HITS

By Scott Ralston, Head of Product, GrayMeta –

Cloud technologies are increas-ingly being used by studios, broadcasters and content owners throughout the lifecycle of content, from production to archive. Industry insiders are envisioning a world where all assets will be created, stored and ultimately delivered in the cloud, providing the efficiency that is needed in production workflows to enable greater creative freedom, while supporting an unprecedented volume of content.

The industry is responding to this vision by developing technologies that provide content owners the facility to keep their assets in the cloud right to the point of delivery.

Pain points

At GrayMeta, we are continuously monitoring market trends and listening to our customers who have raised the following points with regards to that final stage of content delivery: QC and QA.

*They need to be able to move master file workloads to the cloud, such as the QC of Interoperable Master Format (IMF) files in Amazon Simple Storage (s3);

*They want to save money by decreasing egress costs associated with the movement of master files to the cloud, and then having to transfer assets back to local workstations for tasks such as visual QC;

*They need the ability to browse, preview and playback master files by directly connect-ing to those assets in cloud storage locations

*They want the ability to play back and QC single files from the cloud to multiple locations in a synchronized manner, enabling seamless collaboration among users;

*They want to reduce or eliminate the need for transcodes and intermediate applications that are required today to review and QC assets locally

Cost-effective, data-driven solutions — using machine learning and artificial intelligence that decrease operational expenses — ensure content integrity and unleash the monetary value of content.

With greater adoption of cloud services and storage, the need to move QC and compliance workloads to the cloud has become increasingly more prevalent. However, the inordinate amount of time and tremendous costs incurred by having to transcode or transfer extremely large files from a storage provider to a localized workstation to simply view, or in a full-featured sense, conduct quality control and quality assurance tasks, is a major obstacle for many users in the marketplace.

Browser-based and cloud-based solutions can provide QC and QA teams in studios, broadcast networks and media services providers the ability to securely preview, play-back and QC master file formats, without the need for a transcode or generation of a proxy file.

GrayMeta’s Iris Cloud offering also supports simultaneous frame accurate playback for concurrent users providing efficient collaboration workflows. The product has been developed to work on private data centers for production content and public clouds such as Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure.

Cloud solutions

Iris Cloud is built to run natively in the cloud, making it accessible virtually any-where in the world.

The benefits of Iris Cloud include:

*Seamless support for content owners transitioning to cloud-based workflows for master file formats such as IMF;

*An ability to browse, preview and playback master files directly from cloud storage environments;

*Minimization of egress costs associated with the transfer of master files from the cloud to local, on-premise workstations;

*Collaborative functions that enable multiple users across disparate locations to review a single file;

*Providing remote QC, particularly for contingency plans and disaster recovery scenarios when workforces may be forced to self-isolate or are unable to centralize in a common facility.

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