ROUND TABLE
CL: Collaboration is everything. A centralised storage solution like EVO plays a pivotal role in promoting real- time collaboration for many team members, which in turn can speed up deliverables. When team members can tag and comment on shared media assets, quickly find and preview necessary files and collaborate on projects uninterrupted by technical barriers, that’s when a workflow truly comes together. ST: Producers today want more complex productions, but delivered – and earning revenue – in shorter timescales, in concurrent and possibly remote workflows. That means that the production asset management system has to be much more sophisticated. This needs to track where each clip is physically around a shared, distributed storage network (and possibly the cloud), as well as who is doing what to it at any time. Getting this workflow management software right is absolutely central to a successful production. RW: Collaborative tools within a storage system are what benefit users the most. Symply Workspace XE and XE-R solutions are on-premises-first collaborative storage systems providing high levels of performance across HDD and/or NVMe storage tiers. Dynamic project management, user and workspace tools are all provided along with cloud storage and MAM functionality options. Providing the tools to fully support interoperability with the applications and workflows users are adopting enables the storage to optimise and accelerate project efficiency.
COLLABORATIVE TOOLS IN STORAGE benefit users the most ”
SS-B: Our portable SSDs are compact and light for enhanced portability. The T7 only weighs 58g, so can be easily shipped between teams to move the drive around different locations fast. The T7 Shield can also be connected directly to a Blackmagic camera while working in the field to streamline production flow. They are also compatible with Windows PC, Mac OS and Android devices to help transition data between team members’ different devices. Def: What advancements have been made in data transfer speeds, and how do these improvements impact the efficiency of film production workflows? SP: Film production workflows have greatly benefited from advancements in data transfer speed, particularly through secure technologies like IBM Aspera. When handling uncompressed production file formats such as 8K, speed is important. Running at up to 80Gbps, a 100GB file could be securely transferred in about ten seconds, and with the cost of bandwidth decreasing, we can transfer larger files more economically. Shorter transfer times between sites, shrinking production timelines and more time to refine the material. An advantage is the ability to transfer large files over the public internet without interruptions, maintaining high transfer speeds, which means production teams can collaborate on large files more efficiently than ever. But high speeds can come with increased costs if file transport solutions are not properly specified. But it’s not just about the bandwidth; real-world speeds at both the sender’s and receiver’s end must be considered. The quality of service (QoS) of the location’s connectivity often remains a variable until the set-up is operational. Plus, productions often involve intensive activity followed by waiting periods –
so the most appropriate file transport solution may not always be the fastest, but one that can manage large data volumes over extended periods. This approach is more aligned with the demands of the industry, ensuring data transfer is fast and practical. With IBM Aspera, we have the capability to allocate and control bandwidth, tailoring it to specific project needs, enhancing efficiency and helping manage costs. RW: A huge step forward in recent years has been multi-actuator hard disk drive technology. Spark XT is our hyper- fast Thunderbolt 3 shuttle RAID that incorporates this technology. Spark XT provides real-world performance greater than 2GB/s while offering 144TB capacity in a compact, quiet and highly portable system – without any notable premium over standard hard disk drive-based RAIDs. We’ve had a huge uptake in DIT and dailies workflows due to the cost- effective performance and high capacity available in such a transportable storage system. It’s also proved popular for online editing and colour grading for lower- budget and independent projects. ST: There are specialised software solutions for content transfer: the one we use at EditShare gives a speed boost of as much as 60%. Much more importantly, though, is intelligence in the workflow layer to determine priorities for content transfer. The use of automatically generated, high-quality proxies allows people to get started on a task before the full-resolution content is delivered. Built-in acceleration solutions such as EFS Swift Sync can also utilise all available bandwidth, which makes transfer speeds many times faster than traditional tools such as Rsync and FTP. EditShare storage supports all the popular software editing tools, so you may not need to transfer content at all. Through the use of a
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