Posted by Is your creative agency seeing an influx of requests for video? If so, you’re not alone. As advertisers look for the latest ways to grab the attention of their busy and easily distracted customers, many are asking ad agencies to incorporate video into comprehensive campaigns that span print, TV, social media, custom apps and beyond.
Your agency might decide to handle this growing demand for video in-house—whether that means expanding your existing capabilities or building a new video department from scratch. Creating video in-house can help you deliver results faster, improve consistency among all assets and save money compared with outsourcing the work.
The current storage environment you’ve been using for print ads, marketing assets, custom publishing and PR probably won’t cut it for video, however. For that, you’ll need a solution specifically optimized for video—and built around high-performance shared storage.
What do you need to support efficient, affordable media workflows? Here are four key media storage considerations.
- Scalability
Video requires much more storage capacity than other content. Each video file could be a few gigabytes, so you might realistically need to store several terabytes worth of content for every project. As you move into high dynamic range (HDR), 4K, and higher-resolution video formats, you’ll create even larger files that will require even greater capacity.You could just buy an enormous storage environment now, but a smarter, more cost-effective move is to opt for a scalable platform. Find a solution that allows you to meet your short-term needs while giving you the flexibility to scale out and scale up as your business grows. Your storage solution should enable you to add capacity and performance quickly and easily.
- Collaboration
Video production is by nature a collaborative process. You might have multiple editors, colorists, video effects artists, and other team members all needing to access the same production files. Those team members might be sitting next to each other in a studio or be spread across the world. And as each project progresses, you’ll likely have additional, geographically dispersed team members and clients who need to review the work.Your storage environment has to support this collaboration. You need ways to enable editors and artists to work in parallel while making it simple for others to review works in progress, no matter where all these people are located. High-performance shared storage is essential to making that happen.
- Flexibility
Not all of your team members will be using the same applications, or even the same operating systems. Editors should be able to easily access files whether they are using Adobe Premiere Pro or Avid Media Composer on Mac, Windows, or Linux machines. To maximize productivity, your storage solution needs the flexibility to accommodate a number of environments. It should be able to extend collaboration to the broadest possible range of users, and work in Fibre Channel, Ethernet, and LAN architectures. In other words, your storage should possess the flexibility to meet your requirements, not the other way around.
- Multi-Tier environment
Preparing your storage environment for video creation requires more than just buying some disk arrays. To maximize productivity and control costs, you can gain real benefits from a tiered approach that matches the right kind of storage with each stage of your workflow. For instance, you’ll want to consider high-performance primary storage for editing and effects creation, especially if you’re working in 4K or higher, but lower-cost object storage or archive for long-term storage. The cloud may also figure into your plans. An integrated, multi-tier storage environment with intelligent data movement capabilities can help you achieve the right balance of performance, access speed, and cost.
Optimizing your storage environment for video is vital for delivering the compelling content that your clients want while keeping costs under control. To learn more about the business and technology challenges that in-house video creation can generate, and to discover ways Quantum® StorNext® shared storage and data management solutions can address those challenges, check out our e-book, “Prepare Your Creative Agency For Expanding In-House Video Production.”
Click here to learn more about Quantum’s media storage solutions for creative ad agencies.
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