Broadcast
With
the industry moving to file-based programme delivery, how should all
this digital content be stored?
Having
adapted to file-based deliverables, indies are now being forced to
rethink strategies around content storage. Alarmingly, many producers
are maintaining a room full of dusty tapes or shelves full of hard
drives. A Digital Production Partnership (DPP) survey of indies last
April found that 46% were storing masters on tape and 20% planned to
continue to use tape as a solution. And 9% were using portable hard
drives, which the DPP guidelines label “a disaster waiting to
happen” because of the hardware’s failure rate.
In
practice, the principles behind storing files are not all that
different from those for keeping tapes. Producers still have to
decide what material to keep, for how long, and how they’re going
to find it again. But the introduction of the DPP’s AS-11 standard
for file delivery demands a top-to-tail revision of what it means to
store programme masters.
“This
is a hot business issue,” says Maverick TV and North One TV head of
post Donna Mulvey- Jones. “Content is at the heart of a producer’s
business but how we keep content has changed. It is no longer good
enough to put a tape on the shelf.”
For
a start, the term ‘master’ is not entirely straightforward. The
AS-11 copy sent to the broadcaster is the delivery master, but there
may be different delivery master versions. Additionally, there will
be a high-resolution mezzanine or edit master based on original EDLs
used for re-edits ahead of transmission or downstream distribution.
Associate elements necessary for versioning could include audio
stems, stills, auto QC and Harding reports, graphics packages, music
cue sheets, stills and an H.264 viewing proxy.
Avoiding
duplication
“You can end up with files duplicated everywhere,”
says Timeline TV North post-production director Eben Clancy. “Because
producers have never had to think about archive in the tape world, it
is very difficult to get them to take it seriously. There is nothing
built into the budget to deal with media afterwards and it’s always
an afterthought.
“There’s
no joined-up approach. As far as most people are concerned, the file
moves through the system like a tape, but there are major questions
for everyone about who keeps what version of which file, what happens
when you hand it on and when it should be deleted.”
These
are decisions that should not be left to individual producers, many
of whom move swiftly on to the next project. These are long-term,
company-wide policies that fall under the purview of a head of
production.
“Companies
need to decide whether to do this in-house or outsource, and that
depends on whether they have the expertise internally to manage it,”
says Mulvey-Jones, who is leading a review of tapeless storage at the
All3Media-owned indies.
Next
step: the DPP is set to publish guidance on how to catalogue, review
and search content
“One
of my projects is to assess how much of what we’re currently
spending on warehouse space could be put into a new media asset
management [MAM] system,” she says. “We can’t afford a massive
MAM but we do want select content to be searchable, quickly
retrievable and secure. And it has to work against a budget.”
The
solution may be a hybrid of content stored on servers externally, but
accessible from a MAM frontend at the indie.
RDF
is also weighing the return on investment from buying and maintaining
a nearline asset management system in-house against paying for
outside storage provision. RDF head of technical Tara Palmer says:
“We find ourselves going back to finished programming frequently,
both for compliance and project development. It’s increasingly
apparent that we need to search and access those master files
efficiently, and that a MAM is key.”
Post
facilities have taken it upon themselves to help transition clients
to the new workflows. Alongside the AS-11 delivery file, it is
standard practice to consolidate the elements that went into the
programme with another version stored at high resolution, most likely
in DNX or ProRes. Few facilities, however, are making additional
revenue from storing these files on behalf of producers, although
some are examining options.
Archiving
services
Evolutions, for example, is in the process of creating a
web portal allowing clients, notably those of fixed-rig shows, to
search and browse low-res proxies of deliverables in the mid- to
long-term. Crow TV ensures its clients are offered the most usable
collection of assets as routine. “There may be a revenue stream if
different deliverables can be marketed,” says head of post Andy
Briers.
Alongside
an LTO archive for rushes, Envy has begun offering a master archiving
service. “We are offering to store these assets in a long-term
archive, allowing clients immediate access whenever they need it,”
explains head of operations Jai Cave.
The
Farm will store a one-hour programme and all assets for three years
for a one-off fee of £500 as part of its single programme on the
shelf (Spots) service. “If you can make the price of storing the
asset as attractive as it would have been to make all those
deliverables [on tape], then producers won’t see this as an
additional cost sitting at the end of the delivery process, but a de
facto part of the programme budget,” says The Farm joint managing
director David Klafkowski. “This is not about replacing the MAM
systems at the bigger production companies. Often they do not have
the time to collate all of the nuts and bolts per finished episode.
That is a service that post houses have traditionally done.”
The
catch, however, is that the business model around file storage is one
of volume. The larger indies that are most likely to have volume are
also the most likely to invest in their own MAM systems, while
smaller indies that are most in need of a storage policy will lack
the volume or resources to make it pay.
“It’s
easy for an indie to commission, say, The Farm for one job and take
the next to Envy, but after a few years your master content will be
all over Soho,” warns Mulvey-Jones. “It won’t be cost-effective
and it won’t be secure if a facility goes bust.”
Nor
are most facilities equipped with redundant data centres and
petabytes of storage. “We archive everything we make a programme
out of and keep an LTO for five years, along with the AS-11 and
associate files, but our speciality is not in archive,” says
Evolutions operations director Owen Tyler.
That’s
where archive and content processing specialists like Re:fine or Ark
Post Production come into their own. “Every client has individual
needs so we offer a bespoke service around three levels of storage:
nearline work in progress, disc-based
storage
for urgent retrieval or thirdtier deeper archive on LTO,” says Ark
technical consultant David Carstairs.
Clancy
says Timeline would “love” to make a business out of archive but
clients don’t want to spend the money. “They are willing to pay
just enough so that if they had to find something they could, but
they’re not willing to spend real money to make finding it easy,”
he says.
DPP
on Storage
The
DPP has discussed whether there’s merit in mandating storage
standards and determined there isn’t. However, it will publish a
“definitive and more tech nical guide” to storage this summer.
DPP project manager Rachel Baldwin says: “We recognise that
production companies need to store a range of content, from the
high-quality editable file to all programme elements. We will provide
detailed guidance on how to catalogue, review and search content, and
aim to standardise the terminology.”
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