We have gone from 1.44 mb floppy disks to flash drives and SSD storage in a relatively short span of time. The digital world has a voracious appetite to consume data and storing it has been quite a task.
According to reports there are 2.5 quintillion bytes of data created every day. Data is being generated at a breakneck pace and there seems to be no sign of it slowing down. Data storage, processing, and its security is paramount, however.Â
Take post-production studios such as Hockwood Digital for instance (full feature p16). The studio packages and distributes films to cinemas around the UAE. The practice up until now has been sending cloned hard drives of the final copy to cinema houses. This is done physically albeit in safe and secure manner (read piracy). Hockwood is poised to change the norm by delivering movies directly to the cinema house via servers it will install on-site. In this instance, Hockwood will migrate from physical to cloud (or IP-based) delivery.
The cloud system will be just as secure as the servers aren’t connected to any other networks. So that takes away any concerns of pirating the film before it releases in cinemas.
We are witnessing more production houses switch to cloud storage, or use a hybrid system that combines premise storage with the cloud. More recently, we have seen editing workflows able to support 8K footage off the cloud. With the advent of 5G are we going to see more breakneck data management technology?
As always I would love to hear what solution you are deploying at your studio / production facility. Write in to me at nikhil.pereira@itp.com to keep the conversation going