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Real-World Video Storage Solutions
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January 27, 2010
John Lofton IV, an associate producer at RaffertyWeiss, tackles storage issues for his company. By James Careless
There are many innovative asset management systems available today, for the efficient and cost-effective storage and retrieval of video. But what are producers actually using? To get a real world view, DV contacted a number of production and post houses across the Untied States to access how they are storing their video. Here’s what five of them told us:
A Smart, Simple Video Storage System
AlphaDogs is a full service post house located in Burbank’s Media District. It offers both Avid Media Composer and Final Cut Pro editing suites.
According to "top dog" Terence Curren, founder and president of Alpha Dogs, the company keeps its nearline video on two Terrablock servers, allowing for immediate access. For archiving, AlphaDogs uses videotape and removable hard drives, depending on the show. “We are using raw SATA drives,” Curren tells DV. “We have removal drive docks mounted in our editing computers, and external docks for other workstations. This allows us to perform high-speed backups of data.”
So how do they store hard drives? Given that they are not sold with plastic cases like videotapes are, the answer isn’t a slam-dunk. In fact, it took a bit of shopping around before AlphaDogs “discovered these hard drive cases that are made of strong plastic, like videotape cases,” Curren says. Made by Wiebetech, the cases not only “protect the drives, but they also made storage in our tape vaults easy.”
Whether tapes or plastic-encased hard disks, all of AlphaDog’s archived video is labeled with individual barcodes. They are then scanned into the company’s vault tracking system, which is supported by their Studio Suite 9 from Altermedia.
Such is the effectiveness of this ad-hoc system that AlphaDogs has yet to buy a dedicated asset-management system. “That is beyond what we currently need,” Curren says. This said, growing client demand usage of file-based media is forcing the company to look at asset management options for future use. “We have looked at LTO [linear-tape open] storage, but can't justify the cost-to-performance value versus our current approach,” he notes. “So, for now, we will continue with our current cost-effective approach. It protects our video assets, is relatively easy to search, and is very affordable.”
Adair Productions Goes Ziplock
Ask Sean Adair, president of Adair Productions in New York, how he stores his video these days and he replies: "On bare hard drives in plastic bags." So what did he use before hard drives? “Floppies!” Adair replies. After he stops laughing, he adds, “Okay, just kidding. Not for video files, anyway!”
In fact, Adair Productions uses a mixed approach for video storage and retrieval. “Initially, I stored videotapes, which would need to be recaptured to retrieve a project,” Adair says. “With DV tapes and logged projects, this approach still works fine.”
Meanwhile, “I dub video digital archives on SATA 1TB bare hard drives that I buy for about $75 each,” he continues. “They go in Ziplock bags, with a printout of project folder names. I use a hard drive dock to go back to them. I don’t have to use asset management: The projects are big enough so that there aren't that many on a drive, and all I need to know is which drive to find what I need.”
Adair Productions started keeping digital archives after moving into HDV production. “First, I used this approach just for ProRes of finished HD projects — which were mostly just being downrezzed to DVD for delivery at present, and HDV of master is lossy,” says Adair. “Then I moved to storing complete projects in some cases, as I realized cost was minimal, and I transitioned to hard-drive capture; thus keeping all raw footage too.”
“Now I shoot digital files — XDCAM EX, QT on a JVC HM700 using SDHC cards — and always archive complete projects and ProRes of masters on hard drives. I make backup copies of these drives, too, when they are full, and before erasing projects off my work drives.”
Adair is satisfied with his "Ziplock" storage system, but also has high hopes for SDHC cards: “If they get just a bit cheaper, I'll be keeping cards in many cases; certainly rotating them and saving them until a project is archived,” he says. “Already, for many clients, I'll have them buy the cards they use. Per minute, it's cheaper than Betacam tape already. Two hours of HD footage on a 32GB card is only about $100. These are viable to use as archives, too, as I suspect they are more reliable than hard drives. In any case, I always charge archiving footage to client, partly offset by not needing to buy tapes.”
Jamison Multimedia Productions Gets Down on the Farm
Some people are still storing their videos on tape and putting them on a shelf. Others have switched to logging video onto hard drives... and then putting them on a shelf. But Jamison Multimedia Productions of Johnston, Rhode Island, has decided to shift storage off the premises entirely. Instead of keeping video in-house, “I have all my video on a server farm,” says company owner Kyle Jamison. “I pull this off to my workstation as needed to work on a project.”
For the record, Jamison Multimedia works with Adobe Premiere, Adobe After Effects and Pinnacle Studio. And Jamison’s PC runs on Windows 2000, which is just fine with him: “To keep my costs down for my clients, I'm not on the bleeding edge of technology,” he explains. “My equipment gives me good results, so why fix what's not broken?”
Back to video storage: Because his production system is linked to the server farm, Jamison has real-time access to all of his content. To keep track of it all, “I have client files and folders for each project on the servers,” he says. Storage is helped by the fact that Jamison Multimedia does not use stock footage. “I deal with custom video supplied by the client so I do not store stock video at all,” he says. Jamison estimates that he has 2TB of data stored on the server farm, and that he generates 20-30GB of video each month.
Thanks to the server farm approach, Kyle Jamison sees no need to install an in-house digital management system. Instead, “I make some notes and have my client list to refer to,” when archiving and accessing video,” he says. "That’s all there is to it."
RaffertyWeiss Media has Video Storage Figured Out
Some production companies are overwhelmed by the task of video storage and asset management. RaffertyWeiss Media of Silver Springs, Maryland, is not one of these. In fact, according to associate producer John Lofton IV, RaffertyWeiss has devised an end-to-end video management system that works.
