Podcast: The Workflow Show

The powerful new Mac Pro is now available for sale, and it’s been quite awhile since we’ve been so excited about the release of a new Apple product.

Yet, as has been the trend with Apple computers over the recent past, there are fewer areas that you can “expand” down the road, so the choices you make at purchase become ever more critical. In this episode, Nick Gold and Merrel Davis “get granular” in sharing their insights as to what factors you should keep in mind when considering adding this revolutionary computer to your digital video workflow. Hint: it boils down to four areas: CPU, GPU, storage, and RAM.

The guys also discuss the release of Final Cut Pro X 10.1  While some folks are still holding a grudge regarding Apple’s abrupt pullback a couple of years ago from the professional video editing space, Nick and Merrel are starting to feel like many others in the field that perhaps time can heal the wounds. While FCP X, when first introduced, was considered a rather lame “next step” after FCP 7 — in essence “adding salt to the wound,” this latest version release of FCP X is going a long way in convincing many that Apple indeed is dedicated to being a player in the professional video editing realm. And when teamed with the new Mac Pro? Well, listen to the episode.

Episode length: 1:08:52

Remember that you can also listen and subscribe to The Workflow Show in iTunes.

Show Notes: (Items touched upon but not fully-fleshed out in the podcast)

Netflix to launch 4K in 2014

Pegasus2 Thunderbolt 2 hardware RAID storage
Your comments are welcome below, or feel free to email us.

And we invite you to contact Nick Gold or Merrel Davis at ProSales@chesa.com to discuss your particular digital video workflow needs further.

The conversation also includes Danny’s insights into the future, where he sees analytics really coming to the fore.

Length of podcast episode: 01:05:12

You can also access and subscribe to The Workflow Show on iTunes.

Show Notes

PAM = Production Asset Management

DAM = Digital Asset Management

MAM = Media Asset Management

service-oriented architecture
enterprise service bus
Aspera
owl.ly
Dispatch
engandget
Sharknado
Facebook Paper
Flipboard

CatDV was one of the pioneer platforms in the Media Asset Management space, and today it is one of the most deployed MAM solutions in the world. Nick and Merrel had a chance to sit down with CEO Dave Clack to talk about the plaftorm’s success and what Dave and his team see for the future of MAM.

We welcome your comments below or feel free to email us.

Show Notes

Dave Clack shares the latest news about CatDV with us at NAB 2014:

CatDV website

Rolf Howarth, Founder & CTO 

Dalet Digital Media Systems
Telestream Episode

CatDV Review and Approval

CatDV Review app
CatDV Review & Approval via Rich Client and Web Client
REST API
Oculus Rift virtual reality headset
Quantum StorNext 5 file system and Storage Manager
ASG – Digital Archive

This episode of The Workflow Show is a recording of the opening panel discussion at our MAM Project Planning and Integration Symposium held in New York City on June 24, 2014.

The panel was moderated by Nick Gold, Director of Business Development, Chesapeake Systems; Greg Shiff, Director of Technical Sales at Levels Beyond (the creators of Reach Engine), John Fico, Solutions Architect with Axispoint; and Mike Szumlinski, CEO of Professional Video Technology (US distributor of Cantemo Portal)

The event “got granular” regarding MAM topics such as best practices for communicating with partners and dealing with challenges that come with “deep integration,” including issues like how to properly scope out a project — and assessing what possibilities exist for customization and integration with third-party platforms.
We thank our partners at Cantemo Portal, Levels Beyond and Axispoint for their participation, and we thank our good friends at Nexsan, who graciously provided financial sponsorship for this event. Nexsan’s E-Series RAIDs and NST-Series file servers offer exceptional performance, density and value for SAN, NAS and hybrid environments.

In this episode Nick Gold and new co-host Jason Whetstone talk with Gary Watson, the co-founder and CTO of Nexsan — now with the added title of Imation Fellow as  Nexsan was acquired by Imation in 2013.

Gary is one of those brilliant technical people who also possesses the gift to communicate eloquently, enthusiastically and informatively with any audience. Listen to this conversation, and you will learn why we at Chesapeake are such fans of Nexsan storage solutions.

The topics discussed range from Nexsan’s history, philosophy and reputation for “minding the details” to the technical highlights of the popular E-series storage, the new NST series and Assureon, the company’s spinning drive-based archive solution.

While certainly utilizing SSDs in Nexsan products, Gary also shares with us his candid thoughts about that particular technology and why he believes spinning drives have a very bright future indeed.

As with all episodes of The Workflow Show, this program can also be accessed via iTunes.

Show Notes

ATA

SATA

ATAbeast review from 2004

SATAbeast review from 2007

E-Series overview

active cooling

SAS, Near Line SAS and SATA overview

good article on how flash works

MLC flash memory

eMLC

Single-Level Cell flash vs. MLC flash

core memory

ATTO Thunderlink devices

NVM Express

unified hybrid storage (Nexsan NST series)

snapshot

replication

thin provisioning

compression

article on how NBC’s Olympic team uses Nexsan NST storage

Assureon

CAS

press release on Imation’s acquisition of Nexsan in 2013

Co-hosts Nick Gold and Jason Whetstone begin the third season of our popular audio podcast series with an in-depth, wide-ranging conversation with Quantum’s Alex Grossman and Skip Levens. Alex is the VP of Media and Entertainment at the company and Skip is Director, Technical Marketing.

