NAB 2019

This year we presented the Managing Media Knowledge Zone. A showcase of industry experts and solutions to solve challenges facing all facilities in media and entertainment. Thank you to all who stopped by and took the time to meet with us and listen to our presenters. Our solutions are installed across many segments of the market including; broadcast, VFX, film, and video production both here and abroad. Our team is ready to help you scale and prepare for the future growth of your environment.

 

NAB Las Vegas 2019: A World of Knowledge

Move over, Information Age: it’s time for the Knowledge Age.

We just returned from the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) 2019 convention in Las Vegas, and while the show featured some very impressive technology, the most sought-after attractions featured a healthy dose of thought leadership.

Scale Logic led the way with its NAB Knowledge Zone – two days of expert customer and partner testimonials that revealed new insights and strategies for media management and storage.

Each presentation captured different aspects of media management strategy, including variations on a theme we saw frequently at the show: the evolving needs of media producers and broadcasters for smart, scalable storage solutions at every stage of the workflow.

Key Takeaways

It’s not too late if you’re behind the curve. While production professionals in media and entertainment have long known the value of smart storage and networking strategies, other enterprises are just now realizing that they too have critical business needs involving digital media.

For Fortune 100 companies and universities, mega-churches and creative start-ups, the future of marketing is media-driven. Many of these organizations recognize that they need better organization and long-term storage strategies, but they often lack institutional knowledge of production environments and may not be prioritizing media as much as they should.

Being slow to the party is no reason to stick with the status quo. Leaders who build a case for investments in storage and media workflow at any stage and at any level of sophistication can prepare an organization for the future of efficient media management.

Ditch your grandpa’s folder-based asset hierarchy. Project- or folder-based organizational systems can hamper backup and archiving operations due to a lack of visibility across the enterprise to the data contained in the folders. This results in a great deal of (expensive) human intervention to find precisely the right images, clips and graphics.

A folder-based hierarchy creates confusion among editors, GFX professionals and others working collaboratively on projects, while also making it difficult for new staff to see and access digital assets intuitively. A better strategy is to employ digital asset management (DAM) tools and trends instead of categorizing all assets by project.

Hybrid cloud solutions can improve media workflows. The flexibility of a hybrid cloud model for media can bring strategic advantages to production and broadcast environments. By combining private and public clouds – while maintaining distinct identities – media organizations can manage co-location, managed services and media assets with cloud resources uniquely suited for each.

Likewise, solution vendors are getting used to the new digital environment by replacing legacy storage platforms with flexible, scalable and secure hybrid cloud solutions. This is helping many companies shift priorities to focus on media asset creation and updating inefficient hardware.

By operating within this ecosystem, customers can directly link with partner companies instead of connecting them in multiple, far-flung locations. The result is a faster and more efficient production environment; a good thing in an industry where time is money.

Storage and data management tools must be intuitive. Bringing an organization toward a new, more sophisticated storage solution is not without its risks, namely a lack of adoption among the people working with the data. For producers, editors and other media professionals who aren’t IT experts, the front end of any storage solution must be instantly understandable and intuitive enough to ensure a shallow learning curve.

New tools from software providers are helping to demystify storage and making it easy for non-technical end-users to understand and engage in an enterprise-wide storage strategy. Simplified user interfaces can help editors access assets quickly, while a converged data fabric platform can automate the storage, processing, analysis and management of unstructured data and media assets.

As technology providers continue to make this process simpler for end users, we will begin to see more widespread adoption of robust storage solutions.

Thanks to all of our partners – StorageDNA, Walmart Event Solutions, ROOT6, Lesspain Software, Cantemo, Backblaze, Jim Casabella, North Shore Automation and CineSys-Oceana – for sharing their smarts, strategies and successes with media and entertainment storage. In the coming weeks, we will be sharing more insights from our NAB Knowledge Zone presenters, along with exclusive content only shared at the show.


Our presentations were a huge success and below outlines what was talked about and presented by our partners.

Cantemo/Backblaze

Presenters: Mike Szumlinski from Cantemo and Skip Levens from Backblaze

Topic: Hybrid-cloud workflows with Cantemo and Backblaze

Mike has been working in the M&E space for 17 years. His focus over the years has been around storage, media management, and automation. Recently he has focused heavily on hybrid cloud workflows, leveraging the power of on-premise solutions in concert with the flexibility provided by cloud technology. Currently Mike works closely with several of the manufacturers focused on this market, including Cantemo, Archiware, and Backblaze.
Backblaze B2 provides incredibly robust cloud storage at a fraction of the price of the competition. The product is integrated natively with Cantemo’s iconik platform, providing a powerful and cost effective option for cloud storage. B2 offers 99.999999999% durability (11 nines), the destruction of Earth is more likely than you losing a file with B2. See why many professional M&E industry customers are using B2 to store, share, and distribute their content worldwide.

