ARTICLE POSTED August 8th, 2005 Quick! Get me a clip from the film archives! By Bob Schaefer Managing large and growing video archives presents a challenge for broadcast and production facilities of all sizes. Smaller businesses in the broadcast industry have a new range of choices, thanks to recent advances in data storage technologies. The advent of lower-cost integrated disk-to-disk-to-tape (D2D2T), along with archive management and media asset management software that runs on Windows or Linux, gives smaller stations and production facilities a cost-effective alternative that optimizes the value of the digital content in their video archives. The broadcast and entertainment industries represent a healthy slice of the global economy, and they are responsible for some of the most explosive growth in digital information. With the advent of digital video and advanced production technologies, plus the conversion of existing content to digital formats, the volume of digital content created each year in broadcast media has skyrocketed, and it will continue to grow at phenomenal rates. This digital content has to be stored and managed for retrieval. A broadcast station or production facility's video archive is a true reference archive, in that it holds material for expected future use. It's not just a place to store the past. Finding and retrieving the specific target of your search — and the more specific the better — as easily and quickly as possible is the essential goal of a reference archive. Accessibility = value Until recently, creating and managing a digital video archive meant depending on proprietary systems only — expensive, high-maintenance systems that were prohibitively expensive for many smaller broadcasters and production facilities. But the recent development of integrated, open-standard IT applications offers a more cost-effective alternative that retains the sophisticated features needed for true reference archiving. Recent years have seen a trend in the broadcast industry wherein small independent stations have been acquired by larger corporate parents and reconfigured as "sister stations" within a group. In this group station environment, many deficiencies in the current video archive or the video library paradigm have become apparent, and the limitations that these deficiencies create have become unacceptable. Without true reference archive management, the content held within the typical small station video library can be difficult, costly and time-consuming to retrieve. The value of the library is in the content, and if the content cannot be accessed readily, that value cannot be realized. The typical group station video archive is held on tape in various formats, including but not exclusively digital. Each sister station has its own wall of hundreds or thousands of tapes, and the usual target of a search is a clip only a few seconds or minutes long. This "needle-in-a-haystack" scenario plays havoc with production deadlines and can consume hours. The many needs of an integrated system A centralized, searchable database of clips is what the group station environment requires. How can it be realized? Digitization of the content is just the beginning. Video management features have to be available at the time of input to result in digital content that is searchable on media-specific, relevant criteria. Media asset management software gives the archive manager powerful tools to search content rapidly and efficiently, and to retrieve small portions of large, content-rich files with ease. Broadcast stations and production facilities really need faster, consistent access, which is deliverable only from disk. These stations are very limited in their response to breaking news with the use of tape, which is painfully slow, inconsistent and expensive. But disk-to-disk-to-tape puts tape where it belongs as the low-cost, long-term repository for infrequently accessed files. It also uses the latest high-performance disk for more recent files, which allows users to browse the disk for a low-resolution clip, and then retrieve the production-ready data from the tape. A well-designed disk-to-disk-to-tape system configured as an archive server can offer terabytes of capacity on SATA-based RAID, plus a robotic digital data tape library that holds up to terabytes — equivalent to hours of video — of online tape. By integrating the tape and disk seamlessly, access becomes fast and simple. It should be noted that most sites will need high-powered processors to efficiently search the archives. The next major component is easy-to-use software that can manage a digital tape library and RAID storage optimized for digital archives. If optimized for video archiving, it can handle the special challenges of digital media management. High-value media assets are protected and secure, while recovery is fast and reliable, even when working with the large file sizes typical of video. An integrated video archive solution should: Present tape and disk as a single, logical drive shared over a network, so that video files are written and retrieved just as they would be from a standard Windows logical hard drive. Perform policy-based file management. Policies should be easily set by the administrator to manage to multiple requirements of the archives. That is, low-resolution proxies should be kept permanently online on RAID, while high-resolution broadcast media should be held near-line on digital tapes within the library. Deliver fast retrieval of relatively small portions of large video files. The digital data tape should be rapidly driven to the beginning of the required section and retrieve only the required fragments. Automatically generate replica tape cartridge copies for off-site retention and disaster recovery, with the protection of write-once-read-many (WORM) media if desired. With the rapid increase in storage capacity of hard disk and tape, it is now practical to integrate both into a single package optimized to run low-cost media management and archive management software for a fully integrated storage solution. This package should be able to manage a true reference archive for the high-value media assets of smaller broadcast or video production facilities. About the author Bob Schaefer is CEO of Breece Hill, LLC. Feedback: feedback@snwonline.com Questions: questions@snwonline.com Technical difficulties: webmaster@snwonline.com