pp52-53 June issue InBroadcast
Remote working, hybrid on-prem and cloud migrations and smarter allocation of storage resources all make production more performant and cost-efficient
With production teams worldwide leaving their studios to work from home, organisations urgently need tools and architectures that will enable them to continue running specialised workflows like editing, rendering and post-production effects.
Among them is Qumulo’s CloudStudio which is deployed on AWS or Google Cloud, allowing local artists to connect from anywhere (including their couches), while experiencing seamless 30+ frames per second video playback.
Qumulo CloudStudio works with software tools including Premiere Pro, Adobe After Effects, Cinema 4D, 3ds Max, Nuke and Maya, and others. Combined with ultra-low-latency remote PCoIP clients such as those by Teradici, remote artists get the same level of application responsiveness they’re used to, the company explains, because applications get the same enterprise-grade file storage they need to run properly.
“Qumulo running in the cloud provides best-in-class NFS and SMB protocol support, automatic cross-protocol permissions handling, and full metadata fidelity,” it says. “Some of the world’s largest movie studios, streaming content providers, and gaming companies are using Qumulo in the public cloud to run their customized pre- and post workflows at scale.”
“Remote workforce enablement for those working with documents, images, and online meetings is one thing,” says Jeff Kazanow of Levels Beyond. “But those working with high-volume, high-throughput, video content are quickly learning that standard remote workforce infrastructure and dependence on VPNs will not cut it.
To help media companies transitioning creative production and video distribution environments to a work-at-home model Levels Beyond has developed a Proxy-in-the-Cloud solution. This enables secure access to media over AWS through its workflow engine called Reach Engine. The solution, which integrates with Aspera and Signiant for file transport and with AWS Elemental file processing, is currently in use by the NHL and Amazon Studios.
Smarter asset management
With an industry traumatised financially by the crisis the need to save cost is ever more pressing. Several solutions help optimise the storage of assets so that content is found easier and held on the most economic storage tiers.
Tedial’s Evolution MAM system includes aSTORM, a content management solution that manages various tiers across departments, locations or in the cloud. This includes on-prem live storage, nearline, deep archive tape libraries or public cloud storage such as AWS S3 or AWS Glacier.
Using logical storage groups and rules defined within each group, Tedial explains that aSTORM can move, backup and restore content when and where required. Live content can be kept on online storage for a period of time depending on its genre. aSTORM can immediately archive content to tape whilst storing it online for a certain period of time depending on the logical storage group. News content can be kept online for 48 hours while live sport, which might need to be kept for editing throughout a whole week, can be kept on online storage for seven days, for example. Similar rules can be set using a public cloud.
Spectra Logic’s storage management software StorCycle is designed to reduce primary storage costs by migrating and storing inactive – non accessed – data on cheaper storage devices. Spectra promotes a two-tier model with a first tier being the Primary Tier for production data and the second Perpetual Tier with various devices and entities between tape libraries, NAS, object storage and cloud storage. The software is smart enough to identify and migrate inactive data from the primary storage tier to a more affordable Perpetual Tier which is for secondary storage, distribution, archive, and disaster recovery.
Spectra explains that organisations typically store their growing banks of data on the more expensive Primary Tier and says to 80 percent of this data is inactive, costing both space and money.
“IT professionals know they can’t keep adding costly flash and disk drives to their storage architectures when capacities are maxed out,” says Nathan Thompson, CEO. “The storage industry hasn’t delivered the right tools that can easily and optimally manage data. StorCycle’s unique ability to scan and migrate inactive and project data from a costly Primary Tier of storage to a Perpetual Tier, consisting of less expensive storage targets, benefits data creators, IT professionals and organisations everywhere.”
Masstech’s storage and asset lifecycle management platform, Kumulate enables operators to search and browse assets located on any storage tier of any site.
For users looking to migrate content, the Kumulate Orchestrator module has automated tools for migrating content across hardware versions, storage tiers (e.g. tape to cloud) or from legacy systems to other storage platforms. Other standard workflows include publishing to specific formats (e.g. YouTube and Facebook), bulk transcoding, and auto-archive for iNEWS, ENPS and other newsroom systems. AI and ML services such as facial or object recognition, or speech-to-text transcribing can be plugged in to generate metadata that is stored alongside the assets and searchable from anywhere.
Kumulate also integrates into Avid and Adobe production environments, allowing editors to manage their asset storage from directly within editing applications. Efficiency of local disk and cloud storage is maximized with features such as partial file restore of sequences.
Marquis Broadcast’s Project Parking tool for Avid storage management supports the new OP1A workflows as found in Media Composer. Project Parking and Marquis’ Workspace Tools also integrate with Avid Nexis Cloudspaces making it simple for disaster recovery, workflow sync and cloud backup.
“If you’re not running Project Parking regularly, you may be wasting around 20 percent of your Avid Nexis system, which has huge cost implications,” explains Paul Glasgow, MD, Marquis Broadcast. “Project Parking’s dashboard feature provides site-wide visibility to monitor usage, allowing companies to ensure that the whole facility is running effectively, with analytics to prevent duplicate and orphaned media propagating into the Workspace Sync or Backup. This saves significant amounts of storage whilst also accelerating time-critical sync backup and recovery processes.”
A new Edit Bridge panel enables custom searches of content held on Avid Interplay systems for loading directly into Adobe Premiere Pro or After Effects. Marquis says Edit Bridge is ideal for large broadcasters, enabling users to access a choice of PAM system. This is especially important when a promo department is creating promos for multiple production genres, spread across one or more Avid PAMs. Given appropriate security permissions, promo editors can directly access projects shared across Avid storage systems to accelerate production.
