By Randi Altman

Storage. Without it there would be no post workflows. It is at the heart of each and every one of them… an unsung hero of sorts. The folks we spoke to for this storage roundtable share their thoughts on how users employ storage, how manufacturers make storage, what it’s like living in a hybrid and cloud world and what’s next for this all-important aspect of the industry.

We hope you enjoy.

BlueBolt’s Tom Mawby 

BlueBolt is an independent VFX studio based in London. It creates visual effects for film and high-end episodic television, such as Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu, Ridley Scott’s Napoleon, The Peripheral (Amazon) and The Last Kingdom (Carnival Films/ Netflix).

How many different types of storage does your facility use and for which parts of your workflow? On-prem, hybrid, cloud, NAS? 
We use one on-prem Pixitmedia GPFS clustered file system for our main storage and another one off-site for disaster recovery. We have SSD storage in our editorial systems for fast playback, and artists have NVMe storage for caching on workstations. 

Some servers use ZFS for storing software and, less frequently, accessed media. We use limited cloud storage; we currently render back directly to our Pixitmedia storage. 

What are the most important things you need from your storage solutions? 
It’s always a case of balancing reliability, speed and capacity with cost. Our main media storage is the Pixitmedia system. It’s the cornerstone of our artists’ workflows, so it needs to be extremely reliable. But this reliability comes at a cost, so space is at a premium, and we have to be vigilant to keep the footprint of our shows under control. 

Another important consideration for us is the quality of support. If something goes wrong with a critical piece of storage, we have to know that the vendor has our back. 

Are you using a MAM? 
No. We use ShotGrid for production tracking and digital asset management, but our media is stored on-prem on our Pixitmedia. 

How are you working with storage in remote workflows? 
Everyone connects in via PCoIP from thin clients to workstations housed in our data centers. All data stays inside our network. This means all of our employees must have very fast and reliable internet connections, but it also means we’re able to keep things simple in terms of having one source of truth for all of our data. 

What do you see as the next storage solutions trend? 
Amazon’s FSx for OpenZFS looks very interesting. We don’t have a huge development team to throw at building custom solutions, so the opportunity to extend our storage into the cloud transparently without having to manage the synchronization ourselves is very compelling. Different storage vendors have their own solutions for extending their file systems, but these often come at higher costs. It’s interesting that Amazon has taken on ZFS. It gives us options to integrate with performant cloud storage at a lower price point than other solutions. 

AJA Video’s Abe Abt 

What kind of storage and data management solutions do you offer? 
We offer AJA Diskover Media Edition, a global data curation and management solution that works with a variety of storage systems from a range of storage vendors and cloud storage providers. We’re working closely together with Diskover Data on the technology to help the M&E industry solve interoperability and accessibility challenges. These challenges are the result of an exponential increase in the amount of data being generated across the industry in recent years and the use of so many different on-prem and cloud storage tools today.  

Are users pushing for more hybrid solutions or sticking with either on-prem or the cloud? 
With the advent of remote production and the widely distributed workforce, cloud and hybrid cloud solutions seem to be the most in-demand among our partners and clients. These solutions lend themselves well to production and post teams working from home or across multiple locations. On-prem storage will always be important for on-set acquisition and the crucial moments just after data is created, but organized movement of data to the cloud for wider viewing and access is becoming increasingly important. 

What do you think is keeping some from working in the cloud? 
One of the main bottlenecks is a lack of familiarity with cloud storage and how it works. If people don’t understand how and where their data is being stored and how they can easily access or view it, then it’s hard to see its true value. AJA Diskover Media Edition helps alleviate those concerns by giving facilities one simple-to-use, web-based user interface that an entire team can use to view, report on and act on their data, regardless of where or how it is stored. 

