15 STREAMPUNK TOOLS Storage
into what they already have. Avid recently unveiled Cloudspaces, an extension to its Nexis on-premises storage system, at its Connect event to coincide with the NAB Show in Las Vegas. David Colantuoni, Avid’s vice-president of product management, describes Cloudspaces as a simplifed, demystified approach to nearline storage. “It’s the same thing as a workspace on a Nexis,” he says. “You can move your media to the cloud. Why would you want to do that? Well, often your storage is defined by the amount you’ve purchased. You have a fixed capacity. Sometimes you don’t have the capacity to buy more storage, or you need to temporarily park media while you finish a project. Or maybe it’s for safekeeping. “The workflows aren’t different. The storage is just located somewhere else. You can have an editor that’s in a different area from where the content’s been shot.” As ever, performance relies on a speedy internet connection, and Colantuoni finds that connectivity problems are becoming a thing of the past. “I don’t hear that concern as much anymore. There are limited bandwidth capabilities in some places, but transferring data is something you can do in the background while you’re working,” he says.
one at Microsoft. It’s a humongous concern, but we do take so many steps.” The set-up process is, he says, “an engagement”, adding: “We have teams that will go look at your workflow: how many editors you want to have, where are the productions going to be located, so we can find the best bandwidth and storage.” BLACKBIRD ASCENDING Editors eager to dive deeper into the cloud might consider Blackbird and its Ascent editor. Ascent is a web application, available on most connected devices, intended to assemble and publish simple edits quickly. It handles video stored almost anywhere thanks to Blackbird’s Edge server. “Say you’ve got some video files in on- premises deployment,” explains Blackbird product manager, Huw Dymond. “In addition, you might have some files or streams that exist within AWS, or Azure or a private data centre. You deploy Edge wherever your content is, users then use our applications through a normalised dashboard that allows them to get access to content wherever it’s located. The thing we always note to our customers is that we’ve built the codec and our apps to run in a standard web browser.” “The key value is that you don’t have to move your original source to the cloud,” Dymond adds. “If it’s in the cloud, great. If it’s not, Edge gets deployed wherever that media is.” The company anticipates three main workflows: “The first is that I want to take all my edit decisions – including transitions, stills, animations, video layers – and then conform and render those decisions. That means Edge is responsible for determining which of the resources were used. It does
HEAD IN THE CLOUDS Cloudian focuses on object storage, which is intended to reduce the complexity of managing large amounts of data
Cloudspaces is implemented on Microsoft’s Azure infrastructure, satisfying both performance and security concerns. “The facilities are secure,” Colantuoni explains. “Microsoft has a bunch of web pages dedicated to this. They’re serious about it. Cloudspaces goes through a security audit internally at Avid and another
DATA IS GETTING BIGGER AND BIGGER ANDMUCH FASTER THANNETWORKING IS GETTING QUICKER. THE NETWORKING GUYS HAVE TO UP THEIR GAME
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