All posts by James Flores

A Disaster Recovery Game Plan for Media Teams

Post Syndicated from James Flores original https://www.backblaze.com/blog/a-disaster-recovery-game-plan-for-media-teams/

A decorative image showing icons representing file types surrounding a cloud. The background has sports imagery incorporated.

When it comes to content creation, every second you can spend honing your craft counts. Which means things like disaster recovery planning are often overlooked—they’re tasks that easily get bumped to the bottom of every to-do list. Yet, the consequences of data loss or downtime can be huge, affecting everything from marketing strategy to viewer engagement. 

For years, LTO tape has been a staple in disaster recovery (DR) plans for media teams that focus on everything from sports teams to broadcast news to TV and film production. Using an on-premises network attached storage (NAS) backed up to LTO tapes stored on-site, occasionally with a second copy off-site, is the de facto DR strategy for many. And while your off-site backup may be in a different physical location, more often than not, it’s the same city and still vulnerable to some of the same threats.  

As in all areas of business, the key to a successful DR plan is preparation. Having a solid DR plan in place can be the difference between bouncing back swiftly or facing downtime. Today, I’ll lay out some of the challenges media teams face with disaster recovery and share some of the most cost-effective and time-efficient solutions.

Disaster Recovery Challenges

Let’s dive into some potential issues media teams face when it comes to disaster recovery.

Insufficient Resources

It’s easy to deprioritize disaster recovery when you’re facing budgetary constraints. You’re often faced with a trade-off: protect your data assets or invest in creating more. You might have limited NAS or LTO capacity, so you’re constantly evaluating what is worthy of protecting. Beyond cost, you might also be facing space limitations where investing in more infrastructure means not just shouldering the price of new tapes or drives, but also building out space to house them.

Simplicity vs. Comprehensive Coverage: Keeping Up With Scale

We’ve all heard the saying “keep it simple, stupid.” But sometimes you sacrifice adequate coverage for the sake of simplicity. Maybe you established a disaster recovery plan early on, but haven’t revisited it as your team scaled. Broadcasting and media management can quickly become complex, involving multiple departments, facilities, and stakeholders. If you haven’t revisited your plan, you may have gaps in your readiness to respond to threats. 

As media teams grow and evolve, their disaster recovery needs may also change, meaning disaster recovery backups should be easy, automated, and geographically distanced. 

The LTO Fallacy

No matter how well documented your processes may be, it’s inevitable that any process that requires a physical component is subject to human error. And managing LTO tapes is nothing if not a physical process. You’re manually inserting LTO tapes into an LTO deck to perform a backup. You’re then physically placing that tape and its replicas in the correct location in your library. These processes have a considerable margin of error; any deviation from an established procedure compromises the recovery process.

Additionally, LTO components—the decks and the tapes themselves—age like any other piece of equipment. And ensuring that all appropriate staff members are adequately trained and aware of any nuances of the LTO system becomes crucial in understanding the recovery process. Achieving consistent training across all levels of the organization and maintaining hardware can be challenging, leading to gaps in preparedness.

Embracing Cloud Readiness

As a media team faced with the challenges outlined above, you need solutions. Enter cloud readiness. Cloud-based storage offers unparalleled scalability, flexibility, and reliability, making it ideal for safeguarding media for teams large and small. By leveraging the power of the cloud, media teams can ensure seamless access to vital information from any location, at any time. Whether it’s raw footage, game footage, or final assets, cloud storage enables rapid recovery and minimal disruption in the event of a disaster.

Cloud Storage Considerations for Media Teams

Migrating to a cloud-based disaster recovery model requires careful planning and consideration. Here are some key factors for sports teams to keep in mind:

  1. Data Security: Content security is becoming more and more of a top priority with many in the media space concerned about footage leakage and the growing monetization of archival content. Ensure your cloud provider employs robust security measures like encryption, and verify compliance with industry standards to maintain data privacy, especially if your media content involves sensitive or confidential information. 
  2. Cost Efficiency: Given the cost of NAS servers, LTO tapes, and external hard drives, scaling on-premises solutions indefinitely is not always the best solution. Extending your storage to the cloud makes scaling easy, but it’s not without its own set of considerations. Evaluate the cost structure of different cloud providers, considering factors like storage capacity, data transfer costs, and retention minimums.  
  3. Geospatial Redundancy: Driving LTO tapes to different locations or even shipping them to secure sites can become a logistical nightmare. When data is stored in the cloud, it not only can be accessed from anywhere but the replication of that data across geographic locations can be automated. Consider the geographical locations of the cloud servers to ensure optimal accessibility for your team, minimizing latency and providing a smooth user experience.
  4. Interoperability: With data securely stored in the cloud it becomes instantly accessible to not only users but across different systems, platforms, and applications. This facilitates interoperability with applications like cloud media asset managers (MAMs) or cloud editing solutions and even simplifies media distribution. When choosing a cloud provider, consider APIs and third-party integrations that might enhance the functionality of your media production environment. 
  5. Testing and Training: Testing and training are paramount in disaster recovery to ensure a swift and effective response when crises strike. Rigorous testing identifies vulnerabilities, fine-tunes procedures, and validates recovery strategies. Simulated scenarios enable teams to practice and refine their roles, enhancing coordination and readiness. Regular training instills confidence and competence, reducing downtime during actual disasters. By prioritizing testing and training, your media team can bolster resilience, safeguard critical data, and increase the likelihood of a seamless recovery in the face of unforeseen disasters.

Cloud Backup in Action

For Trailblazer Studios, a leading media production company, satisfying internal and external backup requirements led to a complex and costly manual system of LTO tape and spinning disk drive redundancies. They utilized Backblaze’s cloud storage to streamline their data recovery processes and enhance their overall workflow efficiency.