The other issue that prevents a lot of facilities from transitioning to the cloud is security. This can stem from the lack of familiarity with the cloud, as mentioned above, but there are also legitimate concerns with having your data stored in the cloud and allowing your entire facility/team to remotely access it. AJA Diskover Media Edition helps here by giving teams controlled, nondestructive visibility into their data without direct access. It also allows administrators to control how individual users can view, access and act on their data, ensuring complete data security while also allowing entire distributed workforces to view and interact with their data from any location. 

You touched on this already, but are more people working remotely or back in the office? 
There are certainly more people working remotely now than before 2020. I don’t anticipate we’ll ever transition completely back to the way things were then, nor is it needed. The production world was already pivoting to more remote models pre-2020 because productions and teams were growing more geographically dispersed. Additionally, post work was being increasingly contracted out to multiple editorial, VFX and color facilities spanning the entire globe, and that’s still the case today. Now that the media and entertainment industry has uncovered the benefits of remote work, there’s no going back.  

Do you offer a MAM solution? 
AJA Diskover Media Edition is a global data management solution rather than a MAM. We can certainly integrate with a variety of MAM solutions at a plugin level and make it easier for a large workforce to rapidly index and search powerful MAM solutions from remote locations. 

What is the life expectancy of your storage solution, and is the hardware refresh cycle increasing, decreasing or remaining the same? 
Since we don’t develop a storage system, we cannot define a life expectancy for AJA Diskover Media Edition. It’s a software-based product, available via yearly subscription, with unlimited “seats” per license per year. AJA overall is known for offering long-lasting products and support that far exceeds the life expectancy and market availability of our products, and AJA Diskover Media Edition is no different.

Is real-time sharing of storage between color, editing, audio and VFX something that every post house should have… or at least be working toward? 
Anything that simplifies the storage ontology of a production is a good thing. Giving each phase of the post process visibility into production data is key to a smooth post process and an effective, efficient and economical use of storage and post hours. Losing data, misplacing files and misusing expensive, high-speed cloud storage are all costly mistakes that are very easy to make without proper data management and visibility into your data and what it is doing. 

What are the biggest trends you are seeing in storage? 
Tools that allow entire productions to move to the cloud are exciting and a huge trend right now. At every trade show, I see more and more cloud services vendors and developers. And the faster that data can go from camera to cloud the better. Video is now data earlier and earlier in the process, and all of the software and hardware being created by the manufacturers in this industry reflects just that. 

Rohde & Schwarz’s Duncan Beattie

What kind of storage do you offer?  
We have a broad reach in M&E, encompassing ingest, mastering, playout and monitoring. SpycerNode is a comprehensive range of modular storage systems using enterprise hardware alongside Spectrum Scale from IBM. The deployment that we use is the highest level available and allows us to work with the very best tools that IBM offers. When combined with our hardware, this allows us limitless expansion for both performance and capacity.  

We can also offer intersite data exchange, on-premises instant failover, PAM and cloud connectivity — all-in-all solutions that can scale from media production to broadcast.  

Are users pushing for more hybrid solutions or sticking with either on-prem or the cloud?  
Hybrid workflows have been discussed since before the pandemic. However, in later years the term has been applied to anything where on-prem, cloud and remote have been combined. I believe businesses must concentrate on whatever optimizes the production process for them.  

As we know, it is rare to find two media companies that work the same way, but what they do expect is to be able to maximize their team’s output and investment. Some users insist on having on-prem as their point of origin, whereas others are concentrating on cloud as theirs. We have seen, certainly with broadcasters and large post houses, the desire to keep a large on-prem footprint linked to the cloud. 

What do you think is keeping some from working in the cloud? 
Traditionally, media companies are more comfortable having control over their assets and productions, therefore migrating their entire workflow to a cloud-based solution is a risk too far for many. A further consideration is the uncertainty of price increases or, indeed, ownership of the data. What happens if your cloud provider is no longer viable or operational? A combination of both is ideal. 

Are more people working remotely or back in the office? 
Remote work is absolutely part of the modern production process. However, its feasibility depends on the production company and its specific needs. Film studios, for instance, often require on-site production and post work, especially for location shoots and commercial rentals.  

