With the sheer volume of media produced skyrocketing, top companies are now generating vast libraries of assets that they must maintain and keep accessible. Therefore, post-production companies need to balance their excitement of new technologies with the practicalities of securely storing the data. With augmented reality and virtual reality becoming mainstream filmmaking and high-resolution photography becoming popular through digital streaming sources such as Netflix, many film studios today create bigger files than ever before by shooting in Ultra HD 4K quality or even 8K footage.   

One of the critical challenges is capturing, storing and securely moving large data sets or unedited footage for a film or TV show from production locations, sometimes remote with no internet access. It can also be challenging to access big data sets from multiple sources scattered across different geographical areas.   

As post-production houses experience an increase in project size, they need readily accessible storage systems to handle this enormous change. However, today’s storage solutions cannot simply ingest and store files; companies also require systems that facilitate the creative work with those files. In addition, post-production teams require their source files with full resolution and no compression to get the best image quality possible.

They also need these types of materials quickly accessible over a shared network system like cloud storage. The cloud can offer the media and entertainment industry new agility, efficiency and flexibility, which delivers easier management, lower costs and new production and business opportunities.   

Seagate Lyve Mobile is the perfect data storage solution for today’s digital content. It saves time, reduces stress, and guarantees security. 101 Data Solutions have worked with post-production houses to optimise workflow, reduce downtime, increase responsiveness, and ensure security using Seagate Lyve Mobile. With Seagate Lyve Mobile, businesses can back up their digital content and access it anywhere.   

A 2-hour 4K movie can create up to 1.5 TBs of digital storage – all the footage accumulated throughout production could stretch to petabytes, so post-production teams need to keep data scalability in mind. Seagate Lyve Mobile storage has simple pricing with no add-ons and is dependable during ingesting, producing, archiving, and reusing data. In addition, 101 Data Solutions ensure that businesses don’t have to worry about vendor compatibility because physical and virtual environments are unified for dependable transfers from production data.    

Case Study (The Entertainment Technology Center at the University of Southern California)
 
Improving production workflow is essential for studios investing in productions that cost millions or even hundreds of millions. The Ripple Effect project demonstrates Seagate storage, enabling high-capacity and high-performance data transfers and on-site backups. The project also allowed ETC to integrate with Seagate’s storage-as-a-service solution and carry out safe remote collaboration while generating 12TB of data per day at its peak. In addition, teams could move all the gigabytes of footage from the cloud, enabling editing teams across oceans to access it remotely.   

Case Study (NASA-funded Montana Space Grant Consortium)
 
The researchers at the NASA-funded Montana Space Grant Consortium and the Nature Conservancy power their massive drone-gathered data sets with Lyve Mobile, saving the environment a terabyte at a time.  

On the low, rolling grasslands of northern Montana, thousands of sage grouse converge every spring, strutting and burbling their calls across salty clearings in search of mates. These squat, white-breasted birds vary from two to seven pounds. The males puff up great yellow air sacs on their chests and fan out their spiky tails, making popping sounds in the chill mornings to intimidate competitors.  

At any given mating ground, or lek, there might be hundreds of sage grouse going about this ritual. More recently, that number may have fallen to dozens. In 2019, Montana state wildlife officials noted a 40% drop in sage grouse populations over the prior three years. Causes may be due to human activity, climate change, natural cycles, etc.  

One thing ecosystem specialists know for sure is that sage grouse are an indicator species, meaning that population counts speak an inordinate amount about an ecosystem’s wellbeing. Stable populations indicate a healthy habitat and that the preservation methods applied to the range by land managers and biologists are working. A population decline, on the other hand, often signals something amiss in need of a remedy.

Without reliable population counts, conservationists have no solid data on which to base their arguments. One researcher, deep in the Montana grasslands, now uses Seagate’s Lyve™ Mobile Shuttle to help improve his sage grouse analysis methods. The results of that work reach far beyond bird counts—and into the forecast of North America’s climate change.

“I can tell you that thanks to Lyve Mobile we saved hours and hours, both obtaining the data and then distributing it internally. We immediately put that time to good use doing data analysis,” said Jennifer Fowler, assistant director of the Montana Space Grant Consortium (MSGC). 

Contact 101 Data Solutions – see how we can implement Seagate Lyve Mobile into your business