Tim Burton – Media IT My ramblings covering NLEs / Servers / Storage and the odd bit of photography.

If you haven’t read it, take a look here: http://t.co/KIQu0er

Problems at the grass /root level:

I feel a big issue for the industry, especially the creative side, is how brittle and fragile the file based systems are. I commonly hear people complaining they have broken a folder structure, or cant read a MXF file for the lack of a decent cross camera and platform viewer. This is before they’ve even got anywhere near an NLE with their, at best, retrofitted plugin support for solid state acquisition formats. If you start throwing ‘prosumer’ cameras in along the lines of DSLR, GoPro and Flip cams, the lack of timecode, UMIDs or any other ‘broadcast’ metadata leaves the process tricky at best, transcode laden and hand cranked on average and broken at worst.

The complexity of delivery formats has column inches, but in reality this is usually handled by a post facility and/or could be outsourced by exporting a timeline native quicktime and dropping it to a dubbing house as 1 off per deliverable.  Acquisition is a much larger problem, and one which if done right has a positive effect on the whole production process.

Where is the modern BITC VHS?

Storage Solutions:

Cloud is a fluffy term (groan) but I feel the only reason IT people feel they understand the term is that it’s been hijacked by the virtual x86 machine crowd.  This is only one pocket, that I’d call IaaS. Comparing Amazon EC2 against a SaaS product is like orange trees to orange juice.  A core value in the provisioning of cloud services is that you only pay for what you use, and it can scale up and more importantly down on demand.

In the Obstacles section of the paper there is a price comparison between cloud, LTO and LaCie (a name now as ubiquitous as the ‘hoover’).  There is one key part missing! Management. 1 drive is easy enough to manage, 5 tricky, 10 you’ve no idea and by the time you’re at 100 you may as well bin them.  With reality and ob-doc productions seeing extremely high shoot ratios, 100+ TB projects are not rare.  Where is the cost of sorting, organising and finding in this equation?

LTO I consider to be more dangerous term than cloud, as while many industries use it to warehouse vast quantities of static data successfully, it is remiss to attach the same badge and trust to stand alone tape drive and umpteen china-graphed tapes sat on a shelf.  I would consider the stand alone drive LTO solution as no better than a stack of LaCie disks, as I can’t easy attach a LTO drive to my MacBook and would need two tape drives if I want to copy anything without an intermediate step.

When you start to delve deeper into the TCO of LTO properly by considering: Reclamation - it’s linear after all, so remove a file in the middle of a tape and you need to rewrite that tape to efficiently use the space again. Error checking - backups never fail, only restores do. Last but not least, supporting and maintaining a proper tape management infrastructure.  The numbers are not quite so rosy. Insert even light random access (conform maybe) and the equation gets very interesting.

Conspicuous in its absence was ‘spinning disk’ solutions.  While I agree vendors tend to oversell banking sector hand-me-down features (dedup etc) that have little use to the media sector, spinning disk is still the key stone of any good tapeless workflow.  However I’ll park this point and I know others have a lot more than me to say about it!

Cost of handling data:

Digibeta was a great format, as it could playback your rushes and serve as your delivery format too. In ’94 an A500 would have set you back £37k* (~£55k in todays money) and it was considered over a 10 year life that the TCO was roughly 2x purchase price*. So before stock you could consider that it cost £917 a month in todays money to have that sat in your machine room.  While things have moved on since ’94, in a HD tape workflow you now need a one deck to ingest with (DVCProHD maybe) and another to master to (SR?!!) so the cost is still there, even if you choose to sub the work out. Oh how much does addison lee charge?     * Phil Crawley - Chief Tech dude and all round good guy @ root6.

For your fibre internet cost, you are getting a transport layer that doesn’t care about ‘formats’, so no risk in ‘buying the wrong one’ and the ability to use it for a multitude of services. 100Mb is nearly realtime (with overheads) when dealing with AVCintra, so no slower than a tape deck yes doesnt need to be couriered or played in at the other side!

The real future in handling video assets as data in orchestration systems and networks.  Being able to deliver media from your rushes store, to your graphics house whilst also delivering a selection of edit proxies to your edit workstation.  All this is possible from a 3G connection, as there is no need for the data to flow via the machine you are managing from.

Moores law also relates to connectivity, we at Aframe have a 1Gb line for less than I paid (under 1k pcm) for a 10Mb line just 3 years ago...