ROUND TABLE
Blackmagic’s James Townend and Mnemonica’s Piero Costantini discuss the evolving demands of on-set storage, remote workflows and long-term data preservation STORAGE: SIMPLIFIED ROUND TABLE
DEFINITION: When you talk to filmmakers, what are the biggest storage headaches they face on productions today? JAMES TOWNEND: One of the biggest challenges is the expectation to have material available for review almost immediately, for teams both on-set and off-site. At the same time, productions need to offload media quickly and reuse storage to keep costs down. This means having fast, reliable network storage on- set, paired with an efficient pipeline for generating proxies and distributing them to remote collaborators. It’s no longer enough to think about storage as a local problem. Productions increasingly need a system that can handle both instant access and long-distance collaboration. PIERO COSTANTINI: It’s important for us to distinguish between individual filmmakers and production companies. We’ve found that most independent filmmakers are acutely aware of the need for preservation, while production companies seem to ignore the problem or push it aside. They accumulate vast quantities of physical media that sit gathering dust in their storage rooms, disconnected from the market and difficult to access. The big question
is whether, in the long term, these companies will even be able to access the content on that ageing media, and what condition it’ll be in if they can. The challenge we’re tackling is a cultural one: to instil the concept of digital patrimony and how to get the most out of it. DEF: Remote collaboration is now a big part of filmmaking – how are modern storage solutions helping teams work smoothly across different locations or departments? JT: The key is removing complexity for remote teams. Products like our Cloud Dock and Cloud Store let you pre-configure sync settings so that media drives connect to the main network and automatically sync to remote destinations. Productions can choose whether to sync full- resolution media or just proxies, and all of this can be managed centrally. For remote collaborators, there is no set-up or manual file wrangling needed. They can simply work with the media as if it were local, which reduces delays, mistakes and the overhead admin that used to slow down distributed teams. PC: Mnemonica was built on the idea of collaboration. It’s a tool designed
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