In the just published fourth installment of a series of Sponsored Entertainment & Advertising Technology features, SHOOT delves into the challenge facing the industry to intelligently store, manage and archive massive amounts of material. The huge increase in content has meant dramatically increased demands not just for storage, but also for content to be searchable with metadata, kept in a manner that makes it readily accessible and archived in a way that it can retain its value. Without a properly constructed workflow, even a single project can become hopelessly muddled, with multiple versions scattered or lost throughout a facility.
With the advent of UltraHD TV and 4K, demands for space and management have increased. HDR and HFR are only making the issue more acute. As motion picture studios and broadcast networks have realized the value of repurposing their sizable video assets, they have made increasing demands on their vendors. For every production and post facility, implementing robust systems for storage, maintenance and archiving is no longer an option. It’s an imperative, even for the smallest post or production facility.
This feature, titled “New Challenges, New Solutions in Storage, Asset Management and Archiving,” was published on August 15, 2015, across SHOOT’s digital and print platforms, including SHOOT Magazine, SHOOTonline and The SHOOT>e.dition.
Alex Grossman, Quantum VP of Media and Entertainment, was interviewed for the article. Click here to watch Alex's "StorNext Pro Solutions 4K" overview demo video.
An excerpt from the SHOOT feature about Quantum….
Quantum has specialized in high throughput, high performance computing for archive and data protection for 35 years. Many in the media and entertainment industry are familiar with Quantum through its StorNext shared file system that controls shared access to storage across an entire workflow. This Quantum product has been ubiquitous in the industry for the last 20 years, a feature at companies ranging from Framestore VFX house in London and Park Road Post in New Zealand to Disney and CBS and many other major studios and broadcasters.
“About five years ago, we started to look at where the future of media production was going,” says Alex Grossman, Quantum VP of Media and Entertainment. “We saw HD, more collaboration, more workgroups, not quite in the cloud, but people working remotely.” The company rewrote a lot of the over 1 million lines of code to StorNext, turning it into a platform for the workflow for today…and tomorrow.
But that’s not where they stopped. “We realized that we had moved into a true tapeless workflow,” Grossman adds. “We no longer had tapes on the shelf for archive. Virtually every facility had some kind of LTO backup, but they didn’t have the concept of the repurpose-able archive yet.” Facilities were doing more and more high-resolution work but lacked the end-to-end workflow to completely optimize efficiency and costs. “Often people let their workspace grow in an ad hoc fashion,” he says. “You’ll have 22 shows on an online disc because with offline, it was hard to get it back.”
The need, Quantum saw, was to make storage more cost effective and manageable, as well as faster for ingesting and outputting content in a fully automated manner. “We said, let’s build tools that let you archive in a couple of different ways,” Grossman says. “We already had an automated tool to back-up the archive on LTO, but there are a lot of technologies as resilient as LTO with the speed of disk.”
Object Storage became the focus of Quantum’s next generation solution, dubbed Lattus. “Traditional RAID is inefficient for Petabyte scale storage, and traditional block storage addressing can’t match the scale, access or durability needs of today, “ says Grossman. “Lattus, Quantum’s next generation cloud object storage, addresses these issues, and ultimately allows the business to unlock more value from the data. Now we can offer people the fastest performance, from ingest to delivery.”
At the same time, continues Grossman, Quantum focused on refining the way people handle content at ingest. “With higher resolution content, you need to ingest the content but you also need a copy of that raw content to be maintained for a long time, so it’s an archive ingest. Using StorNext Storage Manager, the platform now lets you even archive at ingest.”
Workflow Optimized Storage was the next step. “You can lower the overall cost of production by how you use storage,” says Grossman. “In broadcast, for example, you are getting content from many different sources in a lot of different codecs. You need to transcode it to get it into a working format and build a proxy format too. We automate that process completely in a way that doesn’t slow down the people already working on the content.”
To read the full “New Challenges, New Solutions in Storage, Asset Management and Archiving” sponsored feature, please visit one of the following links:
Click Here to read the online version of the article.
Click Here to view article in the PDF version of the August 15, 2015 PDF version of SHOOT Magazine (click on first issue on top of page).
Click Here to view/download PDF version of just the article.
Click Here to request information on future SHOOT Entertainment and Advertising Technology sponsored features. Sponsorship includes participation in feature article plus digital and print advertising & promotion.
About Quantum
Quantum is a leading expert in scale-out storage, archive and data protection, providing intelligent solutions for capturing, sharing and preserving digital assets over the entire data lifecycle. We help customers maximize the value of these assets to achieve their goals, whether it’s top movie studios looking to create the next blockbuster, researchers working to accelerate scientific discovery, or small businesses trying to streamline their operations. With a comprehensive portfolio of best-in-class disk, tape and software solutions for physical, virtual and cloud environments, we enable customers to address their most demanding workflow challenges and opportunities.
About SHOOT Magazine/SHOOTonline
SHOOT® Magazine and SHOOTonline® are the leading publication and website for commercial and entertainment production & postproduction; edited for agency, movie & studio creative and production executives, executives at commercial and entertainment production/post companies, TV/Online/Mobile networks, brand marketer production executives, independent filmmakers and artisans including directors, cinematographers, editors, colorists, VFX supervisors/artists/animators, composers, sound designers & mixers. Through its “News” and “ScreenWork” sections, “Columns” and in-depth “Features,” SHOOT publishes timely news, relevant information and a behind-the-scenes look at the best new work and profiles/interviews with industry news makers. In addition, SHOOT reports on the latest cinematography, post & editing technology and equipment. If the work involves advertising and entertainment motion picture content that consumers view on a screen—a TV screen, Cinema screen, Computer screen, Mobile screen or Game screen, SHOOT is searching out who’s doing the most innovative work and what’s coming next. For further information please visit www.SHOOTonline.com®
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