OutPost Perfects Project Parking With Marquis

Many studios struggle to deal with edit storage space; particularly as more and more look to digitisation and digital archiving. Nigel Gourley, MD at OutPost, reveals how the company turned to Project Parking for simple, yet effective solutions...
The question: 'why is my edit storage always full and what can I do about it?' is one which many post production editors face. There are very few effective tools within the Avid ecosystem to sort projects on size and archive them with their media, and this becomes an issue when operating large Unity systems and managing many projects. Up until now, although a handful of solutions have claimed to address this issue, they have fallen short in relation to the necessary functionality required to manage the media effectively.
At OutPost, we needed a way of managing and archiving our Unity space. We first saw a demo of Marquis’ Project Parking at the end of last year and we were really excited by its potential.
From our base at Pinewood Studios, we work on a range of dramas, documentaries and children’s programming as well as a few feature films. Like most facilities, each project generates many media files and we needed a way of managing and archiving our Unity space. The latest version of Project Parking now provides a uniquely simple way of managing and archiving files on our edit storage, with the additional benefit of allowing us to provide clients with a copy of all the Avid media files at the end of a project. We believe that Marquis is the only company to offer a solution which intelligently analyses projects to enable efficient media management in this way, and this means we can offer an even better service to our valued customers.
Project Parking works by analysing all projects and media across every workspace allowing them to be viewed in a user-friendly way. This enables editors to analyse the media on their edit storage by size, project, location, age, duplicated or orphaned files and then archive files to lower tier storage, or clear out unused media at the touch of a button, take snapshots of versions of projects, or move from one location to another, while still maintaining a usable and easily accessible format for future use.
The new bin archive functionality in Project Parking then allows individual bins or folders of bins to be included or excluded in order to move media to lower tier storage. Retrieval is also straight forward and can be easily achieved by restoring whole projects or just the required bins of an archived project for re-editing.
Outpost has been lucky enough to be involved in the beta testing for the latest version of Project Parking. We found the Marquis team was easy to work with and listened to our feedback.
We are now using Project Parking in several different ways: to archive projects to give to clients and also for our own backups. We are also starting to use it as a way to manage our workspaces more effectively. The solution allows us to collect media that has ended up in several different places and put it back in one location. Often media gets put in the wrong location and this can be difficult to manage later on. Project Parking addresses this problem.
Early in 2012, Project Parking was first launched as an archive and restore solution which allowed facilities to create a complete copy of any Avid project onto any storage device. However, now with the new functionality that Project Parking Version 3 offers, complete analysis and management tools give users total control over their edit storage, allowing for the efficient management of valuable edit storage space and improving the reliability and speed of archiving.
As we adopt file based workflows, we can look forward to many benefits. However, inevitably, we also need to overcome some of the new challenges that developments in technology brings. In just one application Project Parking now helps us manage our projects and workspaces, solving the problem of managing all our Avid media.
Read the article in the online edition of Regional Film & Video here.