Backblaze is our off-site production backup. The hope is that we never need to use it, but it gives us peace of mind.

—Kevin Shattuck, Systems Administrator, Trailblazer Studios

The Road Ahead

As media continues to embrace digital transformation, the need for robust disaster recovery solutions has never been greater. By transitioning away from on-premises solutions like LTO tape and embracing cloud readiness, organizations can future-proof their operations and ensure uninterrupted production. And, while cloud readiness creates a more secure foundation for disaster recovery, having data in the cloud creates a pathway into the future teams can take advantage of a wave of cloud tools designed to foster productivity and efficiency. 

With the right strategy in place, media teams can turn potential disasters into mere setbacks, while taking advantage of their new cloud centric posterity maintaining their competitive edge. 

The post A Disaster Recovery Game Plan for Media Teams appeared first on Backblaze Blog | Cloud Storage & Cloud Backup.

APIs for Media and Film: What You Need to Know

Post Syndicated from James Flores original https://www.backblaze.com/blog/apis-for-media-and-film-what-you-need-to-know/

A decorative image showing a drive dissolving into the cloud with the clouds connected by digital lines.

Over the years, the film industry has witnessed constant transformation, from the introduction of sound and color to the digital revolution, 4K, and ultra high definition (UHD). However, a groundbreaking change is now underway, as cloud technology merges with media and entertainment (M&E) workflows, reshaping the way content is created, stored, and shared.

What’s helping to drive this transformation? APIs, or application programming interfaces. For any post facility, indie filmmaker/creator, or media team, understanding what APIs are is the first step in using them to embrace the flexibility, efficiency, and speed of the cloud.

Check Out Our New Technical Documentation Portal

When you’re working on a media project, you need to be able to find instructions about the tools you’re using quickly. And, it helps if those instructions are easy to use, easy to understand, and easy to share. Our Technical Documentation Portal has been completely overhauled to deliver on-demand content in a user-friendly way so you can find the information you need. Check out the API overview page to get you started, then dig into the implementation with the full documentation for our S3 Compatible, Backblaze, and Partner APIs.

From Tape to Digital: A Digital File Revolution

The journey towards the cloud transformation in the M&E industry started with the shift from traditional tape and film to digital formats. This revolutionary transition converted traditional media into digital entities, moving them from workstations to servers, shuttle drives, and shared storage systems. Simultaneously, the proliferation of email and cloud-hosted applications like Gmail, Dropbox, and Office 365 laid the groundwork for a cloud-centric future.

Seamless Collaboration With API-Driven Tools

As time went on, applications began communicating effortlessly with one another, facilitating tasks such as creating calendar invites in Gmail through Zoom and the ability to start Zoom meetings with a command in Slack. These integrations were made possible by APIs that allow applications to interact and share data effectively.

What Are APIs?

APIs are sets of rules and protocols that enable different software applications to communicate and interact with each other, allowing you to access specific functionalities or data from one application to be used in another. APIs facilitate seamless integration between diverse systems, enhancing workflows and promoting interoperability.

Most of us in the film industry are familiar with a GUI, a graphical user interface. It’s how we use applications day in and day out—literally the screens on our programs and computers. But a lot of the tasks we execute via a GUI (like saving files, reading files, and moving files) really are pieces of executable code hidden from us behind a nice button. Think of APIs as another method to execute those same pieces of code, but with code. Code executing code. (Let’s not get into the Skynet complex, and this isn’t AI either.)

Grinding the Gears: A Metaphor for APIs

An easy way to think about APIs is to think of them as gears. Each application has a gear.  If we adjust the two gears to talk we simply align them to each other allowing their APIs to establish communication.

A diagram that shows two gears. One is labeled API 1 and the other is labeled API 2. There are arrows going back and forth between them.

Once communications are established, you can start to do some cool stuff. For example, you can migrate a Frame.io archive to a Backblaze B2 Bucket. Or you could use the iconik API to move a file we want to edit with into our Lucidlink filespace, then remove it as soon as we finish our project. 

A chart showing iconik with workflow lines going out to Backblaze and LucidLink.

Check out a video about the solution here:

The MovieLabs 2030 Vision and Cloud Integration

As the industry embraced cloud technology, the need for standardization became apparent. Organizations like the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE) worked diligently to establish technical unity across vendors and technologies. However, implementation of these standards lacked persistence. To address this void, the Movie Picture Association (MPA) established MovieLabs, an organization dedicated to researching, testing, and developing new guidelines, processes, and tooling to drive improvements on how content is created. One such set of guidelines is the MovieLabs 2030 Vision.

Core Principles of the MovieLabs 2030 Vision

The MovieLabs 2030 Vision outlines 10 core principles that are aspirational for the film industry to accomplish by 2030. These core principles set the stage with a high importance on cloud technology and interoperability. Interoperability boils down to the ability to use various tools but have them share resources—which is where APIs come in. APIs help make tools interoperable and able to share resources. It’s a key functionality, and it’s how many cloud tools work together today.  

A list of the MovieLabs 2023 Vision's 10 core principles to upgrade technology in the film industry.
MovieLab’s 2030 Vision aspirational principles.

The Future Is Here: Cloud Technology at Its Peak

Cloud technology grants us instant access to digital documents and the ability to carry our entire lives in our pockets. With the right tools, our data is securely synced, backed up, and accessible across devices, from smartphones to laptops and even TVs.

