Marquis Broadcast

With the rise in crypto-ransomware attacks in recent years, companies need to make certain they run scheduled backups of their data, in order to keep both media project data and critical business operations safe. However, when infected by crypto-ransomware, the backups themselves can also become infected, which often renders the whole backup strategy useless. Luckily, Marquis Broadcast’s Workspace Backup system avoids this problem. It analyses and copies Avid workspaces and projects to Tier 2 storage and the cloud and will never backup any media that has become encrypted, ensuring valuable media files remain intact.

Crypto-ransomware is a harmful program that encrypts files on a computer or mobile device in order to extort money. It works by encrypting the contents of a file so that it’s impossible to read, then threatens users via prominently-displayed messages for money in exchange for the decryption key needed to restore the files. Recently, crypto-ransomware has taken down large broadcasters and production companies in the US and Europe, with the loss of months and months of Avid projects and associated media. Workspace Backup from Marquis Broadcast would have prevented this disaster, since the system won’t just blindly backup media files but will instead look for changes and not allow the newly encrypted media files to be added into the backup.

Workspace Backup is a powerful disaster recovery and business continuity tool, designed specifically to protect Avid shared storage systems. It uses detailed analytics of Avid workspaces to ensure the highest levels of integrity of a backup, ensuring the most crucial projects can be immediately and individually recovered to production in any location that can see the backup.

Workspace Backup first runs low-level analytics to examine and characterise every byte of data held within the source Avid workspaces, so it’s able to check the data structure and report if something is wrong before it’s too late. It then backs up the content of the workspaces, before copying all the projects that use media in those workspaces. Finally, those projects are analysed and any other assets that are linked to them are also backed up. Thereafter, any subsequent backups replicate changes in the source workspaces and capture new versions of the projects. Workspace Backup is ideal for use to take daily backups of Avid work-in-progress, safeguarding companies from data loss from crypto-ransomware, drive failure or if files are deleted by mistake. Workspace Backup is also Avid-certified, operating seamlessly within the Avid environment and ensuring the integrity of the media backup.

Pan-African broadcaster, Kwesé, has taken delivery of a Marquis Broadcast Medway system, supplied by Zimele Broadcast, to streamline its sports production and facilitate fast-turnaround coverage of a recent major sporting event in Asia. The Medway middleware was retrofitted to an Avid NEXIS/ Interplay, Oracle DIVA and Dell EMC Isilon infrastructure, to enable Kwesé’s team to edit while ingesting media for the fastest possible turnaround of incoming live feeds. Importantly, Medway enabled this critical functionality without needing to replace any existing systems.

Kwesé uses Imagine Communications’ Nexio AMP video server for live ingests of sports feeds, attached to Nexio Farad™ storage, while its edit systems are connected to the Avid NEXIS software-defined storage platform. Moving files between these two systems previously meant waiting for recordings to finish before being able to start editing, which was obviously not ideal when creating sports highlights. Marquis Broadcast’s Medway middleware solution has now provided Kwesé’s sports edit team with instant access to footage, plus the ability to edit while growing. This has dramatically reduced turnaround times of sport content, without the need to update any of its existing editing systems or storage.

Medway is a very powerful and scalable media-centric middleware solution, enabling a complete digital workflow to ensure edit platforms, MAMs, video servers and archive systems can work seamlessly together. Designed to meet the demands of the most challenging production environments, Medway is used globally by broadcast, production, post production, newsrooms and playout facilities. It offers integration between incompatible systems in media production workflows and is cloud-enabled too, bringing the richest set of legacy and contemporary integrations to cloud and hybrid workflows.

Medway simplifies Avid workflow complexity by use of the world’s largest library of certified workflow and metadata integrations. It has enabled Kwesé to build out the precise workflow it needed, with support from Marquis during setup and testing, delivering a cost-effective integration between its broadcast content applications and edit platforms – both standalone and using shared storage. This new workflow is now used daily by Kwesé, reducing turnaround times and providing an improved offering to viewers. “The team from Marquis Medway were very helpful every step of the way, assisting us with seamless setup and testing,” explains Kwesé’s head of Broadcast Engineering, Baxter de Jager. “This system is a perfect addition to our workflow.”