Walmart Event Solutions, CineSys-Oceana and Scale Logic

Panelists: Justin Elliot, Senior Manager of Technology for Event Solutions, Ian Khadan, CineSys-Oceana, and Matthew Jensen, Technical Engineer, Scale LogicTopic: Challenges facing a large and evolving video production and event solution environment

Walmart has been working with Scale Logic for more than 15 years, installing and maintaining a complete Storage Fabric setup to serve the needs of the world’s largest company.What started small, with a single discount store and the simple idea of selling more for less, has grown over the last 50 years into the largest retailer in the world. Each week, over 275 million customers and members visit our more than 11,300 stores under 58 banners in 27 countries and eCommerce websites in 10 countries.
Ian Khadan has an extensive background in Information Systems, Security, and Cloud technologies. He’s currently the technical lead for all Media Asset Management projects at CineSys-Oceana.CineSys-Oceana are Media IT Specialists providing systems, solutions, integration and support for digital content creators across North America. With years of IT experience and a foundation in M&E, we serve a range of industries from broadcast and post production to government, corporate, houses of worship and sports.
Matthew Jensen is a lead technician for Scale Logic who manages many of the installations and integrations both onsite and remote.SLI designs, integrates, deploys and supports a complete line of hardware and software solutions including RAID, SAN, NAS, storage servers, Scale-Out NAS, backup, archive and disaster recovery solutions. Our team offers a complete suite of products and services including installation, training, enhanced warranty options, on-site services, extended maintenance contracts and decommission/recycling services.

ROOT6

Presenter: Anand JahagirdarTopic: Ingest, transcode, deliver. Sounds easy, right?As ROOT6’s Director of Sales Engineering & Business Development, Anand Jahagirdar has the unique ability to approach scenarios from both a business a technical perspective. Anand brings vast knowledge and insight stemming from over a decade working with a variety of customer markets from post-production, to broadcast, news and corporate.ROOT6 Technology was established in 1997 by industry professionals at the heart of London’s post-production and new media communities in Soho. The close association with the media industry lead to the development of ContentAgent, the globally-installed, scalable, software-based transcoder that manages and automates file-based workflows.

CatDV

Presenter: Bryson Jones, North Shore Automation

Topic: The intersection of DAMs and the file system, preparing your files before you integrate a DAM and new trends in media organization for modern production on shared storage.

As founder and CIO of North Shore Automation Bryson Jones brings to the table over 20 years of post-production, asset management, IT, and web consulting experience.

Starting in nonlinear editorial support and storage system design, Jones quickly gained a reputation for providing innovative solutions to television & film production clients. As storage systems got larger and file counts increased, he was introduced to the world of asset management. In 2007, Bryson began redirecting his efforts to address what he saw as a coming wave of clients needing Digital Asset Management solutions.

Today, North Shore Automation has completed over 150 deployments and their products are integrated into systems for 12 professional sports teams, including World Series and Super Bowl Champions, seven NCAA athletics programs; 17 Fortune 500 companies and nine broadcast networks, as well as regional broadcasters, production companies, corporations, and organizations that vary from the world’s largest YouTube networks to life saving NGO’s.

Jim Casabella

Topic: Broadcast media storage optimization in a hybrid-cloud architecture

Jim Casabella has a long and storied pedigree as a media and entertainment strategist, with more than 20 years of experience using the latest technology to improve media workflows.

Prior to starting his own consultancy, Jim served in the U.S. Navy, became chief engineer for KGO-TV in San Francisco and later served as senior technical manager for the ABC Owned Stations Group. In this role, Jim was responsible for all strategic technical planning for eight major-market, network-owned stations, including evaluating and approving all technology plans and contractor agreements. Under his leadership, these stations were early adopters of new video technology as well as control-room and studio automation tactics.

Jim also served as chairman of the Media Asset Management Workgroup for The Walt Disney Company, leading the company’s strategy for transitioning to file-based workloads within more than 400 business units. While at Disney, Jim led the development of a shared MAM system called JellyRoll that interfaced with the Disney business unit MAM via an electronic services bus called the Monorail. Jim is listed as the inventor on several patents related to its design, and the system is still in service today.

StorageDNA

Presenter: Tridib Chakravarty, CEO

Since 2004, StorageDNA has been helping film, video and broadcast professionals work more efficiently and save costs. Advanced technologies and a commitment to innovation are the backbone of our company. Our mission is to engage with our community of customers, resellers and partners, evolve our product offerings, and provide these solutions for an unparalleled value.

The Data Management Fabric is a set of tools that provide key data management functions – Index, analyze, search, copy – across disk, tape, WAN and cloud. These functions have numerous applications from copying files across storage volumes, to WAN accelerating across locations, creating automated backups, disaster recovery and managing Avid/Adobe projects across different storage tiers, including the cloud.

Lesspain Software

Presenter: Robert Krüger, Founder and Managing Partner

Topic: Better media management from camera to edit to archive

Robert Krüger, founder and managing partner of Lesspain Software will talk about the challenges of managing video from camera to edit in a team and how Kyno, combined with Scale Logic’s storage and Archiware P5 archiving can help you be more efficient.

Lesspain Software are the makers of Kyno, the revolutionary all-in-one media management app for video professionals ranging from aspiring filmmakers, journalists, creative professionals to seasoned broadcast pros. Kyno is an ingest-free screening, logging, organization & transcoding toolset for Mac and Windows, with tight NLE integration and unbeatable ease of use.