Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/652464
8 STORAGE SOLUTIONS MARCH 2016 STORAGE SOLUTIONS ecause of the growing size of modern me- dia content the digital storage and trans- port bandwidth requirements continue to increase (as shown in Table 1). Better media management, use of IMF elements to control versioning and some use of compression have moderated this growth, but as consumers come to expect more immersive experiences, larger master media files are the result. Figure 1 shows a modern digital media work- flow. A smaller post production facility may have non-connected video workstations with local storage, but with ubiquitous network connectivity and the value of collaborative workflows, even very small facilities may share content in a local storage network (a block-based Storage Area Network or SAN or a file-based Network Attached Storage or NAS). Increasingly some content may be shared with remote collaborators using data stored in data cen- ters accessed through the Internet (the Cloud). POST AT THE SPEED OF FLASH As media files increase in size, the choice of stor- age technology to use must balance higher perfor- mance needs with the overall IT budget. Most digital storage in post production workflows has been hard disk drives, but with the declining price of flash mem- ory, it is becoming more attractive as a storage tier in a post environment. Today, there are Thunderbolt external storage devices with flash memory rather than HDDs that serve the needs of smaller editing facilities. For larger facilities, SSD-based storage is finding a role in local network storage systems either as an all-flash array or as a flash-based front end to cache active content for rapid access. In most cases the bulk storage is HDD-based or may even use some magnetic tape for less active archiving of data. Archive and backup of post data is very important to avoid the impact of data corruption or loss and although flash memory might be used to accelerate movement of archived data, these appli- cations are still dominated by HDDs, magnetic tape and some optical disc because these are the most cost-effective storage media in $/TB. Flash memory growth in all media and entertain- ment applications (content creation, post, content DIGITAL STORAGE CHANGES ENABLE NEW POST WORKFLOWS B Table 1: Example resolution, data rates and storage capacity requirements for pro media. Figure 1: Modern Video Editing Station 1 4,000,000 3,000,000 2,000,000 1,000,000 0 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 2019 2020 Format Resolution (width x height) Frame Rate (fps) Data Rates (MBps) Storage Capacity/ Hour (GB) SDTV (NTSC, 4:2:2, 8-bit) 720 x 480 ~30 31 112 HDTV (1080p, 4:2:2, 8-bit) 1920 x 1080 24 149 537 Digital Cinema 2k (4:4:4, 10-bit) YUV 2048 x 1080 24 199 716 Digital Cinema 4k (4:4:4, 12-bit) YUV 4096 x 2160 48 1,910 6,880 Digital Cinema 8k (4:4:4, 16-bit) 1 7680 x 4320 120 23,890 86,000