Light Iron on Making Data-Driven Storage Decisions
For modern post houses, managing petabytes of data across a facility can be taxing, but with AJA Diskover Media Edition, Liam Ford, SVP of Engineering and Technical Operations at Light Iron, a Panavision Company, has found a way to keep better track of projects and easily determine where files should be routed – be it a tape archive, deletion, or for client review. In our latest customer interview, he reflects on industry trends that have shaped storage demands today and shares how his team is addressing data challenges head-on.
“Light Iron handles post-production for scripted feature films and episodic series. We support clients from dailies all the way through finishing. As we do, we’re ingesting tons of terabytes a day per show across our facilities in New York, Los Angeles, and other locations. It’s A LOT of data to manage and wrangle, and if we’re not organized, things can get out of hand quickly, which is where we lean heavily on AJA Diskover Media Edition.
Studios used to send us all their on-set negatives, which we’d store and pull from, but with the transition to digital capture, the expectation was that we’d keep all that online. We couldn’t put it on a shelf in our vault, so our storage requirements shot up fast. Until AJA Diskover Media Edition, there weren’t really any modern solutions to manage it all in a secure way.
AJA Diskover Media Edition plugs into all our different storage, scans it, and presents a full listing of all its contents, including file metadata. Its MediaInfo plug-in lets our producers and operations staff browse our storage and view the built-in metadata of a specific media file so they can ensure it’s the right resolution and framework, which is a huge help.
I work with it on a weekly basis to check the health of our storage network and validate that all our indexes are running properly. It gives me a general overview of the SAN structure and helps me make sure that we’re not holding too many aged files or hitting critical capacity limits.
Our operations staff and producers use the technology every day to keep track of projects. They’re frequently making decisions about what gets archived to tape, what can be deleted, and which versions should be sent for client review. They rely on Diskover Media Edition heavily to quickly drill down through projects and make decisions about what needs to go where; they’re in there clicking through, waiting for new things to come online, and copying and pasting pathways to generate work orders and tag things, so that other people know what can be archived.
Diskover is a true workhorse that we use constantly to track file movement and notify people where things are. Without it, it would be a slog to figure out where the content is, determine the latest versions, and so on. We can also easily keep track of duplicates, so it’s easy to free up space when we need more. It gives us a project dashboard to track how data is being consumed across projects. With better insight into our data consumption and where files are, it’s easier to get ahead of any issues.
AJA and the Diskover team continue to make new updates to Diskover, like Live View. With the most recent implementation, it functions as a navigable tree as opposed to just a static listing. If the team is worried that they’re not seeing the latest and greatest file versions, they just right-click, navigate to Live View, and get insight into the storage systems. It lets the team know if the files they’re looking at are still there or if there’s anything else there that might be newer that they haven’t seen yet. In the last two years, there have also been a lot of performance updates; it’s a night and day difference, from speed to responsiveness and organization. Everything just keeps getting presented in a smarter way. The MediaInfo plug-in is great as well.
Without Diskover, the only way for our team to make project management decisions in terms of which data to keep is to gather around a single secured workstation to look directly at the content; as you can imagine, that’s incredibly inefficient and a waste of resources. With Diskover, any of us can open up our laptops and get a full, up-to-date overview of everything online. As a result, decisions to clean things up happen way faster and way earlier. It’s time-saving, but also money-saving.”
Liam Ford
SVP of Engineering and Technical Operations, Light Iron, a Panavision Company