Although cloud technology has revolutionized various industries, the media and entertainment sector lagged behind, relying on cumbersome shuttle drives and expensive file systems for our massive files. The COVID pandemic, however, acted as a catalyst for change, pushing the industry to seriously consider the benefits of cloud integration.

Breaking Down Silos With APIs

In a post-pandemic world, many popular media and entertainment applications are built in the cloud, the same as other software as a service (SaaS) applications like Zoom, Slack, or Outlook. Which is great! But many of these tools are designed to best operate in their own ecosystem, meaning once the files are in their systems, it’s not easy to take them out. This may sound familiar if you are an iPhone user faced with migrating to an Android or vice versa. (But who would do that? 😀

With each of these applications working in their own ecosystem, the result is their own dedicated storage and usage costs which can vary greatly across tools. So many productions end up with projects and project files locked in various different environments creating storage silos—the opposite of centralized interoperability. 

An image showing projects in two silos. Projects 2, 4, and 6 are in Tool A, and Projects 1, 3, and 5 are in Tool B.

APIs not only foster interoperability in cloud-based business applications, but also empower filmmaking cloud tools like Frame.io, iconik, and Backblaze the ability to send, receive, and delete files (the POST, GET, PUT, and DELETE commands) data from other programs, enabling more dynamic and advanced workflows, such as sending files to colorists or reviewing edits for picture lock.

Customized Workflows and Automation

APIs offer the flexibility to tailor workflows to specific needs, whether within a single company or for vendor-specific processes. The automation possibilities are virtually limitless, facilitating seamless integration between cloud tools and storage solutions.

The Road Ahead for Media and Entertainment

The Movie Labs 2030 Vision offers a glimpse into a future defined by cloud tools and automation. Principally, that cloud technology with open and extensible storage exists and is available today. 

So for any post facility, indie filmmaker/creator, or media team still driving around shuttle drives while James Cameron is shooting Avatar in New Zealand and editing it in Santa Monica, the future is here and within reach. You can get started today with all the power and flexibility of the cloud without the Avatar budget.

The post APIs for Media and Film: What You Need to Know appeared first on Backblaze Blog | Cloud Storage & Cloud Backup.

Free Your Premiere Pro Workflows With Backblaze Cloud Storage

Post Syndicated from James Flores original https://www.backblaze.com/blog/free-your-premiere-pro-workflows-with-backblaze-cloud-storage/

A decorative image showing a mockup of Premiere Pro's user interface and the Backblaze storage cloud.

Projects and technologies come and go, and with each new tool comes new workflow changes. But changing the way you move media around can be tough. Maybe you’ve always done things a certain way, and using a new tool feels like too much of a learning curve especially when you’re pressed for time. But the way you’ve always done things isn’t always the best, easiest, or fastest way. Sometimes you need to change the status quo to level up your media operations. 

As a freelance editor, I worked on a recent project that presented some challenges that demanded new approaches to media storage challenges you might also be facing. I solved them with the cloud—but not an all-in-one cloud. My solution was a mix of cloud tools, including Adobe Premiere Pro, which gives me customization and flexibility—the best of all worlds in media workflows

Right Opportunity at the Right Time

Last year I had the opportunity to serve as a digital imaging technician (DIT) on the set of an indie film titled “Vengeance” produced by Falcon Pictures. The role of a DIT can vary. In many instances you’re simply a data wrangler making backups of the data being shot. In others, you work in the color space of the project creating color corrected dailies on set. For “Vengeance”, I was mostly data wrangling. 

“Vengeance” was an 11-day shoot in the mountains of Northern California near Bass Lake. While the rest of the crew spent their days hiking around with equipment, I was stationed back at home base with my DIT cart. With a lot of free time, I found myself logging data as it came in. Logging clip names soon turned into organizing bins and prepping the project for editing. And, while I was not the editor on the project, I was happy to help edit while I was on set. 

The Challenge

A few months after my work as DIT ended, it became clear that “Vengeance” needed a boost in post-production. The editing was a bit stuck—they had no assistant editor to complete logging and to sound sync all the footage. So, I was asked to help out. The only problem: I needed to be able to share my work with another editor who lived 45 miles away.

A screenshot of an indie film, Vengeance, being edited in Adobe Premiere Pro.
Editing “Vengeance” in Adobe Premiere Pro.

Evaluating the World of Workflows and Cloud Tools

So we began to evaluate a few different solutions. It was clear that Adobe Premiere Pro would be used, but data storage was still a big question. We debated a few methods for sharing media:

  1. The traditional route: Sharing a studio. With the other editor 45 miles away, commuting and scheduling time with each other was going to be cumbersome. 
  2. Email: We could email project files back and forth as we worked, but how would we keep track of versioning? Project bloat was a big concern. 
  3. Sharing a shuttle drive. Or what I’m calling “Sneakernet 2.0.” This is a popular method, but far from efficient. 
  4. Google Drive or Dropbox: Another popular option, but also one that comes with costs and service limitations like rate limiting. 

None of these options were great, so we went back to the drawing board. 

The Solution: A Hybrid Workflow Designed for Our Needs

To come to a final decision for this workflow, we made a list of our needs: 

  • The ability to share a Premiere Pro project file for updates. 
  • The ability to share media for the project. 
  • No exchanging external hard drives. 
  • No driving (a car).  
  • Changes need to be real time.

Based on those needs, here’s where we landed.

Sharing Project Files

Adobe recently released a new update to its Team Projects features within Premiere Pro. Team Projects allows you to host a Premiere Pro project in the Adobe cloud and share it with other Adobe Creative Cloud users. This gave us the flexibility to share a single project and share updates in real time. This means no emailing of project files, versioning issues, or bloated files. That left the issues of the media. How do we share media? 

