Marquis Broadcast: Keeping Track Of Media

By Chris Steele, Product Manager, Marquis Broadcast
The implementation of file based workflow promised less footage. Digital cameras that could be turned on and off more quickly, or record constantly to a loop before you hit record, should mean there is no need to “leave the tape running”.
However, this has not turned out to be the case. It is not uncommon for crews to come back with 500GB of media after less than a week of shooting. And, you can carry 10 hours of media in your back pocket these days. For the post house, this raises all sorts of practical problems.
Careful tracking and adherence to a policy of what media goes where on the storage, means it is entirely possible to keep track of it all and to know where all the media for a particular programme is. Unfortunately that is not always how it happens in the real world.
A post house must be able to read every type of physical media, it must have enough camera memory card readers for every format, it must be able to review media from every camera format and be able to translate it into a format that the rest of their equipment can handle.
Each time the media is transformed in some way, another copy is created. It may go from ‘raw’ to ‘ingested’, to ‘rushes’, to ‘consolidated’, to ‘colour corrected’, etc, compounding the difficult task of keeping track of it all. Many directors and executives are now aware that media can be delivered electronically and are keen to see early edits, or even rushes, delivered electronically, increasing further the number of versions of the media.
Editors may bring in their own media for example music or sound effects. The ease of transferring data electronically means it is impossible to stop this happening. The production company might even email additional media to the editor to download it with his phone. Multiple editors may work on the same project in different suites. All of this means that it becomes increasingly hard to be sure where all the media for a project is.
However, keeping all the media for a project together into one place is beneficial. It may be necessary to transfer it temporarily from high-value specialist edit storage to lower cost storage whilst the project is on hold for a period of time. Or, it may be necessary to create a snapshot of the project to protect against disaster. The project may need to be physically relocated to another network. Perhaps the client would benefit from an editable copy of the project so that if they need a new edit in the future, such as an alternative language, format or age rating, they can save costs by starting with the actual edit project and original media.
With hundreds of terabytes of storage, and many concurrent projects, finding all the media for a single project is difficult. If the editor has failed to follow the procedures and left media on local drives or USB storage it might be impossible.
A new product from Marquis Broadcast aims to help with some of these issues. Project Parking takes an Avid project and collates a complete list of all the media that that project has used, whether in a timeline, or simply in a bin. It then searches all the attached workspaces for that media. At the end of this analysis Project Parking can tell you whether all the media is on line. Project Parking then goes on to copy all the project files and all the media that they reference to a new location. It then checks all the files (with MD5 checksums) to ensure they are faithful copies.
As we adopt file based workflows, we can look forward to many benefits. However, we also need to overcome the new challenges that developments in technology brings. Project Parking can help keep track of all the media for a project, solving at least one of the challenges of moving to file based workflows.
(LB/GK)