Lights! Camera! Action!….Storage?

If you’re like me, you’ve probably never spent a lot of time thinking about the hundreds or thousands of hours spent on the painstaking attention to detail that goes into the process of finalizing a movie or television show. I know nothing about the post production workflow, color grading, editorial, film editing or all the activities that usually take longer than the actual shooting of the film. It took years before I caught onto the “nice dissolve” reference in Spaceballs.

There is a whole world of activity that goes on behind the scenes to bring us our favorite shows, movies, and video games. Character animation, motion design, and sound, and countless visual effects that take days, weeks, or months to create go whizzing by us in seconds. To keep us entertained, the studios face a number of unique challenges, especially when it comes to data compute and storage. These challenges are primarily related to the massive quantities of video data that production companies create every day. Although many industries have begun a migration to cloud compute and storage, media and entertainment companies face a unique set of challenges.

As studios have transitioned to digital video capture, post-production, and digital distribution, their requirements for compute performance and storage capacity have increased exponentially. The fluid nature of production where compute power and storage infrastructure may sit idle between projects, makes it impractical for production companies own a lot of IT hardware. However, despite all of it’s benefits, cloud storage has not historically been a favored option for use with digital video. Even though the cost per gigabyte of cloud storage might be less than high performance, on-premises storage, the data egress fees associated with cloud storage have made it cost-prohibitive for digital video work in progress.

That is why this week’s partnership announcement from Wasabi Technologies and Scalar is so exciting. Scalar StudioCloud is a private cloud-based server farm based on industry-leading, high performance technology, that is purposely built for animation/visual effects rendering. StudioCloud takes the burden of technology off the hands of filmmakers and television producers and lets them focus on creating great work. With over 100,000 render cores and six data centers across North America, StudioCloud offers completely secure, fully managed and infinitely scalable compute services for studios of any size. Combined with Wasabi’s infinitely scalable cloud object storage and unique pricing model, studios can store vast quantities of data while rendering in Scalar StudioCloud and not pay the egress fee toll when pulling files from Wasabi. Further, Wasabi’s revolutionary file system writes and reads data faster than competing cloud storage services which can help to compress production time and keep projects on schedule and budget.

Together, Scalar’s StudioCloud and Wasabi are helping producers of all size with affordable access to the production technology they need, when they need it.

To learn more about how Wasabi’s cloud storage platform is an ideal solution for media and entertainment companies that need to store vast quantities of data while still allowing that data to be accessed rapidly, visit us at https://wasabi.com/media-and-entertainment/

Dissolve…