Sharing Media Files

You may think that it would be obvious to share files in the Adobe Creative Cloud where you get 100GB free. And while 100GB may be enough storage for .psd and .ai files, 100GB is nothing for video, especially when we are talking about RED (.r3d) files which start off as approximately 4GB chunks and can quickly add up to terabytes of footage. 

So we put everything in a Backblaze B2 Bucket. All the .r3d source files went directly from my Synology network attached storage (NAS) into a Backblaze B2 Bucket using the Synology Cloud Sync tool. In addition to the source files, I used Adobe Media Encoder to generate proxy files of all the .r3d files. This folder of proxy files also synced with Backblaze automatically. 

Making Changes in Real Time

What was great about this solution is that all of the uploading is done automatically via a seamless Backblaze + Synology integration, and the Premiere Pro Team Project had a slew of publish functions perfect for real-time updates. And because the project files and proxies are stored in the cloud, I could get to them from several computers. I spent time at my desktop PC logging and syncing footage, but was also able to move to my couch and do the same from my MacBook Pro. I never had to move hard drives around, copy projects files, or worry about version control.

The other editor was able to connect to my Backblaze B2 Bucket using Cyberduck, a cloud storage browser for Mac. Using Cyberduck, he was able to pull down all the proxy files I created and share any files that he created. So, we were synced for the entire duration of the project. 

Once the technology was configured, I was able to finish logging for “Vengeance”, sync all the sound, build out stringouts and assemblies, and even a rough cut of every scene for the entire movie, giving the post-production process the boost it needed.

A diagram showing how editors use Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage with Adobe Premiere Pro.

The Power of Centralized Storage for Media Workflows

Technology is constantly evolving, and, in most circumstances, technology makes how we work a lot easier. For years filmmakers have worked on projects by physically moving our source material, whether it was on film reels, tapes, or hard drives. The cloud changed all that

The key to getting “Vengeance” through post-production was our centralized approach to file management. Files existed in Backblaze already, we simply brought Premiere Pro to the data rather than moving the huge amount of files to Premiere Pro via the Creative Cloud. 

The mix of technologies lets us create a customized flow that works for us. Creative Cloud had the benefit of providing a project sharing mechanism, and Backblaze provided a method of sharing media (Synology and Cyberduck) regardless of the tooling each editor had. 

Once we hit picture lock, the centralized files will serve as a distribution point for VFX, color, and sound, making turnover a breeze. It can even be used as a distribution hub—check out how American Public Television uses Backblaze to distribute their finished assets. 

Centralizing in the cloud not only made it easy for me to work from home, it allowed us to collaborate on a project with ease eliminating the overhead of driving, shuttle drive delivery (Sneakernet 2.0), and version control. The best part? A workflow like this is affordable for any size production and can be set up in minutes. 

Have you recently moved to a cloud workflow? Let us know what you’re using and how it went in the comments. 

The post Free Your Premiere Pro Workflows With Backblaze Cloud Storage appeared first on Backblaze Blog | Cloud Storage & Cloud Backup.

A Tale of Two NAS Setups, Part Two: Managing Media Files

Post Syndicated from James Flores original https://www.backblaze.com/blog/a-tale-of-two-nas-setups-part-two-managing-media-files/

A decorative diagram showing icons of media files flowing through a NAS to the cloud.

Editor’s Note

This post is the second in a two-part series about sharing practical NAS tips and tricks to help readers with their own home or office NAS setups. Check out Part One where Backblazer Vinodh Subramanian walks through how he set up a NAS system at home to manage files and back up devices. And read on to learn how Backblazer James Flores uses a NAS to manage media files as a professional filmmaker.

The modern computer has been in existence for decades. As hardware and software have advanced, 5MB of data has gone from taking up a room and weighing a literal ton to being orders of magnitude more compact than what you would find on a typical smartphone. No matter how much storage there is, though, we—I know I am not alone—have been generating content to fill the space. Industry experts say that we reached 64.2 zettabytes of data created, captured, copied, and consumed globally in 2020, and we’re set to reach more than 180 zettabytes in 2025. And a lot of that is media—from .mp3s and .jpgs to .movs, we all have a stock pile of files sitting somewhere.

If you’re creating content you probably have this problem to the 10th power. I started out creating content by editing videos in high school, and my content collection has only grown from there. After a while, the mix of physical media formats had amassed into a giant box stuffed with VHS tapes, DVCPRO tapes, Mini DVs, DVDs, CD-ROMs, flash drives, external hard disk drives (HDDs), internal laptop HDDs, an Apple TimeCapsule, SD cards, and, more recently, USB 3.0 hard drives. Needless to say, it’s unruly at best, and a huge data loss event waiting to happen at worst.

Today, I’m walking through how I solved a problem most of us face: running into the limits of storage.

The Origin Story

My collection of media started because of video editing. Then, when I embarked on an IT career, the amount of data I was responsible for only grew, and my new position came with the (justifiable) paranoia of data loss. In the corporate setting, a network attached storage device (NAS) quickly became the norm—a huge central repository of data accessible to any one on the network and part of the domain.

An image of a Synology network attached storage (NAS) device.
A Synology NAS.

Meanwhile in 2018, I returned to creating content again in full swing. What started with small webinar edits on a Macbook Air quickly turned into scripted productions complete with custom graphics and 4K raw footage. And thus the data bloat continued.

But this time (informed by my IT background), the solution was easy. Instead of burning data to several DVDs and keeping them in a shoebox, I used larger volume storage like hard drives (HDDs) and NAS devices. After all, HDDs are cheap and relatively reliable.

