Is Your Storage Prepared for Cutting-edge Media Workflows?

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[vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text][mk_dropcaps style=”simple-style”]F[/mk_dropcaps]rom next-generation cameras to multi-camera arrays, new technologies for producing visual content are generating important creative opportunities for production studios, post-production houses, distributors, and other media organizations. The engaging content they are producing has an eager audience. Consumers are readily adopting ultra-high-definition (UHD) televisions, high-resolution mobile devices, and even virtual reality (VR) headsets to experience that immersive content.

Capitalizing on new opportunities and meeting consumer expectations might require your organization to reassess its storage infrastructure. You need a storage platform that combines robust performance, scalable performance, and collaborative capabilities for each phase of your workflows, from ingest to post production through delivery.

Four cutting-edge workflows highlight the need for bolstering your storage environment:

  1. Remastering in UHD

Hollywood studio vaults have tremendous volumes of archived content that are ready for a digital makeover. After transferring classic films and TV shows to VHS, DVD, and early Blu-ray formats, many studios now want to create 4K remasters for the latest consumer displays and devices.

Remastering that older content can involve resource-intensive workflows that would strain existing storage systems. Post-production teams need storage performance that can support a variety of real-time restoration work. And importantly, these teams need the scalable capacity to store huge projects while they are in post production.

  1. Increasing value of archived video content

Many broadcast networks, sports leagues, and other organizations are looking for ways to quickly retrieve, reuse, and remonetize clips from their large content archives. A sports network, for example, might want to create a montage of historical clips on a particular player for a broadcast. Or a sports team might want to assemble clips they can show to coaches to gain new competitive insights.

To reuse and remonetize older content, you need more than performance and scalability—you need storage intelligence. Most archived content does not have sufficient metadata associated with it. Even with sophisticated new media asset management (MAM) systems, your organization needs ways to index and enrich the huge collection of content in your archives.

Manual indexing and manual enrichment can be extremely time-consuming, and often unrealistic for smaller production teams. By leveraging the strengths of artificial intelligence (AI), it’s possible to automatically transcribe audio, detect objects, and even recognize faces. Once these tasks are completed, the enhanced metadata tags allow for much more effective content searching using your MAM system.

  1. Immersive VR and AR

Using 360-degree cameras and employing volumetric filmmaking, media organizations can create amazingly immersive, three-dimensional VR and AR (augmented reality) experiences. To deliver those experiences, media teams need to be able to ingest, work with, and store huge amounts of visual data. Today’s 360-degree and light-field cameras generate gigabytes of data per second.

If you’re planning to move into VR or AR, you’ll need the storage performance to ingest content flowing in from multi-camera arrays plus the performance to process and edit that content. In addition, you’ll need collaborative capabilities so multiple team members—spread throughout your studio or across the world—can work on content simultaneously. And of course, you’ll need the capacity to store petabytes of large, high-resolution files.

  1. Next-generation post production

Demand for 4K and UHD content is growing. But post-production studios must continue to deliver SD and HD content as well. Consumers want to watch films, TV shows, and sporting events on a wide range of devices, from 4K TVs to tablets and smartphones.

Quickly generating content in multiple formats can be taxing on your storage environment. In particular, you need strong storage performance so your post-production team can work with multiple video streams. You also need to support several workflows, including editing, color correction, and visual effects. And as projects multiply, you need the performance and collaborative capabilities to allow several team members to work on those projects at the same time.

Tackle cutting-edge media workflow requirements with Quantum
Quantum Xcellis, powered by the StorNext platform, combines the performance, scalable capacity, collaborative capabilities, and support for AI-based metadata to address the challenges of these and other cutting-edge media workflows.

To learn more about how Xcellis can help you—and witness how it’s already helping other organizations like yours—read our eBook, “Tackling the World’s Most Cutting-edge Rich-media Workflows.”

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