Project Parking has become the industry gold standard for Avid® storage management analytics and project portability. The system now features cloud support, delivering a seamless multi-site Avid workflows, ideal for film production and broadcast. Project Parking provides project analytics, visualisation, management and archiving, and can be a valuable tool for billing for usage. It helps companies understand the capacity of productions, allowing them to easily export projects to tier two or cloud storage to make way for a larger incoming production on valuable ISIS or NEXIS storage space.
The ever-increasing capacity of Avid shared storage has completely transformed production processes, with faster networks, greater storage and more concurrent clients operating at ever-higher resolutions. This is where Marquis’s Workspace Backup application can help; this powerful disaster recovery and business continuity solution now natively supports cloud storage. Designed specifically to protect high value work in progress on Avid ISIS and NEXIS systems, Workspace Backup uses detailed analytics of Avid workspaces to ensure the highest levels of integrity of the backup, ensuring the most crucial projects can be immediately and individually recovered to production in any location that can see the backup, whether in cloud or tier two storage.
Workspace Sync provides a higher level of protection, intelligently syncing workspaces – perhaps every 30 minutes – to a second ISIS or NEXIS. This is ideal for intensive, fast turnaround, hard delivery deadline productions, such as nationwide talent shows, ensuring the maximum loss of work in progress is only 30 minutes. Project Parking, Workspace Sync and Workspace Backup also work seamlessly together; one very large benefit is that using Project Parking analytics will prevent duplicate and orphaned media propagating into the Workspace Sync or Backup, saving significant amounts of storage whilst also accelerating time-critical sync backup and recovery processes. “Cloud support for Project Parking makes it simple to move complete Avid projects, together with all the bins, sequences and media files, to any other location worldwide,” explains Chris Steele, managing director, Marquis Broadcast. “In fact, we’re enabling the easiest transformation to hybrid cloud post production.”
Medway has also become cloud-enabled, allowing the most advanced cloud/ground workflows with advanced UHD transcoding. Simon Fearn, Marquis Broadcast’s product manager, explains the new benefits; “Medway uses partial file retrieval of cloud assets together with cloud compute ultra-advanced Avid project proxy relinking. This means anyone, anywhere, could upload content to the cloud, then have Medway deliver proxies to an Avid production environment. It’s a very efficient system.”
Importantly, Marquis is 100% agnostic in terms of cloud platform choice, so its cloud storage enablement programme has included an intensive testing and validation programme with Amazon, Dell EMC, Caringo, Cloudian and IBM. Not only does this allow its customers to take advantage of low cost, performance and scalability of cloud storage, they can do so with their preferred vendor. Marquis can also support hybrid storage environments, providing the best choice of traditional storage alongside on-premise and in-cloud environments.
Marquis’s strategy has been to transform itself and its technology, actively enabling and accelerating industry change. Uniquely, the company offers a path of lowest risk and easy migration to cloud, from individual producer creators to the very largest of media enterprises.