And, I had long since learned that a good backup strategy is key. Thus, I embarked on making my backup plan an extension of my data management plan.

The Plan

The plan was simple. I wanted to have a 4TB NAS to use as a backup location and to extend my internal storage in case I needed to. After all, my internal drive was 7TB—who’s going to use more than that? (I thought at the time, unable to see my own future.) Setting up NAS is relatively simple: it replicated a standard IT setup, with a switch, a static IP address, and some cables.

But first, I needed hardwired network access in my office which is far away from my router. As anyone who works with media knows, accessing a lot of large files over wifi just isn’t fun. Luckily my house was pre-wired with CAT5—CAT5 cables that were terminated as phone lines. (Who uses a landline these days?) After terminating the cables with CAT5E adapters, installing a small 10-port patch panel and a new switch, I had a small network where my entire office was hardwired to my router/modem.

As far as the NAS goes, I chose a Synology DS214+, a simple two-bay NAS. After all, I didn’t expect to really use it all. I worked primarily off of my internal storage, then files were archived to this Synology device. I could easily move them back and forth between my primary and secondary storage because I’d created my internal network, and life was good.

Data Bloat Strikes Again

Fast forward to 2023. Now, I’m creating content routinely for two different companies, going to film school, and flexing my freelance editing skills on indie films. Even with the extra storage I’d built in for myself, I am at capacity yet again. Not only have I filled up Plan A on my internal drive, but now my Plan B NAS is nearing capacity. And, where are those backups being stored? My on-prem-only solution wasn’t cutting it.

A photograph of a room with an overwhelming amount of old and new technology and cables.
This wasn’t me—but I get it.

Okay, New Plan

So what’s next?

Since I’m already set up for it, there’s a good argument to expand the NAS. But is that really scalable? In an office full of film equipment, a desk, a lightboard, and who knows what else in the future, do I really need another piece of equipment that will run all day?

Like all things tech, the answer is in the cloud. Synology’s NAS was already set up for cloud-based workflows, which meant that I got the best of both worlds: the speed of on-prem and the flexibility of the cloud.

Synology has its own marketplace with add-on packages which are essentially apps that let you add functionality to your device. Using their Cloud Sync app, you can sync an entire folder on your NAS to a cloud object storage provider. For me that means: Instead of buying another NAS device (hardware I have to maintain) or some other type of external storage (USB drives, LTO tapes), I purchase cloud storage, set up Cloud Sync to automatically sync data to Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage, and my data is set. It’s accessible from anywhere, I can easily create off-site backups, and I am not adding hardware to my jam-packed office.

I Need a Hero

This is great for my home office and the small projects I do in my spare time but how is this simple setup being used to modernize media workflows?

A big sticking point for media folks is what we talked about before—that large files can take up too much bandwidth to work well on wifi. However, as the cloud has become more accessible to all, there are many products today on the market designed to solve that problem for media teams specifically.

Up Amongst the Clouds

One problem though: Many of these tools push their own cloud storage. You could opt to play cloud storage hopscotch: sign up for the free tier of Google Drive,  drag and drop files (and hope the browser keeps the connection going), hit capacity, then jump to the next cloud storage provider’s free tier and fill that up. With free accounts across the internet, all of the sudden you have your files stored all over the place, and you may not even remember where they all are. So, instead of my cardboard box full of various types of media, we end up with media in silos across different cloud providers.

And you can’t forget the cost. Cloud storage used to be all about the big guys. Beyond the free tiers, pricing was designed for big business, and many cloud storage providers have tiered pricing based on your usage, charges for downloads, throttled speeds, and so on. But, the cost of storage per GB has only decreased over the years, so (in theory), the cost of cloud storage should have gone down. (And I can’t resist a shameless plug here: At Backblaze, storage is ⅕ the cost of other cloud providers.)

An image of a chalkboard and a piggy bank. The chalkboard displays a list of fees with dollar signs indicating how much or little they cost.
Key takeaway: Cute piggy bank, yes. Prohibitively expensive cloud storage, no.

Using NAS for Bigger Teams

It should be news to no one that COVID changed a lot in the media and entertainment industry, bringing remote work to our front door, and readily-available cloud products are powering those remote workflows. However, when you’re storing in each individual tool, it’s like when you have a USB drive over here, and an external hard drive over there.

As the media tech stack has evolved, a few things have changed. You have more options when it comes to choosing your cloud storage provider. And, cloud storage providers have made it a priority for tools to talk to each other through APIs. Here’s a good example: now that my media files are synced to and backed up with Synology and Backblaze, they are also readily accessible for other applications to use. This could be direct access to my Backblaze storage with a nonlinear editing system (NLE) or any modern workflow automation tool. Storing files in the cloud is only an entry point for a whole host of other cloud workflow hacks that can make your life immensely easier.

These days, you can essentially “bring your own storage” (BYOS, let’s make it a thing). Now, the storage is the foundation of how I can work with other tools, and it all happens invisibly and easily. I go about my normal tasks, and my files follow me.

With many tools, it’s as simple as pointing your storage to Backblaze. When that’s not an option, that’s when you get into why APIs matter, a story for another day (or another blog post). Basically, with the right storage, you can write your own rules that your tools + storage execute, which means that things like this LucidLink, iconik, and Backblaze workflow are incredibly easy.

Headline: Cloud Saves the (Media) World

So that’s the tale of how and why I set up my home NAS, and how that’s naturally led me to cloud storage. The “how” has gotten easier over the years. It’s still important to have a hard-wired internet connection for my NAS device, but now that you can sync to the cloud and point your other tools to use those synced files, you have the best of both worlds: a hybrid cloud workflow that gives you maximum speed with the ability to grow your storage as you need to.