For traditional post, proxy workflows have helped greatly to reduce the need for high-resolution media to be trafficked off-site, yet the security of moving media in this way is a huge concern and is commercially treacherous. Broadcasters can have remote editing facilities, but they need a great deal of administration and services on-site. Notably, smaller media production teams can derive greater benefits from remote working compared to larger post setups.

Are you offering a MAM as well?  
We have a product called SpycerPAM, which is built on a proven framework for the production process controlling on-the-fly permissions and featuring a project-based workflow that allows a templated approach to production and editing. SpycerNode as a storage solution is also MAM-agnostic, working with all asset management systems. SpycerPAM can also work alongside any MAM in a media workflow, allowing both PAM and MAM to coexist. 

What is the life expectancy of your storage solution, and is the hardware refresh cycle increasing, decreasing or remaining the same? 
For over 90 years, our commitment has been to quality and reliability in all our products, and our dedication to broadcast and M&E is no exception. We have a minimum expected life span of five years, and with our storage solutions, we can offer a case-by-case extension. Many storage providers will have a hard cut-off at this point, forcing a complete reinvestment.  

What customers now need is an increased ROI with an upfront commitment to SLA or licensing costs. Therefore, I would say that manufacturers who can help extend life span and offer a predictable opex support cost have an attractive proposition. 

Is real-time sharing of storage between color, editing, audio and VFX something that every post house should have… or at least be working toward? 
Absolutely. When we made the move to file-based workflows, central storage was imperative. Tracking files, reducing duplication and managing production all helped make sense of the chaotic nature of content creation. As data rates have increased, some areas have become more siloed, and this almost reintroduces the issues for those that are not using shared storage.  

Files must be copied or moved from one pool to another. One of the key aspects I love about our storage solutions is being able to combine our active file management and SpycerPAM products alongside the ability to mix flash and spinning disks in the same cluster. This means we can host all of the above inside the same namespace, simplifying the management of the most valuable asset: data. 

What are the biggest trends you are seeing in storage? 
One of the main trends that I see currently is mixing disk technologies in a seamless fashion. With rising data rates, there’s a growing use of NVMe, SSD and HDD in the background of certain workflow areas to ensure optimal performance. Another enduring trend is the use of the cloud. However, there have been some recent cases where the long-term cost of cloud storage is nearly four times that of a capital expenditure (capex) investment. 

Hammerspace’s Molly Presley 

What kind of storage do you offer? 
 
Hammerspace offers high-performance NAS storage coupled with automated data orchestration to unify data into a single, global data environment. This allows organizations to have a single global file system that spans all storage silos, which users and applications can reference no matter where they are. In other words, users can see and access data stored anywhere. And when that data must be moved for rendering, collaboration, distribution or archive, it all happens in the same global file system.  

Hammerspace gives organizations the flexibility to use data anywhere, with users, compute and applications everywhere. Operations are more efficient because organizations don’t need to store multiple copies of the same data, can use compute resources that are most cost-effective or readily available, and can hire resources anywhere and give them access to collaborate on projects globally.  

Are users pushing for more hybrid solutions or sticking with either on-prem or the cloud?
Users are pushing to be able to use the tools they prefer with the flexibility to work anywhere. They need the application stack to empower them with high-performance local data access, whether the data is actually stored locally, in a remote data center or in a cloud. 

IT administrators, on the other hand, are pushing for the ability to design for flexibility. GPUs are difficult to come by and expensive to procure and run. Workload requirements are often changing as organizations grapple with power availability, access to talent, AI readiness and time to market with new content. IT organizations want the flexibility to run in multiple locations.  

What do you think is keeping some from working in the cloud? 
Working in the cloud is largely inhibited by the need to redesign applications and workloads to be cloud-native. The complexity of such a redesign has kept many organizations from being able to take advantage of cloud capabilities as quickly as they would like. The more standards-based, cloud-native applications that technology vendors provide, the greater the flexibility to run anywhere. This includes allowing data architectures to be standard-file interfaces in the cloud just as they were in the data center. It also means deploying anywhere without changing user workloads and putting data in motion to use it where it is most efficient and beneficial. 