“First and foremost, every time we have completed mastering a video (right after the final color correction and audio mix) we request an uncompressed QuickTime copy,” says Lofton. “If it's a fully digital project, we just export this QuickTime movie directly from Final Cut Pro to our 'Masters' drive. This is the easiest method.”
“However, if it has been laid to tape — Digibeta or HDCAM SR — we ask the duplicator to capture it to an uncompressed QuickTime on an external hard drive of our choice, which we then courier back to our office to be copied to our masters drive,” he adds. For safety’s sake, the company keeps master Digibeta, HDCAM and HDCAM SR tape copies of its videos stored on the "masters shelves." “We have over 200 masters spanning two bookshelves!” Lofton says.
As for those old videotapes that can sit in closets, out of sight and out of mind? RaffertyWeiss does not have them. Instead, “we have captured all of our 'old' tape-only masters to uncompressed QuickTimes and stored them on the masters drive as well,” says Lofton.
Finally, “every couple of months or so, we use our Wiebetech 4-door SATA drive enclosure to duplicate project drives,” Lofton notes. “We back them up using simple 'copy and paste' in Mac OS X. Since all of the drives are connected using SATA, this process only takes a few hours.”
So much for storage. What about searching and retrieving videos? To do this, RaffertyWeiss employs a two-category approach. “All masters are separated into 'Spots' and 'Long Form' categories,” Lofton says. “Spots are generally :30 to :60 in length and are in a broadcast ready format, whereas Long Form videos can be anywhere from two minutes to an hour!”
“Within both folders is a 'Compressed for DVD' folder,” he continues. “This is where all DVD-ready, compressed elementary streams are contained for whenever we need to create a Demo Reel. I have separated video and audio streams into 'AC3' and 'M2V' folders. This helps keep our videos and demo versions of videos organized and ready to be output to Demo DVD at a moment’s notice.”
At present, “our process is pretty simple,” Lofton concludes. Still, “if the volume of project drives and master videos increases significantly, we may have to consider changing to a NAS network storage system. But, for now, this method works just fine for us!”
Secret Headquarters’ Storage Solution Is No Secret
Despite its name, Secret Headquarters Inc. is actually a well-known postproduction house located in Los Angeles. With extensive credits for FOX Broadcasting (24, Bones, House), ABC Cable Networks/Disney Channels and Walt Disney Studios Home Video, Secret Headquarters is accustomed to dealing with a lot of archival/vaulted video.
“We archive everything straight off our 'online storage' Terrablock 24D — recently upgraded to 24TB — to bare hard drives,” says Greg Huson, the chief of Secret Headquarters. “We also use Maxx Digital EVO-2 storage as screaming-fast local storage on a couple of the finishing machines, and those get archived to bare drives, too.”
Initially, Secret Headquarters ran into some problems using bare hard drives. But after the company suffered some media losses, it switched to LTO-3 with BRU PE. “However, LTO did not prove to be practical for the way we work,” Huson says. “Clients often want to go back to something we did a year or more ago, and LTO requires an extra step to restore. With hard drives you can simply look at them to see if what they want is there — often restoring a single shot or a few clips. So we went back to using bare hard drives, shelved in anti-static bags.”
As for the mechanical failures that drove Secret Headquarters to the LTO-3 system in the first place? “The difference now is that we clone the hard drives when they're full, so we have a backup,” Huson replies. “And we're careful to spin up and test the drives on a regular basis.” He adds that, “for mission-critical data, or 'original negative,' like R3Ds, we're still backing up our back-up-of-the-backup to LTO3.”
To keep track of its stored video, Secret Headquarters indexes its archival hard drives in its Flashspot library system. But don’t expect the company to supercede this approach with any form of asset management system: “We don't have the volume of work that justifies the expense,” Huson says. “I'm a gearhead, so I'm always looking at what's new — but right now we can't justify the cost of an asset management system that would work with all our applications, including Avid, Adobe applications, Protools, and FCS.”
As the examples above prove, there are many cost-effective and clever ways to store video, without having to adopt a full-blown asset management system. What makes these systems work is that they support reliable storage and file access. That’s the key: It doesn’t matter if you store archival video on a server farm or in Ziplocked-bagged hard drives, as long as you can locate and retrieve this video whenever you need to.
| COMMENTS (2) | | 01/30/2010 | | A few insights worth mentioning:
I have been told that not all HDD are the same. Though their specs may be identical, prices may range widely. This due to (I've been told) large HDD customers like Sun or Oracle ordering 100s of thousands of custom bio'd/firmware'd HDD for their server products, only to determine later that they do not need them. Thus, they are dumped on the retail market cheaply. Their firmware, however, was intended for specific applications, and although the HDD may be formatted appropriately (Mac GUID/PC, Linux, etc.), there may exhibit some idiosyncrasies from the disparity in its use from originally being a server product versus being used as media storage. I cannot articulate exactly how this may appear, though this is how it was explained to me by a Seagate tech guy.
Second: I have been using CD Finder as a super easy method of archiving HDD catalogs for fast indexing and searching to locate a specific file in the same way you would to a search on your own hard drive (CMD + F on Mac). Archiving is as simple as drag/. It works for every kind of mountable volume, such as CD to an entire computer.
Last, I have discarded my entire G4 Mac OS Server box (gotta use it for something) for a 1.5TB SATA drive inside an OWC Voyager - quad interface. It's as easy to use as an 8-track cassette. Well, look it up, you young punks! |
| | 01/28/2010 | | I have been leaning toward this storage workflow. It seems sensible and simple.
However, I am curious. What drives do most of these post houses use?
Seagate, Hitachi, etc..
I have been using Seagate but have had some issues.
Any insight into hard drives for archiving would be helpful.
Thanks |
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