Are you using NAS to manage your media at home or for a creative team? We’d love to hear more about your setup and how it’s working for you.

The post A Tale of Two NAS Setups, Part Two: Managing Media Files appeared first on Backblaze Blog | Cloud Storage & Cloud Backup.

Object Storage for Film, Video, and Content Creation

Post Syndicated from James Flores original https://www.backblaze.com/blog/object-storage-for-film-video-and-content-creation/

A decorative image showing icons representing drives and storage options superimposed on a cloud. A title reads: Object Storage for Media Workflows

Twenty years ago, who would have thought going to work would mean spending most of your time on a computer and running most of your applications through a web browser or a mobile app? Today, we can do everything remotely via the power of the internet—from email to gaming, from viewing our home security cameras to watching the latest and greatest movie trailers—and we all have opinions about the best browsers, too…

Along with that easy, remote access, a slew of new cloud technologies are fueling the tech we use day in and day out. To get to where we are today, the tech industry had to rethink some common understandings, especially around data storage and delivery. Gone are the days that you save a file on your laptop, then transport a copy of that file via USB drive or CD-ROM (or, dare we say, a floppy disk) so that you can keep working on it at the library or your office. And, those same common understandings are now being reckoned with in the world of film, video, and content creation.

In this post, I’ll dive into storage, specifically cloud object storage, and what it means for the future of content creation, not only for independent filmmakers and content creators, but also in post-production workflows.

The Evolution of File Management

If you are reading this blog you are probably familiar with a storage file system—think Windows Explorer, the Finder on Mac, or directory structures in Linux. You know how to create a folder, create files, move files, and delete folders. This same file structure has made its way into cloud services such as Google Drive, Box, and Dropbox. And many of these technologies have been adopted to store some of the largest content, namely media files like .mp4, .wav, or .r3d files.

But, as camera file outputs grow larger and larger and the amount of content generated by creative teams soars, folders structures get more and more complex. Why is this important?

Well, ask yourself: How much time have you spent searching for clips you know exist, but just can’t seem to find? Sure, you can use search tools to search your folder structure but as you have more and more content, that means searching for the proverbial needle in a haystack—naming conventions can only do so much, especially when you have dozens or hundreds of people adding raw footage, creating new versions, and so on.

Finding files in a complex file structure can take so much time that many of the aforementioned companies create system limits preventing long searches. In addition, they may limit uploads and downloads making it difficult to manage the terabytes of data a modern production creates. So, this all begs the question: Is a traditional file system really the best for scaling up, especially in data-heavy industries like filmmaking and video content creation? Enter: Cloud object storage.

Refresher: What is Object Storage?

You can think of object storage as simply a big pool of storage space filled with object data. In the past we’ve defined object data as “some assemblage of data with one unique identifier and an infinite amount of metadata.” The three components that comprise objects in object storage are key here. They include:

  1. Unique Identifier: Referred to as a universally unique identifier (UUID) or global unique identifier (GUID), this is simply a complex number identifier.
  2. Infinite Metadata: Data about the data with endless possibilities.
  3. Data: The actual data we are storing.

So what does that actually mean?

It means each object (this can be any type of file—a .jpg, .mp4, .wav, .r3d, etc.) has an automatically generated unique identifier which is just a number (e.g. 4_z6b84cf3535395) versus a folder structure path you must manually create and maintain (e.g. D:\Projects\JOB4548\Assets\RAW\A001\A001_3424OP.RDM\A001_34240KU.RDC\
A001_A001_1005ku_001.R3D).

An image of a card catalog.
Interestingly enough, this is where metadata comes from.

It also means each object can have an infinite amount of metadata attached to it. Metadata, put simply, is a “tag” that identifies how the file is used or stored. There are several examples of metadata, but here are just a few:

  • Descriptive metadata, like the title or author.
  • Structural metadata, like how to order pages in a chapter.
  • Administrative metadata, like when the file was created, who has permissions to it, and so on.
  • Legal metadata, like who holds the copyright or if the file is in the public domain.

So, when you’re saying an image file is 400×400 pixels and in .jpg format, you’ve just identified two pieces of metadata about the file. In filmmaking, metadata can include things like reel numbers or descriptions. And, as artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning tools continue to evolve, the amount of metadata about a given piece of footage or image only continues to grow. AI tools can add data around scene details, facial recognition, and other identifiers, and since those are coded as metadata, you will be able to store and search files using terms like “scenes with Bugs Bunny” or “scenes that are in a field of wildflowers”—and that means that you’ll spend less time trying to find the footage you need when you’re editing.

When you put it all together, you have one gigantic content pool that can grow infinitely. It uses no manually created complex folder structure and naming conventions. And it can hold an infinite amount of data about your data (metadata), making your files more discoverable.

Let’s Talk About Object Storage for Content Creation

You might be wondering: What does this have to do with the content I’m creating?

Consider this: When you’re editing a project, how much of your time is spent searching for files? A recent study by GISTICS found that the average creative person searches for media 83 times a week. Maybe you’re searching your local hard drive first, then your NAS, then those USB drives in your closet. Or, maybe you are restoring content off an LTO tape to search for that one clip you need. Or, maybe you moved some of your content to the cloud—is it in your Google Drive or in your Dropbox account? If so, which folder is it in? Or was it the corporate Box account? Do you have permissions to that folder? All of that complexity means that the average creative person fails to find the media they are looking for 35% of the time. But you probably don’t need a study to tell you we all spent huge amounts of time searching for content.

An image showing a command line interface window with a failed search.
Good old “request timed out.”