Are more people working remotely, or are they back in the office?



 
The majority of users we work with are still remote, or they have the flexibility to work in the office at their discretion but don’t do so consistently. 

Are you offering a MAM?  
We do not provide a MAM. Instead, we work with MAM companies to enrich the metadata in our file system and provide tight integration between the two technologies. This provides the ability to orchestrate data where it is needed, automatically, using the traditional MAM already in place in the workflow. 

What is the life expectancy of your storage solution, and is the hardware refresh cycle increasing, decreasing or remaining the same? 
Our solution is completely software-defined and hardware-agnostic. We would expect the software to stay in place for over a decade because it provides the file system interfaces to applications, the knowledge of which data is located where and robust metadata that workflows depend on. We are agnostic to hardware updates, and we make it easy for organizations to refresh or move to new infrastructure without interrupting the workflow. This means organizations can be more elastic and can have a wide variety of infrastructure without the disadvantages of infrastructure-bound data silos. The Hammerspace Parallel Global File System spans all different types of infrastructure. With this flexibility, hardware refresh can be done on a more flexible schedule and without user downtime or complex data migrations, so they will likely occur more frequently. 

Is real-time sharing of storage between color, editing, audio and VFX something that every post house should have… or at least be working toward?
 
Yes, definitely. The goal to reduce copy management and increase collaboration is something every post house should be working toward. It will reduce infrastructure costs and IT management overhead while also accelerating speed of collaboration. The MovieLabs 2030 paper has touched on many of the benefits of eliminating silos and accelerating collaboration. 

What are the biggest trends you are seeing in storage? 
Standards-based solutions instead of proprietary file systems; isolated metadata and infrastructure-bound silos are becoming more prevalent. The standards-based approach is helping organizations run with flexibility on any data center hardware or cloud. We are also seeing demand for solutions that overcome data silos and make content easier to move to available compute resources and remote workforce. Data orchestration has become a front-and-center topic in most storage discussions we are having. 

Symply’s Keith Warburton 

What kind of storage do you offer?  
Symply is an on-prem-first storage technology company, but with hybrid cloud solutions that enable organizations with critical workflows — such as media and entertainment — to get the best out of cloud storage and services.  

We offer a portfolio of solutions — high-performance Thunderbolt RAID, an extensive range of desktop and rackmount LTO, collaborative storage, object storage for production content protection and long-term archive, and cost-predicable public cloud with zero egress fees.  

Are users pushing for more hybrid solutions or sticking with either on-prem or the cloud?  
It really depends on the user and the workflow. The truth is that for most users, there is usually a mix of on-prem with some form of remote access, complemented with cloud storage and services.  

A lot of users have a large investment in on-prem solutions, and Symply can help those users by deploying products that enhance their workflows that involve moving content to the cloud.  

What do you think is keeping some from working in the cloud?  
The are several reasons. First, there is a lack of internal cloud/IT expertise combined with a lack of cloud-native tools that are required for achieving the desired workflows.  

Second, there is a problem of resources. This could be the customer’s local connection to the cloud or even the lack of correct resources in the cloud.  

Users expect cloud resources to be limitless, but this is far from the case when specialized compute and GPU resources are required.  

Third, and perhaps the elephant in the room, is cost, especially the lack of cost predictability. Finally, for some customers, there is the problem of data governance and security. 

Are more people working remotely or back in the office?   
We are seeing that most media and entertainment companies are offering a hybrid model of working, usually weighted for the majority of the working week in the office. Obviously, this varies depending on the services that a particular organization offers. It is difficult for a DIT to work from home. 

