The Media Industry’s Exabyte-Scale Challenge – Part II: Media File Flood Gates

media industry digital exabyte

Guest blog by Ben Foakes, Founder and Managing Director, BASE Media Cloud

In part 1 of this blog series, we discussed the rapidly changing state of the media industry as it evolves from traditional methods to rapid, affordable, flexible production, post production and distribution. You can read on in Part III: Solving the problem: where the media and IT industries collide

Part II: Media File Flood Gates

When you take away traditional, touchable video tape from the mix (and its inherent record time cap), and replace it with file-based recording, it is a bit like opening the floodgates to your production, post production and distribution departments. Television production companies have a contractual obligation to securely store their original file-based media (digital rushes) in more than one copy, in more than one physical location, throughout the term of a production contract.

Post production processes often require the collaboration of teams situated across multiple sites, all requiring access to the source content, on demand. When a production reaches completion, there are no longer plastic tape boxes to place neatly on the library shelves for a Production Manager’s peace of mind.

You can’t touch a master file! It’s all ‘ones and zeros’, invisible to the human eye and yet no less valuable in terms of intellectual property and critical business process. These files are the most important asset any media company possesses. They are the life-blood of any production, post or distribution company’s business model. They should be treated as such.

The 99-Exabytes Growing Pains (or: 99 Problems and a tape’s not one?)

Data storage research from the 2013 Survey of Storage in Professional Media and Entertainment by Coughlin Associates forecast that by 2018 the aggregate size of media file storage consumption across the global Media & Entertainment sector will hit 99 Exabytes (or 99 million Terabytes) per year.

This immense growth in data is being driven by huge progress in high quality tapeless camera acquisition, where HD (High Definition, 1920 x 1080 resolution) is now the equivalent of old fashioned SD (Standard Definition, 720 x 576) and media companies across all verticals are pushing for the highest resolution, highest frame rates, greatest colour sampling and highest quality compression ratios they can get their hands on.

RED 4K Camera 2007
One of the first RED 4K cameras in 2007

We already have BASE Media Cloud customers who use 4k Digital Cinema cameras to shoot online YouTube video campaigns. Format convergence is here to stay.

I can remember getting our hands on one of the first ever 4k RED ONE film cameras in 2007, which we used to shoot a range of BBC titles films in the UK. Watch the films:

This was before 4k was really a commonly recognised format and was arguably the genesis of the data growth storm in our industry. There are now a proliferation of 4k acquisition formats on the market, at very low cost, and content producers are harnessing them to produce unparalleled quality images.

See below for an example of Sony’s F5 output for last year’s Channel 5 SUSPECTS campaign:

This constant resolution and file size increase increase shows no sign of slowing down. We can already shoot 5k, 6k, 8k… not to mention 3D (multiply everything by 2) and super slow-mo frame rates (120fps on a GoPro anybody?).

It’s just going to keep on moving north. This June, BT Sport officially announced they will launch their first 4K UHD sports channel in August 2015. Consider that within a year from today, our customers will all be delivering standardised UHD (Ultra High Definition) 4k master files for television and online broadcast, and you can start to get a sense of the scale of the incoming challenges facing the media industry, both in the UK and worldwide.

We will discuss solutions in my next blog entry. In case you haven’t read part 1, you can find it here!

 

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