Here is where object storage can help. With object storage, you simply have buckets (object storage containers) where all your data can live, and you can access it from wherever you’re working. That means all of the data stored on those shuttle drives sitting around your office, your closet of LTO tapes, and even a replica of your online NAS are in a central, easily accessible location. You’re also working from the most recent file.

Once it’s in the cloud, it’s safe from the types of disasters that affect on-premises storage systems, and it’s easy to secure your files, create backups, and so on. It’s also readily available when you need it, and much easier to share with other team members. It’s no wonder many of the apps you use today take advantage of object storage as their primary storage mechanism.

The Benefits of Object Storage for Media Workflows

Object storage offers a number of benefits for creative teams when it comes to streamlining workflows, including:

  • Instant access
  • Integrations
  • Workflow interoperability
  • Easy distribution
  • Off-site back up and archive

Instant Access

With cloud object storage, content is ready when you need it. You know inspiration can strike at any time. You could be knee deep in editing a project, in the middle of binge watching the latest limited series, or out for a walk. Whenever the inspiration decides to strike, having instant access to your library of content is a game changer. And that’s the great thing about object storage in the cloud: you gain access to massive amounts of data with a few clicks.

Integrations

Object storage is a key component of many of the content production tools in use today. For example, iconik is a cloud-native media asset management (MAM) tool that can gather and organize media from any storage location. You can point iconik to your Backblaze B2 Bucket and use its advanced search functions as well as its metadata tagging.

Workflow Interoperability

What if you don’t want to use iconik, specifically? What’s great about using cloud storage as a centralized repository is that no matter what application you use, your data is in a single place. Think of it like your external hard drive or NAS—you just connect that drive with a new tool, and you don’t have to worry about downloading everything to move to the latest and greatest. In essence, you are bringing your own storage (BYOS!).

Here’s an example: CuttingRoom is a cloud native video editing and collaboration tool. It runs entirely in your web browser and lets you create unique stories that can instantly be published to your destination of choice. What’s great about CuttingRoom is its ability to read an object storage bucket as a source. By simply pointing CuttingRoom to a Backblaze B2 Bucket, it has immediate access to the media source files and you can get to editing. On the other hand, if you prefer using a MAM, that same bucket can be indexed by a tool like iconik.

Easy Distribution

Now that your edit is done, it’s time to distribute your content to the world. Or, perhaps you are working with other teams to perfect your color and sound, and it’s time to share your picture lock version. Cloud storage is ready for you to distribute your files to the next team or an end user.

Here’s a recent, real-world example: If you have been following the behind-the-scenes articles about creating Avatar: The Way of Water, you know that not only was its creation the spark of new technology like the Sony Venice camera with removable sensors, but the distribution featured a cloud centric flow. Footage (the film) was placed in an object store (read: a cloud storage database), processed into different formats, languages were added with 3D captions, and then footage was distributed directly from a central location.

And, while not all of us have Jon Landau as our producer, a huge budget, and a decade to create our product, this same flexibility exists today with object storage—with the added bonus that it’s usually budget-friendly as well.

Off-Site Back Up and Archive

And last but certainly not least, let’s talk back up and archive. Once a project is done, you need space for the next project, but no one wants to risk losing the old project. Who out there is completely comfortable hitting the delete key as well as saying yes to the scary prompt, “Are you sure you want to delete?”

Well, that’s what you would have to do in the past. These days, object storage is a great place to store your terabytes and terabytes of archived footage without cluttering your home, office, or set with additional hardware. Compared with on-premises storage, cloud storage lets you add more capacity as you need it—just make sure you understand cloud storage pricing models so that you’re getting the best bang for your buck.

If you’re using a NAS device in your media workflow, you’ll find you need to free up your on-prem storage. Many NAS devices, like Synology and QNAP, have cloud storage integrations that allow you to automatically sync and archive data from your device to the cloud. In fact, you could start taking advantage of this today.

No delete key here—just a friendly archive button.

Getting Started With Object Storage for Media Workflows

Migrating to the cloud may seem daunting, but it doesn’t have to be. Especially with the acceleration of hybrid workflows in the film industry recently, cloud-based workflows are becoming more common and better integrated with the tools we use every day. You can test this out with Backblaze using your free 10GB that you get just for signing up for Backblaze B2. Sure, that may not seem like much when a single .r3d file is 4GB. But with that 10GB, you can test upload speeds and download speeds, try out integrations with your preferred workflow tools, and experiment with AI metadata. If your team is remote, you could try an integration with LucidLink. Or if you’re looking to power a video on-demand site, you could integrate with one of our content delivery network (CDN) partners to test out content distribution, like Backblaze customer Kanopy, a streaming service that delivers 25,000 videos to libraries worldwide.

Change is hard, but cloud storage can be easy. Check out all of our media workflow solutions and get started with your 10GB free today.

The post Object Storage for Film, Video, and Content Creation appeared first on Backblaze Blog | Cloud Storage & Cloud Backup.

Virtual vs. Remote vs. Hybrid Production

Post Syndicated from James Flores original https://www.backblaze.com/blog/virtual-vs-remote-vs-hybrid-production/

A decorative image showing icons of a NAS device, a video with a superimposed play button, and a cloud with the Backblaze logo.

For many of us, 2020 transformed our work habits. Changes to the way we work that always seemed years away got rolled out within a few months. Fast forward to today, and the world seems to be returning back to some sense of normalcy. But one thing that’s not going back is how we work, especially for media production teams. Virtual production, remote video production, and hybrid cloud have all accelerated, reducing operating costs and moving us closer to a cloud-based reality.