Are you offering a MAM as well?  
We do offer both an integrated project manager and a MAM with our Workspace XE collaborative storage solutions. It makes the user’s life simpler to have everything integrated into a single appliance. But we realize that there are many different MAM platforms on the market, and we support customers who want to integrate with their preferred MAM solution, especially in relation to our Workspace XE and on-prem object storage.  

What is the life expectancy of your storage solution, and is the hardware refresh cycle increasing, decreasing or remaining the same?  
The life expectancy of our storage solution is five years. I do not see organizations investing in storage solutions that have less than a five-year life expectancy. At Symply, we know that users are trying to increase the time between storage refreshes, and we are engineering many of our solutions to be upgradable and scalable to make that possible. 

Is real-time sharing of storage between color, editing, audio and VFX something that every post house should have… or at least be working toward?  
I believe that increasingly, the days of the sneakernet are behind us, and most facilities large or small are using shared storage solutions to collaborate and allow hybrid working.   

What are the biggest trends you are seeing in storage?  
For production and post, flash storage is becoming more cost-effective, and all our new Workspace XE collaborative storage solutions are designed to support both flash and hard drives. This allows us to offer cost-effective hybrid storage products to support the needs of our customers.  

Organizations, especially content owners, are giving more thought to where their content resides, whether it’s in large LTO libraries or public cloud. There is a lot of truth in the “cloud boomerang,” primarily due to the financial costs but also because of data governance. Tape libraries, while very cost-effective, make it more difficult to get more value from archived content. On-prem object storage can offer a long-term archive strategy with enhanced metadata to help content owners better monetize their assets.  

High-capacity portable RAID storage and LTO are still very much in demand, despite a trend toward delivering content via the internet and better cloud connectivity. The 100TB-plus Shuttle RAID is still an essential part of content acquisition on-set; it is an easy solution when many projects are still run ad hoc. LTO is still the most secure and cost-effective solution for creating archives of the original camera data and metadata, backups during a project and the final archive of the finished project for delivery and posterity.  

Finally, it is worth noting that the supply chain issues that caused problems worldwide after the pandemic are not all behind us. A perfect storm of pandemic, inflation and geopolitics is continuing to wreak havoc. The constant increases in cost and supply shortages on SSDs have been apparent for some time now, but HDDs have also increased steadily in price over the past few quarters as demand drops and fears of key component shortages loom.      

Goldcrest Post‘s Roman Rossell 

New York’s Goldcrest Post is full-service post facility offering color correction, visual effects, DI conform, sound mixing, ADR, screening rooms, digital cinema mastering, offline editorial and post office space, including consultation from project inception to delivery.

How many different types of storage does your facility use, and for which parts of your workflow? On-prem, hybrid, cloud, NAS, etc.? 
We currently use three storage solutions within our facility.  For our high-end, demanding production workflows, we boast OpenDrives Ultimate, an NVMe storage platform providing enough bandwidth to handle multiple streams of 8K video for our color suites and conform artists. 

For back-office and Nearchive storage needs, we use Quantum StorNext with Xcellis appliances segmented from each other by purpose and per security protocol. For offline editorial, there’s Avid Pro Tools and Avid Nexis F-series storage. 

While we have cloud storage available to us, we aren’t yet realizing the return on investment both monetarily and workflow-wise as compared to our on-prem solutions. We do not use cloud storage unless specifically requested.  

What are the most important things you need from your storage solutions? 
Reliability. Uptime.  Redundancy. 

Are you using a MAM? 
No, not any traditional MAM tool. We instead track our media assets with software that indexes all our storage silos, allowing us to know exactly where, what, how long and why we have any given piece of digital content. 

How are you working with storage in remote workflows?
Our priority is the safe keeping of our clients’ media assets, so all media remains within our ecosystem. Our remote users are set up to enter specific points using popular software solutions — Jump Desktop, Splashtop and HP RGS — as well as point-to-point hardware with Amulet Hotkey, allowing for higher-bandwidth, lower-latency connectivity to our on-prem workstations by our remote editors and artists.  

