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BITS & PIECES www.postmagazine.com 10 POST NOV/DEC 2019 SONY OPTICAL DISC ARCHIVING PROVES THE RIGHT CHOICE FOR ENDEMOL SHINE NORTH AMERICA NORTH HOLLYWOOD, CA — Within an 85,000-square foot corporate office facility in North Hollywood, Endemol Shine North America (www. endemolshine.us) houses storage for each mega- byte of data generated by its deep roster of hit programming including MasterChef, The Biggest Loser, Deal or No Deal, and Extreme Makeover: Home Edition. Every camera master, offline edit proxy, online edit proxy, and all show-generated me- dia resides on storage drives in North Hollywood — every megabyte of data generated over the course of production. After using a combination of LTO-5 storage and four Sony first generation ODS-D77U standalone optical disc drives for several years, Endemol Shine North America is transitioning to become a fully Sony ODA (Optical Disc Archive) facility with the addition of four new Generation Two ODS-D280U ODA units. The switchover is the result of a number of factors related to the large volume of material, in- cluding: the need to save on expenses, refine overall workflows, prevent data loss and reduce mainte- nance requirements. When storage was on LTO tapes, the post pro- duction team at Endemol Shine housed the tapes in an off-site, climate-controlled warehouse, which was costly. As an illustration of the physical space that requires, shows such as MasterChef, for example, generate between 70-80 cubic feet of boxes. "With LTO, it was necessary to have climate con- trolled off-site storage," explains Alex Palatnick, VP of post production, Endemol Shine North America. "Climate-controlled storage is exceptionally ex- pensive. But magnetic media is very susceptible to humidity and temperature over time. If you put LTO tapes in a warm room, say, 80-90 degrees for a year or two, you're going to have a dramatic impact on the ability to get data off that cartridge. So, it was a necessity to have them in such an environment. With ODA, that issue does not exist. ODA has a life span at least two to three times that of LTO. For us, that means we don't have to have climate-con- trolled storage for our newer shows. Anything you can do to either reduce your footprint or not have to use a climate-controlled environment, will save significant cost over time." While Palatnick notes that the speed of Sony's first-generation ODA product was "very solid," he points to the higher density, lower cost per GB and speed of the second generation ODS-D280U ODA drives. "The second-generation cartridge has twice the volume of the first and costs 20 percent less to purchase, which means that the cost per gigabyte drops to around four cents. It's roughly a 46 percent savings switching to the second-generation cartridge. And when you couple that with offsite storage sav- ings, we start getting into some serious savings. It's very much a long game with this product." The idea of being able to have a medium such as ODA, with speeds as fast as LTO, random access and data longevity, is something that the company has been looking at very closely. Palatnick and his team discovered new operational workflows such as on-set archiving, in-facility ar- chiving and distribution. "We're always looking to re- fine our workflows, and we're always looking to save more time," says Palatnick. "Our workflows are very solid. We save a lot of time, and thus a lot of money in the process. Behind that result is the continued refinement of those workflows and processes." Another positive Palatnick points out for opti- cal disc storage versus tape is that the potential for data loss on discs is virtually nonexistent. Optical Disc archive offers a robust bit error correction and is not susceptible to magnetic bit rot. In an unlikely event, if a disc was damaged, it doesn't result in damage to the entire cartridge, as is the case with LTO-based storage: "With LTO tape, if you have a problem with the cartridge, you can lose the entire thing. With ODA, because of the individual discs that comprise the cartridge, the potential loss is compartmentalized." Endemol Shine was also looking for a storage system that would require little to no maintenance. "Right out of the gate, we saw there was zero maintenance with these drives," says Palatnick. "With LTO drives, depending on how much volume you have within your facility, you need to clean each drive at least once a week. With ODA, it's all laser. It's one less thing for the librarian who pilots the system to have to worry about. When we're in production, we put a lot of data through the storage drives, and we're very demanding. The transition process to ODA has been similarly easy. Endemol Shine has remaining LTO infrastruc- ture because of its library of legacy content. But all new content is stored on Sony ODA drives, which is a change that literally happened overnight. "No joke, it was overnight," stresses Palatnick. "This has been a very transparent transition for us, to move from LTO to ODA. Everything at this stage of the game goes to ODA, and it's a much easier cartridge to manage." Endemol Shine North America uses the Soleratec Phoenix Video Content Management workflow to move content from its Avid ISIS video file storage system to ODA. Phoenix is the company's archival backbone. The software manages all data writes and reads from the ODA cartridges. Offline editorial is done on the Avid primary storage, with camera proxies put on Nexsan Unity Pier 2 storage. According to Palatnick, addressing the cloud- based versus hard assets decision, says he doesn't see cloud-based options as a viable alternative for the immediate future. "I will never give up hard assets ever," he explains. "In the event we run into a failure, we have to retain the ability to recover from it quickly. The only way I can see a cloud-based storage solution being viable, is to have something transitional, which would be ODA. And I think that ODA absolutely has a long-term presence, even with cloud-based archives running simultaneously. So, you can still run ODA, and have cloud-based archives at the same time." The ODS-D280U Optical Disc Archive stand- alone drive unit is part of the Sony Optical Disc family of data storage products designed for storing and archiving all forms of audio-visual assets and data files for the long term. It features very high transfer speeds of 1Gbps write (verify on) and 2Gbps read using the ODC-3300R (3.3TB) genera- tion 2 cartridge. Fully backward-read compatible, the Sony Optical Disc Archive drive technology provides read capability for all generations of optical disc cartridge media. Generation 2 drives and media enables content access for 100+ years while elim- inating the need for a forced media migration due to media and drive obsolescence. The drive unit handles a single optical disc cartridge that offers an alternative to traditional forms of data tape and secondary RAID (HDD/SSD) for the longer-term archiving of valuable assets. Fox's MasterChef