As the film industry has progressed from tape-based workflows into a digital
environment, we are presented with the opportunity to extract value from content
through better management of our content.
Centralisation of media and archives has traditionally been a luxury available only to
broadcasters and those facilities with huge budgets. Today the cost of disk-based
RAID storage and LTO tape libraries has dropped to the point where it’s accessible to
almost everyone. This means that smaller environments now have the ability to
centrally store, administrate and protect their data from loss.
As an example, we look at a small post-production facility. They have probably
bought external storage as or when it was required over the past few years. By now,
the mountain of external hard drives has become a daunting web of duplicated
content. Nobody really knows what’s been stored on the drives yet everyone lives in
fear of data loss. Centralising their storage enables easy search and access to all
content for multiple users at the same time. Adding MAM (Media Asset Management)
software also gives users the ability to add metadata and even view low res proxy
videos of the content.
There is a large range of storage on the market for every environment and budget
ranging from NAS (Network Attached Storage) to SAN (Storage Attached Network).
More advanced appliance storage like the TBOX from Tiger Technology integrates
SAN with MAM software and allows multiple users to easily connect manage and edit
content from anywhere in the office.
Long term archiving on LTO tapes is becoming increasingly popular because it is more
cost effective, frees up space on disk based storage systems and has excellent shelf
life. Xendata has a range of network based LTO archive servers which make it easy
to save and access LTO archived content over a network.
Centralising storage provides easy access for all users to all content, RAID protection
and safeguarding against hardware failure. The on-going cost of consolidated
storage is normally lower because content is not duplicated and legacy information
can be archived. There are the intangible benefits like reusing rather than reshooting
content, time saved in accessing content or the ability for users to work
collaboratively on projects.