What do you see as the next storage solutions trend? 
The reduced use of proxy media is a trend that I’d like to see the storage industry continue moving toward so that high-speed storage solutions become more accessible and cost-effective.  

I look forward to editing 4K footage using hand gestures while wearing a VR headset. 

Do you have a wish list for those making storage tools? 
I’d like to see the industry work more closely with the various software vendors so that advancements in relevant technologies are used more effectively. 

What haven’t I asked that’s important? 
Relationships between end users and vendors are important. I place a high value in being able to interact with manufacturers before, during and after the initial point of sales. Interacting with vendors’ engineering teams and fellow end users allows for maximizing the potential of equipment in use and for better diagnosing issues and moving toward workflow improvements. 

Facilis’ Jim McKenna  

What kind of storage do you offer?  
We configure on-prem solutions with remote access, and we also offer a cloud-based backup and archive. Hybrid on-/off-prem workgroups are very popular right now. For NAS solutions without the benefit of software-managed connectivity, it’s very difficult to work remotely, as network file systems and VPN slow any access to a crawl. Through the Facilis Shared File System, WANLink offers the easiest and fastest way to access your on-prem storage from anywhere, securely and without the need for a VPN.

Are more people working remotely or back in the office? What do you think is keeping some from working in the cloud? 
We have some customers who are still (or in some cases, once again) all on-prem, and that will not change. Others have moved to on-prem with remote editors, sometimes across the country. Regarding cloud, I have had facility managers come to me and say that they’ve been able to move their entire operation to the cloud, except for the video department. It’s very difficult to sustain a fast-paced workflow, especially with on-prem workers who expect high-speed access to project data, when everyone is going outside the facility to access data.

Are you offering a MAM? If not, do you suggest specific MAMs your solutions work well with? 
We offer a MAM called FastTracker. It’s a fully integrated solution for designing proxy workflows, tracking project data and streamlining workflow with automations. FastTracker is included at no additional cost with our minimal yearly server support. And unlike some MAMs, we don’t have any limitation on seats, even when acting as a web server for browser-based access. FastTracker offers transcription, AI tags on timecode markers and full tape and cloud backup and archive management when used with our Object Cloud and Object LTO products.

What is the life expectancy of your storage solution, and is the hardware refresh cycle increasing, decreasing or remaining the same? 
Hardware refresh cycle timing has increased. As server hardware gets more capable, users can hold onto servers they bought seven or eight years ago and still work in the newest 4K formats. Since capacity increases are outpacing many facilities’ needs, many of our customers are refreshing with similar-sized units. In the past, the normal trade-in would be several times the size of the original to meet the demand. We never purposefully obsolete our systems, nor do we ever drop support for our customers using them.

Is real-time sharing of storage between color, editing, audio and VFX something that every post house should have… or at least be working toward? 
We believe every facility can benefit from centralization, management and protection of a shared storage system with industry-leading security features. Our Smart Access Rules allow facility managers to lock down critical files during the post workflow without impeding the progress of the project. To be sure that no vital data is ever compromised, files can even be protected from deletion by certain users or groups based on type or extension.  

What are the biggest trends you are seeing in storage? 
Solid state storage is becoming an important layer in many facilities, as evidenced by the popularity of our FlashPoint server models. We can supply up to 12GB/sec to our shared file system clients from a single 4U server enclosure with a capacity of as little as 48TB and as large as 368TB at a price that will surprise anyone looking at premium storage servers. To exploit this performance, we can deliver over 4GB/sec to a single Mac client for 8K color grading, and we offer up to 64Gb Fibre Channel for Windows workstations that can’t reach their potential with Ethernet-attached storage.  

Blackmagic’s Bob Caniglia 

What kind of storage do you offer?
Blackmagic has four lines of network-attached storage products: Blackmagic Cloud Store, Cloud Store Mini, Cloud Pod and the Cloud Dock.  