New functionality now included in the VSNExplorer MAM uses semantic searching (in which the search engine understands the meaning of the enquiry, rather than looking for literal matches) to improve how metadata is associated with content in turn making search much more productive.
“For any organization looking to migrate its existing archive systems, or to bring its elderly archive system into line with what’s possible with new technologies, this new functionality will be extremely appealing,” says Patricia Corral, marketing director. “It can exponentially increase the speed with which content can be catalogued, located and retrieved.”
VSNExplorer MAM can syntactically catalogue all the terms and sentences used in the description of scenes in order to achieve “formal, unambiguous, accurate and user-agnostic metadata for content in any language”. Qualifiers – such as colours, mood, commercial names and types of objects - can be added to metadata in order to achieve more precise results.
News from Crispin is its integration (last year) with Sony’s Media Backbone NavigatorX for proxy view and prep of on-air schedules. Functionality includes easy searching and comprehensive browsing of content and the ability to review, trim and prep content in a proxy view.
News packages created in production can be reviewed before air; sales teams can search, view and download customer content and the marketing department can access promo and event content. Schedule needs are taken care of through automatic updates to the playlist. All of this is accomplished without tying up expensive video server ports.
Flexible hybrid migration
The crisis is going to accelerate adoption of cloud base infrastructure but this won’t happen overnight. Hybrid storage and workflow systems are likely to dominate with a number of new innovations happening in this space too.
Whether you call it scale-out flash storage (SOFS) or software-defined storage (SDS), organisations are rapidly embracing new storage options driven by a smart software layers that are more scalable, flexible, performant and lower cost.
“SOFS solutions are tailored to modern data centres that are increasingly running data-intensive workloads,” Tom Leyden, VP corporate marketing, Excelero explains. “These data centres are often doubling the demand for storage and processing capacity every 18 months – while budgets are not keeping up.”
SDS and SOFS have changed the calculus of deploying storage solutions. With storage as the backbone of everything, this is what this new generation of storage enables or should enable: maximize RoI across the data centre by maximising NVMe Flash, reducing hardware to run applications, maximising GPU use.
Excelero NVMesh was designed with cloud as the primary use case. According to Leyden this means that for hybrid and private cloud deployments its product provides data path separation, no controller bottlenecks and a 100 percent software only, no hardware dependency storage solution.
The new F-Series line of non-volatile memory express (NVMe) flash drives from Quantum is for studio editing, rendering, and other performance-intensive workloads. The company says it’s the most significant product launch it’s made in years because it’s the first based on the Quantum Cloud Storage Platform.
The F-Series provides direct access between workstations and the NVMe storage devices and is capable of handling multiple concurrent ingest streams and playing out this content in real-time. By combining these hardware features with Quantum’s Cloud Storage Platform and its StorNext software the solution delivers end-to-end storage for post and broadcast.
This platform is a stepping stone for Quantum to move to a more software-defined ‘hyperconverged’ architecture, and is at the core of additional products it will be introducing down the line.
“StorNext improves collaboration through comprehensive multi-protocol access, protects data through advanced replication and copy functionality, and offers automated tiering of data to capacity-optimized storage,” explains Jamie Lerner, company president and CEO. “This allows customers to maximize the value of content across its entire life-cycle for workflows such as those found in postproduction for real-time editing of 4K and 8K content and sports environments with tens to hundreds of cameras generating content.”
XenData’s new Multi-Site Sync service for cloud object storage can create a global file system accessible via XenData Cloud File Gateways. The gateways each manage a local disk volume that caches frequently accessed files. It supports partial video file restore and streaming and scales to 2 billion files, unlimited cloud storage and up to 256 TB of local disk cache at each location.
“The solution optimises an organisation's productivity by providing global file sharing across multiple facilities combined with excellent local performance provided by the local disk caching,” explains CEO Phil Storey.
Each instance of the synchronised gateway runs on a physical or virtual Windows machine and allows the global file system to be accessed on each local network as a standard share using SMB, NFS and FTP network protocols. When a file is written to the cloud object storage via one of the gateways, it immediately appears as a stub file within the global file system on all other gateways.
The solution supports AWS S3, Azure Blob Storage and Wasabi S3 and works with multiple cloud storage accounts, allowing simultaneous use of multiple cloud storage providers within the global file system.
Multi-Site Sync is scheduled to be available in May 2020 priced from $150 per month for a system that manages up to 10 TB of cloud storage and has two gateways.
EditShare’s latest version of its file system and management console is EFS 2020. Unlike generic IT storage systems, EditShare explains that it has written its own drivers for EFS, for use with Windows, MacOS and Linux. EditShare manages the entire EFS 2020 technology stack from the file system to OS drivers, which means enterprise-level stability and faster video file transfers for high-bandwidth, multi-stream 4K workflows.
It contains File Auditing claimed as the first and only real-time purpose-built content auditing platform for an entire production workflow. It is designed to track all content movement on the server, including any deliberately obscured change.
NOA is focused on efficient content preservation and believes broadcasters and production houses are facing the same challenges.
A systematic in-house digitization approach, for example, can efficiently manage more than 60,000 tapes a year compared to the mere 600 tapes a solely production-driven strategy typically achieves, NOA argues. It therefore plays a significant role in saving a much larger portion of an archive in the same period of time, helping archivists construct a bigger and more coherent audiovisual repertoire.
In order to sustain the effort of media institutions worldwide to protect their treasures in a sustainable way, NOA recently launched a mediARC user forum. The project is designed to support AV archivists and create interaction and cooperation between institutions around the world.
No comments:
Post a Comment