Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/799353
12 STORAGE SOLUTIONS MARCH 2017 STORAGE SOLUTIONS CINEPOSTPRODUCTION SPEEDS DCP DELIVERY WITH ASPERA Founded in 1911, CinePostproduction (www.cinepost- production.com) is a leading film and television post production facility in Munich, Germany. Its services include duplication of DCP copies, DCP versioning and mastering, localization of trailers and KDM services. To simplify the handling of trailers and DCPs, CinePost- production developed the SHARC DCP portal, which is used by most cinemas in Germany, Austria and Swit- zerland to download DCP trailers, as well as for DCP key creation and management. CinePostproduction previously relied on physical shipment to distribute cinema content to its partners. Satellite transfers were too inflexible and large-scale dis- tribution to hundreds of cinemas doesn't work properly in Europe, resulting in satellite operators withdrawing from the market. Other traditional digital transfer meth- ods were unreliable, inefficient or costly. But with the transition to digital cinema, film producers and distributors needed a way to deliver DCP masters — which typically range from 100GB to 400GB — electronically. And data volumes are even greater for CinePostproduction's TV and cinema post production operations, with data sets between 150GB and 1.5TB per feature film sometimes needing to be transferred globally. To overcome these challenges, CinePostproduction integrated Aspera On Demand (AOD) into its SHARC system to speed the ingest of DCPs from studios and delivery of DCPs directly to cinemas, ensuring feature films are delivered on time and with full security and precise control over bandwidth allocation. Fully integrated with AOD running in the cloud, SHARC can now transfer encrypted, high-resolution (2K or 4K) DCPs between CinePostproduction's Content Delivery Net- work servers at its data center and partici- pating cinemas. SHARC replaces traditional slow, unreli- able and expensive delivery methods with a state-of-the-art hybrid cloud distribution platform comprising a secure online Web portal for ingest and Aspera FASP high- speed transfer running in the cloud for fast and secure delivery directly to cinemas. The compute and storage resources needed to distribute DCPs change over time de- pending on the number of movies and the number of theaters involved in the release. Running AOD in the cloud allows CinePostproduction to scale storage and transfer capacity as needed to meet variable custom- er demands without impacting CinePostproduction's on-premises infrastructure used for post and archiving. With Aspera, CinePostproduction can use SHARC for large-scale distribution to hundreds of cinemas. The distribution platform is extremely cost effective because theaters can use their existing infrastructure to achieve maximum speed delivery — they simply install the CinePostproduction client software, which contains an embedded Aspera Client, and receive DCPs directly from SHARC to the theater over their existing broad- band connection. By fully integrating Aspera into its existing infra- structure, CinePostproduction is able to complement the innovative SHARC portal with powerful, high-per- formance transfers for fast ingest and distribution of large media files. Giving cinemas the option to re- ceive video files over the Internet via SHARC, rather than limiting the service to traditional hard drive de- livery methods, has established a more robust, secure and reliable method for on-time delivery directly to cinemas. Whereas physical shipment of hard copies could take up to a week, today content is delivered within hours. "Most of our studio and production customers were already using Aspera to deliver content to our post production facilities," says Thomas Ramin, CTO of CinePostproduction. "Embedding Aspera on Demand running in the cloud directly into our SHARC digi- tal distribution platform was an obvious choice and allowed us to extend the benefits of high-speed digital delivery to over 400 movie theaters using SHARC." STORAGE NEWS