The Blackmagic Cloud Store is a fast, high-capacity network disk designed to handle large media files and lots of simultaneous users. The Cloud Store Mini offers the same capabilities as the Cloud Store but in a built-in, compact, rack-mount design. The Cloud Pod syncs and shares media from any USB-C disk with Dropbox and Google Drive. Finally, the Cloud Dock lets you share up to four independent drives over a high-speed 10G Ethernet network.

Are you offering a MAM with that? If not, do you suggest specific MAMs your solutions work well with?
We do not sell a stand-alone media asset management product, but a lot of our products come with software tools that help manage media use. For specific MAM solutions, we do not suggest any particular one. There are so many of them out there, and so many different ways people use media, that it would be hard to suggest just one. 

Are users pushing for more hybrid solutions or sticking with either on-prem or the cloud?
I think the days of only on-prem are long gone. I am sure there are still some places that work on projects that are huge security threats and won’t ever go outside the office walls, but the majority of the world is comfortable with a hybrid model.

What do you think is keeping some from working in the cloud?
I think most post pros are comfortable with the idea of working in the cloud by now. Security worries and setting up admin controls (things like who has access to what and when) are what has kept some folks from moving over fully by now. But there are answers to those needs, and even the most complicated remote productions are using the cloud.  

The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power is a great example of how a huge production with a huge security risk used the cloud. VFX producer Ron Ames and Company 3 had to work with 786 hours of footage (24,659 takes) that were shot and worked on across three continents. No matter where the post people were based, they were working on the same media stored in the cloud. The great thing is that everything they built their workflow around is affordable enough for everyone to use.  

The shared storage cloud workflow is also something that made people nervous, but less so now. People are comfortable working with network-attached storage, and the past few years have seen NAS storage built directly for film and video work. Because NAS storage syncs and shares media with services like Dropbox and Google Drive, works with proxy workflows so timelines and media can be shared in minutes and offers low-latency file access, a lot of the worries for cloud and storage have been answered.  

What is the life expectancy of your storage solution, and is the hardware refresh cycle increasing, decreasing or remaining the same?
If you blink you will miss another new storage product launch. I remember when we put out the first Ursa camera, CFast cards were the new amazing thing. Now the original CFast media looks quaint. The refresh cycle for storage in general is going to keep increasing. When you are building out your storage network, you need to keep in mind the ability to add to it as storage gets faster and bigger.  

That doesn’t mean customers should just sit back and assume they will rebuild every two years. Look for storage that is designed to be added to — not a one and done — because one and done doesn’t exist. This is where knowing a company’s history comes in handy. Find a vendor that has a track record of always improving, and make sure that company doesn’t force customers into a closed world where they have to pay for every small upgrade. 

Is real-time sharing of storage between color, editing, audio and VFX something that every post house should have… or at least be working toward?
Absolutely. What is the point of a cloud workflow if only one group of people can talk to one another quickly and efficiently? A proxy workflow can share a whole timeline and its media in minutes. And storage is available that is fast enough to take full advantage of 10G Ethernet ports with multiple users connected. All these things are available now at affordable prices for sharing large media files quickly between editors, colorists, audio engineers and VFX artists.

How do you see AI and virtual production using storage?
AI post tools like Resolve’s Neural Engine are being used for all sorts of different projects, and those are triggered by an actual live artist using those features on media pulled from shared storage. Virtual production is absolutely a huge storage consumer to plan for, and that is just going to become more important as more small- and medium-size projects use virtual production. With virtual production, you have to plan for a storage network that is fast and big enough to handle the huge amount of files associated with real-time VFX and live-action shooting. A good storage workflow for virtual production is a must-have.  

What storage trends are you seeing?
Real-time cloud collaboration across all aspects of post. Cloud-based storage networks will keep going down in price, and the argument that on-prem storage will always be cheaper will no longer be accurate. And everyone will become if not an expert then at least knowledgeable about shared storage.   

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Randi Altman is the founder and editor-in-chief of postPerspective. She has been covering production and post production for more than 25 years.