Broadcast Beat Magazine 2017 IBC Show | Page 72

reasons for this; lowering the cost of IT support in creative facilities allows those facilities to spend more on the systems and people that produce revenue. The storage system in a creative facility is much more integral to daily production than in an office environment, where most documents are cached locally and little pressure is placed on the speed of the repository. Standard network-attached storage is designed to utilize the same technology that’s installed by default on all desktop workstations. It’s the ubiq- uitous network share, the fabric interwoven into every modern facility that allows me to be writing this document to a file that doesn’t exist on my local computer. It provides connectivity across departments and time zones. With the right IP address, you can access anything, if you have enough time to wait for a response. Artists however, rely on edit-in-place networks to be fast, and highly available, with low latency and sustained throughput at high traffic levels, or the deadline isn’t hit, and the facility doesn’t get paid. Because of this, the artists in a creative facility are far more attuned to the behavior of the storage system, and often are the ones making the call to tech support when things aren’t right. If we agree that enterprise storage products are normally inappropriate for the creative facility, we have to think that enterprise storage workflow also has its problems. If you open a document from your office server and for some reason you’re unable to save your changes, you may sim- ply rename it and save it to a different location. This would be fine for an office document but imagine doing this with project files in a creative facility - with gigabytes and terabytes worth of video, audio, and project metadata renamed and spread around randomly. This is where permis- sions stop being a workflow enabler and become a workflow obstacle. Enterprise networks follow the same rules of permissions as your office net- work. Authentication, ownership, and group poli- cies will determine whether the file you require is available to you. Dedicated, content-creation storage networks that apply high-level permissions based on proj- ect assignment and keep file-level system permis- sions to a minimum will avoid enterprise workflow 72 • Broadcast Beat Magazine • www.broadcastbeat.com obstacles. This is called project-based volume workflow, and it’s been a tenant of postproduc- tion content creation for decades. From small, one-person shops to huge unscripted television content factories, volume assignment based on access to the required data for the job at hand is the most secure and efficient method of storage allocation. When a volume management system allows for quick and easy creation, size change and provisioning of storage assets, it’s clear t