News
Intelligent storage: The unlikely hero of the media world
September 2016 by Jeff Greenwald at HGST, a Western Digital Corporation
Twenty years ago a major animation film would require a mere 10GB of storage to produce, for today’s movies the amount is measured in multi-petabytes. As motion pictures evolve - moving from SD to HD and now to 4K and 8K video formats – file size has grown at an incredible rate. This has put media asset managers and content professionals under tremendous pressure to balance storage needs with budgets while enhancing key asset infrastructure, data durability, and resiliency.
If we look at storage requirements for a movie with a typical runtime of 130 minutes, the numbers are staggering. An 8K format version of a movie could use up to 46.5TB of storage capacity. Then, when adding the multiple transcoded formats for each movie with different screen sizes and distribution methods, the amount of content storage for a single movie can easily exceed 100TB.
Storage pressure points
Increased metadata creation for that content puts pressure on the storage infrastructure as much as—or even more than—the actual content itself. For instance, today’s cameras automatically create a tremendous amount of data about the video or images they capture, such as aperture, frame rate, shutter speed, and more.
In addition to the growing amount of content that media and entertainment studios have to deal with, the complexity of the digital workflows handling that content is becoming impossible to manage. From ingest to playout, media content goes through multiples stages, creating various intermediate versions of the digital media that must be stored and managed.
Looking to the clouds
To help manage this data for the television and movie industry, Media Asset Manager (MAM) software is being migrated to the cloud to organize, centralize and manage multimedia content and the correlating metadata. A cloud-compatible MAM can manage all of the data, metadata, workflows, and distribution in a single application, greatly simplifying ingest and post-production activities.
As a result, many top major and independent studios are now opting for scalable object storage, which is able to adapt easily as content continues to grow and ensure that the content isn’t lost in a ramshackle mess of file or storage silos.
Innovative data storage and management is becoming the unlikely savior of the Media and Entertainment industry, thanks to the ever-growing explosion of data putting stress on existing storage and production technology. Media professionals now need scalable object storage combined with a powerful, cloud-based MAM to meet the needs of demanding, modern digital content creation. Media organizations that are already choosing intelligent storage put themselves in the best position to adapt to the ever-innovating and data-hungry media landscape.
