The time we spend packaging, re-packaging, moving, copying and cataloguing content is time that could be more valuably spent. Finding the means to automate these highly repetitive processes not only creates more time, but also eliminates ever-present issue of human error.
For all video creators, editors and distributors, storing and managing content has become a significant challenge. Changes in the way we create, edit, collate, re-purpose and distribute video have created a number of factors that, when taken together, have the potential to generate significant process and operational overheads.
So what are those factors, and what tools are available to help reduce their negative impact on your content creation, distribution and repurposing?
Without any real metadata except file name and date, differentiating content can be extremely difficult.
Factor 1 – Size and volume
In 2019 it is cheaper than ever to create compelling video, not surprisingly. Reductions in the cost of content creation are leading to a commensurate increase in the amount of video created. Multiple cameras capturing single events are commonplace, enabled by lowest ever prices of high resolution cameras and the rapid increase in quality of smartphone video capture. The ability of these affordable modern devices to keep pace with increases in high-end resolution delivery is impressive, to the point where hand-held devices are now used extensively for secondary, tertiary or even primary capture from HD through 4K and, of course, the imminent 8K. This level of quality, coupled with the varied simultaneous camera angles and feeds, is fast becoming the expected norm for any video output, which has led to an explosion in file size and in the sheer number of files being generated.
Factor 2 – Distribution and repurposing
So, we are creating a greater number of video files to create a better experience for our audiences. But those audiences are also becoming more diverse, as are their viewing habits. Traditional distribution channels remain, but in recent years they’ve been joined by emerging IT-, OTT- and telco-based platforms. Your content is as likely to be viewed today on a laptop computer as it is via community TV, satellite or set-top box, and younger audiences in particular require their content to be delivered to their on-the-go devices, to be viewed on your church’s Facebook account, web site or social account.
Whether you’re storing files on local hard disk, external hard drive or in a cloud platform, keeping track of your content can be a major headache.
Satisfying this demand requires you to create and distribute multiple versions, at different resolutions and in a variety of formats. In even the most modest modern channel, any one program may require versions for up to five different platforms—and that’s not counting repurposed content, such as highlight reels and compilations. Even if you’ve committed to the not-insignificant expense of a separate transcode solution, it’s generally a manual process, requiring an operator to queue content, define profiles and execute the operation.
Factor 3 – Asset storage
A greater number of larger files naturally requires more storage. This means that your systems have to grow rapidly; what may have started as one “large hard drive” quickly progresses to an extra workstation, and ever-larger external USB hard drives to which you have to manually copy projects to prevent workstation storage becoming full. As file and project sizes increase, so does the number of drives required to store them, as does the time it takes to perform your housekeeping and asset management tasks. Cloud storage is a welcome addition, and many channels and content creators make full use of facilities such as Dropbox, iCloud or Creative Cloud. These services do offer relatively inexpensive storage initially, but costs increase with capacity and, just as with external hard disks, effective and efficient cataloguing becomes an issue.
All-in-one storage and asset management solutions are now within the price point that is more suitable to small-to-medium content creators.
Factor 4 – Cataloguing
Whether you’re storing files on local hard disk, external hard drive or in a cloud platform, keeping track of your content can be a major headache. Entering data into spreadsheets is a tedious, manual process, time-consuming and prone to error. Without any real metadata except file name and date, differentiating content can be extremely difficult, and you can only really determine whether you’ve found the right clip when you restore it and play it. A library of content without valuable metadata (and the means to search for it) becomes unwieldy at best and, in worst case scenarios, utterly useless. Think of a huge reference library without a Dewey Decimal system—unless you know exactly where to look, in exactly the right volume, you won’t be able to find the piece that is most valuable to you right now.
Factor 5 – The human factor
Our time is limited and, therefore, precious. We can directly attribute a value to the time we spend performing different functions, whether at home, in the workplace or in our spiritual lives. Housekeeping is almost certainly somewhere down towards the bottom of the list—a laudable activity though it may be. In video terms, our most valuable time is that spent creating and capturing our messages and stories. The time we spend packaging, re-packaging, moving, copying and cataloguing is time that could be more valuably spent. Finding the means to automate these highly repetitive processes not only creates more time, but also eliminates the unfortunate but ever-present issue of human error. But knitting all of these components together into smoothly functioning workflows can be an intricate and expensive undertaking, difficult to accomplish without the appropriate tools. Many of these tools are not in the same box and come with hefty price tags, and each point of integration represents a potential point of weakness that requires outside professional services to make work.
So, what might a shopping list that addresses all of these factors look like?
- Storage
- Asset Management
- Transcoder
- Workflow Automation
- A deployment and support team to configure these for our specific environment
It’s not a long list, but for those organizations not looking to implement large, enterprise-level storage and asset management solutions, it is a potentially expensive looking one. Separate solutions from various providers add up to a large total expenditure that is more often than not a prohibitive one for small- or medium-sized film or media operations. However, recent developments in many of the technologies that underpin these essential video production and distribution processes have led to solutions convergence. Advances in IT processing speed and capacity now enable more to be done in a single-server environment, essentially reducing the amount of technology and hardware required to perform end-to-end workflows. This reduction in infrastructure generates a similar reduction in expense, and all-in-one solutions are now within the price point that is more suitable to small-to-medium content creators.
The Clover Content Suite from Masstech is one such solution. Building upon decades of media and entertainment experience, Clover provides an easy-to-use, web-based GUI that delivers:
- Watch-folder based ingest;
- 150TB of storage, comprised of either an LTO tape library or cloud platform of choice;
- Standard broadcast toolset: a web-based media player, with enhanced metadata generation and search, in and out markers, partial file restore;
- Content Management with advanced elastic search, proxy viewing and scrubbing;
- Transcoding between standard formats;
- Publishing to alternative playout devices;
- Basic Asset Management;
- Advanced data movement, storage tier optimization and life cycle management, automatically moving content from local storage to long-term storage tiers;
- Application-level integration with editing suites such as Adobe and Avid;
- Metadata management and a conduit to metadata enrichment services;
- Seamless connectivity between on-premise and cloud-based components of the workflow.
The Clover GUI can be accessed from a desktop or any device with an internet connection, and allows rapid content location based on structured (file attribute) or unstructured (text, scripts, associated files, etc.) metadata. The media player browses and searches stored content wherever its location, with simple, integrated tools to extract full or partial clips to publish direct from the browser window, and to export it to arrive in the format required for its intended destination. The simple-to-use workflow automation UI allows you to build workflows that operate automatically based on file attributes that you define, performing all of the manual processes in the background while you concentrate on more important activities.
Clover storage locations include on-premise (disk or LTO) or cloud-based storage locations. The elastic search engine can locate content based on file parameters, or even via associated files, such as Excel, Word or even PDFs. The GUI presents scrubbable proxies, which are loaded into a media player that lets operators review the content and enables the creation of multiple segment markers that can then be saved or used to create partial files restoration. Metadata can be modified or sent out for enrichment from within this same media player.
The Clover Content Suite is available from Masstech for a limited-time price of $35,000.
