The workflow for video post-production teams has gotten increasingly complex. Files have to be stored in the cloud to be shared with remote and global team members. Yet the ever growing file sizes are crushing bandwidth and causing incredible frustration.
Atempo and Storj recently teamed up with a powerful integration that helps solve these challenges for post-production teams. Colby Winegar, Sr. VP of Business Development for Storj and Louis-Frederic Laszlo, VP of Product Management at Atempo discussed how it works in the webinar Global Asset Preservation and Protection for Video Production Teams. This article will cover the key points from the webinar to explain the value. For more detailed discussion, the live Q&A, and a special offer to try Atempo, listen to the on-demand webinar.
Why is video management so challenging?
Another challenge is the growth in video file sizes as well as the growth in demand for video assets. Both mean more data that needs to be stored. Put simply, data explosion has created a cost explosion. Colby said on the webinar, “There’s just much more data to work with as consumers demand a better, crisper video experience. With these two major changes happening, it is a major challenge for post-production teams. I'm using a lot more data, and now it's becoming really expensive and complicated to manage all of that data across my hybrid team. Post-production teams want to know, ‘How do I move it around and how do I enable a good experience for my team without increasing costs?’”
These factors combined are making studios and production teams rethink their cloud storage. Unfortunately, there is typically a lack of security or poor performance for many of the methods being used by studios to try to meet these challenges. A smarter, cost effective solution is needed.
Atempo and Storj got together to solve these problems
Atempo has been in the business of protecting and preserving media assets for over 30 years. Louis explained that M&E was a big driver for their business. “M&E was one of the first industries confronted with the problematic issue of managing large volumes of unstructured data, the problematic issue of managing large capacity, but also large numbers of files at amazing scale.”
Fast forward 30 years and Atempo cost-effectively preserves media assets for some of the biggest studios in the world. In fact, they have customers in production with exabytes of data managed on their platform.
They’ve also developed Atempo Miria to specifically address the needs of post-production teams. “Atempo Miria is one single software solution to manage from analytics, to data movements and workflows. So from backup, archiving, migration, synchronization with one single software, you don't need to deploy as many servers. You only need this one solution to call your data your storage silo to understand the insights brought by this service analytics stack and one single solution to drive the movements.”
Louis described on the webinar three key features of Miria plus Storj that create value for post production teams:
- Single catalog across environments - “For M&E we have one single catalog where we store all the metadata describing your data. So even if you put your data in the cloud, even if you put your data in Storj, even if you put data on tape, you can search against the global metadata catalog and find your data.”
- AI enriches the catalog - “To help you deal with the data, we also developed features based on AI to automatically and intelligently enrich your video assets. So during operating record to Storj, for example, we have the capability to use our AI stack. To create data based on the content of your video, to recognize object, to recognize concepts, and create some custom metadata to enrich the catalog and help you to find, but also to create value on top of your video asset. And eventually to monetize these video assets you store and you manage.
- Preview without retrieval - “Another important feature for post-production teams is the capability to drive preview. Imagine you store petabytes of data to Storj and you are looking for a special shot inside an asset. We have the capability, without any retrieving, to do a video preview directly from the media user interface to select a timeframe, where to start timeframe, where to stop, your creation and to do a partial retrieve of your data.”
The combination of Storj and Atempo Miria work together to save money on media asset preservation, while making it extremely efficient to access your data.
Storj cost reduction covers the cost of Atempo
Colby explained how Storj is so effective at reducing cloud storage costs. “On the front end, Storj has an S3 compatible API you can interact with just like all of the other cloud storage solutions like Google and S3 and others. But on the back end, it's a very different way to store data. We like to call it the Airbnb of data storage. We take your data and we spread it all over the world across tens of thousands of locations.”
This distributed storage model eliminates the need to replicate data in regional data centers. It also enables global accessibility with consistently fast download performance anywhere in the world. Colby provided a real-world example. “If you have some kind of a workflow where you need to store a copy in Los Angeles, a copy in Frankfurt, and a copy in Tokyo to make sure that everybody has a good experience with that data, that creates some challenges. You might have to pay $20 a terabyte in Los Angeles, $20 a terabyte in Frankfurt, and $20 a terabyte in Tokyo to store that data. And that gets really expensive and it's also hard to manage.”
“With Storj, we upload your data in Los Angeles, spread across these nodes all over the world. And then whenever anybody wants to access the data, we'll pull it from the fastest nodes in parallel for that person wherever they are in the world, which creates very consistent performance all over the world for teams that are working globally. And it's at a price point that's gonna be more than 90% lower cost than storing in all those locations using a provider like AWS.”
Colby also explained how Storj is highly secure thanks to this distributed model and a zero trust architecture. He commented, “A globally distributed solution becomes really important, especially in media and entertainment, to distribute your risk and not put all your trust in one region or one data center, but instead spread it out all over the world.Not only does it improve your security, it improves your durability and availability of that data.”
And the best part is that Storj delivers this at a much lower cost than other cloud storage providers. How much lower? Colby stated, “And you get all of this for storage that is only $4 a terabyte to store it and $7 a terabyte to egress it. Essentially, you could get Atempo for free by moving your cloud storage to Storj because of the savings you'll get on your object storage and egress fees.”
Storj + Atempo simplifies media preservation
Louis and Colby ended the webinar recapping the value of the combined solution for post-production teams.
- Easily manage data - Miria handles the most complex data workflows so studios can confidently move to more secure and effective storage.
- Effective collaboration - Teams can access files from anywhere in the world with fast downloads for remote and on-premise.
- Flexible and scalable - Handles TB to EB volumes with globally consistent access.
- Highest security - End-to-end encryption comes standard and leaks are not possible.
- Cost savings - Save 80% or more on storage costs with no need for replication across regions.
Webinar attendees had lots of questions at the completion of the presentation. Those questions included migration from tape, how multiple copies are handled across different storage environments, performance in Asia, browsing archive projects, distributing data in Storj, and many others. Tune in to the on-demand webinar recording to listen to the Q&A and get the link for getting 30 days of Atempo free.
