Imagine for a moment you are a studio administrator, managing the editing suites for a major film. Pretty exciting, right?
Every night, one of your tasks is preparing the studio for the next day. This means spending hours uploading raw video footage to each editing suite, sometimes across multiple facilities. Each editing suite is assigned a project and corresponding footage, so editors can get to work right away when they arrive in the morning.
But what if something goes wrong with an editing suite? Say a projector or another piece of hardware in an editing suite malfunctions. Suddenly the production schedule is in jeopardy. It can take hours to move the raw footage to another bay. You should know, you spent the entire night before doing the exact same thing! Even worse, losing valuable working time does not make for happy editors or studio executives.
This is a story we hear far too often from studio administrators.
The storage that isn’t best for your editing suite
Work in an editing suite requires extremely high-performance storage. For this reason, studios have turned to Storage Area Network (SAN) solutions. Historically, SAN storage has given studios the best storage performance, but it comes with trade-offs.
While SAN can supply the storage speeds studios want, they don’t scale. A studio administrator would have to re-architect their entire environment every time they wanted to add another editing suite. Or, if something happens to go wrong in a single editing suite, it can take hours before that editor is back to work.
In cases like this, studios need a storage system that can handle the performance requirements of intensive editing while being able to scale as the business grows.
Editing suite storage with Qumulo
For years, we’ve been helping studios store the digital assets needed for visual effects and rendering workloads. That led to the realization that a network-attached storage (NAS) solution works well as a shared data storage solution across multiple editing suites.
With a modern, scalable storage system, malfunctions in an editing suite won’t shut down production for an entire day. An editor can easily move to another room with access to the assets he or she needs from a shared storage system. When hiccups do occur, real-time analytics can give administrators unprecedented visibility into how workloads are impacting one another and insights into how to optimize workflows.
The result is a storage solution that is no longer just a cost center, but an integral part of the solution. That makes for happier studio executives.
Performance Series storage for an editing suite
Qumulo’s Performance Series is a great option for studios held captive by difficult-to-manage SAN products. Our Performance Series delivers an unprecedented 18GB/sec of throughput, easily supporting 12 streams of uncompressed 4K DPR/EXR video playback at 30 fps from a single 4-node cluster.
Editorial workloads are only going to grow more complex. And production schedules will always be subject to change. As an imaginary (or real) studio administrator, you can have peace of mind knowing your storage infrastructure can keep up.
Hybrid series for an editing suite
For studios with a limited number of uncompressed 4K streams to support, or who work primarily with HD video, our Hybrid Series products are a great option with configurations for any budget. A 4-node QC208 cluster can support 15 streams of 1080p video playback at 30 fps, or four streams of uncompressed 4K DPR/EXR video footage at 24fps.
The best editing suite storage leads to success
Storage technology has come far enough that studios do not have to feel trapped into buying SAN for their editing suite. Newer systems (Qumulo is a great example) are giving studio administrators the freedom to run an editing suite with the storage platform they want. This means studios can take advantage of and incorporate valuable storage features that may not have previously been available, into their editing suite workflow. Features like real-time storage analytics can give you the intelligence to build more efficient workflows. By expanding the options for the best storage for your editing suite, studios can be confident their infrastructure is built for success.
