Distributed Global Workflows Fuel Flexibility And Efficient Use Of Resources

Media production companies are constantly trying to do more with less resources and time. The latest frontline is distributed workflows. Post and effects companies have been doing this for a long time, parcelling out tasks overnight to locations in the world where talent is cheaper.

Marquis is often asked to help with more mainstream production activities, especially Avid Media Composer and NEXIS workflows. Recently, three requests came to us: the first was from an LA-based facility that wanted to collaborate with a Chinese facility. Could we synchronise NEXIS in the two locations, pushing changes from LA to China at the end of their day, then back again at the end of the day in Beijing?

The second was a film production, planning to shoot in the UK, but where the director was not available to be on set the whole time. They needed to synchronise two NEXIS systems – one in Burbank and the other in Pinewood – so the day's footage could be reviewed, selected and edited overnight.

The third example came from a post-production facility that wanted to protect their work-in-progress. They realised that they needed an off-site backup but were reluctant to do so to public cloud. Could we arrange to push to tier 2 storage that was in a remote data centre?

All three requests required distributed workflows over the Internet, using production equipment that's designed exclusively for on-premise use across high-performance, low-latency networks. Even though Marquis products could satisfy these needs – with Workspace Backup to protect Avid work-in-progress, Workspace Sync to synchronise between Avid NEXIS and tier 2 storage or a second NEXIS, and Project Parking to backup Avid projects to a wide range of storage types – they can't work with remote storage or a remote NEXIS. The NEXIS is particularly problematic, since the NEXIS client is required to be able to mount Avid workspaces and it will fail to connect if the connection has too much latency or is not reliable enough. We needed a way to connect to a remote NEXIS over the Internet. Our engineers came up with an elegant and robust solution: Fotonflite – a high-performance, secure 'on-the-fly', point-to-point transfer system for Avid Media Composer projects and media workspaces.

Marquis products already support a plug-in architecture for different storage types. This allows us to create and distribute support for new types of storage without having to change the main application. We planned a new type of plug-in that would be split in two; one end would reside in the application and the other would be a lightweight service running on a remote server next to the destination storage. The two would communicate over the Internet using secure HTTPS protocol, with the remote service supporting the same set of plug-ins. With Fotonflite, these applications could suddenly communicate with any remote storage we support, anywhere on the Internet. When transferring multiple files – and Avid projects typically are made up of hundreds or thousands of files – Fotonflite can saturate the available bandwidth without specialist acceleration.

Visit Marquis at IBC Show on stand 7.D39, or visit www.marquisbroadcast.com for more information.

Author: Paul Glasgow, Marquis Broadcast, Sales and Marketing Director

This article is also available in the September edition of Broadcast Film & Video. Here.