So what’s the difference between virtual production, remote production, and hybrid cloud workflows, and how can you use any or all of those strategies to improve how you work? At first glance, they all seem to be different variations of the same thing. But there are important differences, and that’s what we’re digging into today. Read on to get an understanding of these new ways of working and what they mean for your creative team.

Going to NAB in April?

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➔ Meet Backblaze at NAB

What Is Virtual Production?

Let’s start with virtual production. It sounds like doing production virtually, which could just mean “in the cloud.” I can assure you, it’s way cooler than that. When the pandemic hit, social distancing became the norm. Gathering a film crew together in a studio or in any location of the world went out the door. Never fear: virtual production came to the rescue.

Virtual production is a method of production where, instead of building a set or going to a specific location, you build a set virtually, usually with a gaming engine such as Unreal Engine. Once the environment is designed and lit within Unreal Engine, it can then be fed to an LED volume. An LED volume is exactly what it sounds like: a huge volume of LED screens connected to a single input (the Unreal Engine environment).

With virtual production, your set becomes the LED volume, and Unreal Engine can change the background to anything you can imagine at the click of a button. Now this isn’t just a LED screen as a background—what makes virtual production so powerful is its motion tracking integration with real cameras.

Using a motion sensor system attached to a camera, Unreal Engine is able to understand where your camera is pointed. (It’s way more tech-y than that, but you get the picture.) You can even match the virtual lens in Unreal Engine with the lens of your physical camera. With the two systems combined, a camera following an actor on a virtual set can react by moving the background along with the camera in real time.

Virtual Production in Action

If you were one of the millions who have been watching The Mandalorian on Disney+, check out this behind the scenes look at how they utilized a virtual production.

 

This also means location scouting can be done entirely inside the virtual set and the assets created for pre-vizualiation can actually carry on into post, saving a ton of time (as the post work actually starts during pre-production.

So, virtual production is easily confused with remote production, but it’s not the same. We’ll get into remote production next.

What Is Remote Production?

We’re all familiar with the stages of production: development, pre-production, production, post-production, and distribution. Remote production has more to do with post-production. Remote production is simply the ability to handle post-production tasks from anywhere.

Here’s how the pandemic accelerated remote production: In post, assets are edited on non-linear editing software (NLEs) connected to huge storage systems located deep within studios and post-production houses. When everyone was forced to work from home, it made editing quite difficult. There were, of course, solutions that allowed you to remotely control your edit bay, but remotely controlling a system from miles away and trying to scrub videos over your at-home internet bandwidth quickly became a nuisance.

To solve this problem, everyone just took their edit bay home along with a hard drive containing what they needed for their particular project. But shuttling drives all over the place and trying to correlate files across all the remote drives meant that the NAS became the next headache. To resolve this confusion over storage, production houses turned to hybrid solutions—our next topic.

What Are Hybrid Cloud Workflows?

Hybrid cloud workflows didn’t originate during the pandemic, but they did make remote production much easier. A hybrid cloud workflow is a combination of a public cloud, private cloud, and an on-premises solution like a network attached storage device (NAS) or storage area network (SAN). When we think about storage, we think about first the relationship of our NLE to our local hard drive, then our relationship between the local computer and the NAS or SAN. The next iteration of this is the relationship of all of these (NLE, local computer, and NAS/SAN) to the cloud.

For each of these on-prem solutions the primary problems faced are capacity and availability. How much can our drive hold, and how do I access the NAS—local area network (LAN) or virtual private network (VPN)? Storage in the cloud inherently solves both of these problems. It’s always available and accessible from any location with an internet connection. So, to solve the problems that remote teams of editors, visual effects (VFX), color, and sound folks faced, the cloud was integrated into many workflows.

Using the cloud, companies are able to store content in a single location where it can then be distributed to different teams (VFX, color, sound, etc.). This central repository makes it possible to move large amounts of data across different regions, making it easier for your team to access it while also keeping it secure. Many NAS devices have native cloud integrations, so the automated file synchronization between the cloud and a local environment is baked in—teams can just get to work.

The hybrid solution worked so well that many studios and post houses have adopted them as a permanent part of their workflow and have incorporated remote production into their day-to-day. A good example is the video team at Hagerty, a production crew that creates 300+ videos a year. This means that workflows that were once locked down to specific locations are now moving to the cloud. Now more than ever, API accessible resources, like cloud storage with S3 compatible APIs that integrates with your preferred tools, are needed to make these workflows actually work.

Just one example of Hagerty’s content.

Hybrid Workflows and Cloud Storage

While the world seems to be returning to a new normal, our way of work is not. For the media and entertainment world, the pandemic gave the space a jolt of electricity, igniting the next wave of innovation. Virtual production, remote production, and hybrid workflows are here to stay. What digital video started 20 years ago, the pandemic has accelerated, and that acceleration is pointing directly to the cloud.

So, what are your next steps as you future-proof your workflow? First, inspect your current set of tools. Many modern tools are already cloud-ready. For example, a Synology NAS already has Cloud Sync capabilities. EditShare also has a tool capable of crafting custom workflows, wherever your data lives. (These are just a few examples.)

Second, start building and testing. Most cloud providers offer free tiers or free trials—at Backblaze, your first 10GB are free, for example. Testing a proof of concept is the best way to understand how new workflows fit into your system without overhauling the whole thing or potentially disrupting business as usual.

And finally, one thing you definitely need to make hybrid workflows work is cloud storage. If you’re looking to make the change a lot easier, you came to the right place. Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage pairs with hundreds of integrations so you can implement it directly into your established workflows. Check out our partners and our media solutions for more.

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