Many content creators find themselves facing the need for organized, secure, shared content storage for the first time. You might be a successful YouTuber, or perhaps a growing corporate communications business.
The common factor is that you have an increasing archive of material which you need to organize. Efficiency means you need to reuse some of that material. Location shooting is expensive; you will wear out your welcome if you keep calling up the CEO to ask about shooting some B roll every time you need it.
Keeping Track of your Assets
So you need to know what you have and how to find it. Keeping track through stick-on labels on USB drives or on camera cards, or at best an Excel spreadsheet, is not a scalable solution. Storing the material on USB disk drives on a shelf is increasingly impractical. And, of course, there is the question of content security: if the shot you are looking for is only on one disk drive and it goes faulty, what can you do?
What you need is a solution which will provide very secure, very resilient storage with asset management so you can search your archive.
You may think that EditShare storage systems are for big production companies, and certainly we do supply some of the biggest in the world. But the good news is that our platform is designed to be scalable, so you can start with something small, confident that it will grow as your business does.
Avoiding Data Loss
And however small you start, you will always have the highest levels of protection for your content. Automatically, within the storage device, RAID protection tuned to the needs of video content will ensure that your material is protected.
Working Out What You Need
The question, then, is how much storage do you need? There are a number of online calculators (https://www.omnicalculator.com/other/video-size, for instance) where you can put in your video format, frame rate and length of the recording and it will tell you how much data you have.
If, for instance, you are planning a five-minute video, and you expect a 10:1 shooting ratio. Your acquisition format is ProRes 422, 1080p/50. The raw footage is going to come out at a little under 100 GB. Add some extra for edits and renders.
Then multiply by the number of projects you have now, and how many you plan in the immediate future – the next year or two. That will give you the capacity to aim for.
The EFS 200 is designed for this sort of production capacity. You can start with as little as 24 TB of storage – room for a couple of hundred of our sample project including room for RAID protection – and you can scale it up to 360 TB simply by adding disk drives as you need them. It automatically manages distributing the data so nothing is lost and no time is wasted.
It is a network device, so whether you are using Mac, Windows or Linux you will see it as a connected device, directly accessible from your favorite edit software. There is no need to learn anything new. Better, because it is on the network, you can have multiple editors working on multiple projects simultaneously, without loss of performance.
Having this sort of content management gives you security, it boosts productivity, and it helps you manage your precious assets. You can start with the right size for your business as it currently stands, confident you can grow in the future without issues, even if your ambition is to be one of the most successful production companies in the world.
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