tasks such as grain removal. The Baselight timeline is organized with “strips” of media, grades, and other image processes, forming a “stack” of operations. These grading stacks go from top to bottom. It is possible to mark one strip to be cached. All processing for that strip and the strips above it are then pre-rendered and stored in the local cache. Baselight operators must be careful with this “strip cache” feature. If each “strip” in the stack is individually marked for pre-rendering, Baselight might create a lot of unnecessary intermediate cache files. It is more efficient to pre-cache only the output of a set of strips of media.