In this episode, we get a good feel for Alex and Skip’s driving passion, that they have carried with them since their early days at Apple: to make storage — as it becomes ever more complicated on one hand — more flexible and seamless to today’s video end-users.

 

While delving into a bit a geek-dom along the way (which we’re not afraid to do here on The Workflow Show), any listener, regardless of his or her tech savviness, will appreciate the explanations Alex and Skip provide about Quantum’s StorNext 5, StorageManager and Lattus object storage — the latter being an almost sci-fi game-changer for the industry. The conversation also covers specific offerings within the bundle of StorNext Pro Solutions including StorNext Pro WorkGroup, which was recognized with a Best of Show award at IBC 2014.

Also announced at the expo was StorNext Connect, which is a new enhancement that allows for monitoring performance across the whole storage environment via one “pane of glass” if you will. StorageConnect will start appearing within StorNext Pro Solutions around December, and Alex and Skip also suggested that we stay tuned for soon-to-come manifestations of company-wide efforts to make certain products more affordable while still maintaining the functionality and reliability we’ve come to expect from Quantum.

Yes, you may be glad that storage is, in the end, just an icon on your desktop, but gaining a bit of understanding about what’s under the hood certainly will prove advantageous as you consider storage solutions down the road. Listening to this episode will be 84-minutes well spent.

As always, The Workflow Show is available on iTunes

We welcome your comments — and suggestions for upcoming episodes. You can fill out the form below or email us at workflowshow@chesa.com.

And if you’d like to talk with a member of our team of experts about your particular digital media workflow needs, email us at ProSales@chesa.com — or call us at 410.752.3406.

SHOW NOTES (mainly, items requiring a bit more background to what was mentioned in the show)

NeXt

Oculus Rift headset

Media 100

Xsan

Active Storage

Xsan

StorNext

ActiveSAN

IOPS

throughput

latency

SAN Fusion

StorNext 5

SAN vs. NAS

StorageManager

StorNext 5 “affinities”

API’s – Application Programming Interface

REST

StorNext Pro Workgroup

Kai Pradel, Founder and CEO of MediaSilo has always been excited about the intersection of IT and media, and in 2009, as the notion of software as a service (SaaS) in the cloud was in its infancy, he started Boston-based MediaSilo.

And then things really took off. To give you an idea, in the beginning, the company processed about 1,000 hours of footage a month. Today that figure is 30,000.

But just what is MediaSilo? “It is a cloud-based media asset management and collaboration solution,” says Kai.

As with a chain, a video post-production workflow is only as efficient as its weakest link. And an important link, perhaps over-looked initially by some production teams, is the ease of getting video assets from one location to another, to have them easily searchable, and to facilitate collaboration between users and stakeholders.

Consider a common challenging situation, that of getting a number of producers and client reps to review footage from an interview. Now conceivably, that could be handled by posting a video file of the interview on Dropbox or Vimeo and then have the viewers download the file and email their thoughts to each other. But what if it we were talking about 20 interviews? At some point Dropbox and Vimeo get overwhelmed. Professional videomakers need something more robust and integrated, and that’s where MediaSilo comes in.

Listen to this episode and learn how MediaSilo might be just the solution your video workflow needs.

All episodes of The Workflow Show can also be listened to in iTunes. Either search for the series title in iTunes or click here.

Show Notes (items mentioned in the episode that call for expanded exploration)

Amazon EC2 or Glacier
our Beyond Metadata: The Role of Audio and Video Search podcast episode featuring Nexidia and NerVve
APIs
REST API
IfThisThenThat
Zapier
Final Cut Server
North Plains Digital Asset Management
Reach Engine
XMP data
Quicklinks app
Basecamp
farmerswife
sprites
Nexidia
Amazon’s Mechanical Turk service
GitHub
Dropbox vs. Box
High Tail
Free trial of MediaSilo

What’s behind that seemingly innocuous small hard drive icon on the desktop of client workstations within a collaborative video post-production environment? The answer to that question is fundamental in determining the foundation of a facility’s operating procedures.

In our work as an IT-centric media systems integrator, we at Chesapeake Systems typically present our clients with storage options that involve either a NAS (network attached storage) or SAN (storage area network) solution. Is knowing the difference between the two all that important for the client to understand? We have found that when clients are cognizant of the differences, they actually are doing themselves a big favor, because being aware of all the intricacies can help us to home in on offering the most effective system, one that is at the ideal cross-point of budget and performance.

The reversed acronyms of NAS and SAN can give a false sense of clear cut distinction between the two. While it would be correct to say that the differences in general lie between the way data is accessed, the factors in deciding which solution is best for a particular environment are many indeed. And it’s certainly not all black and white. For example, we serve video clients that have separate NAS and SAN storage arrangements within their facilities. And sometimes, incorporating a NAS as a component of a larger SAN is advisable as well.

Hmmm, a bit confusing? You’re not alone. You can of course comb the web for articles about the differences between NAS and SAN storage solutions, but you will likely not find a more thorough yet clearly presented explanation than in this 90-minute discussion between co-hosts Nick Gold and Jason Whetstone.

As always, this episode can also be accessed via iTunes.  We welcome your comments below, or feel free to email us directly.

We are in our third year of producing this audio podcast series. We invite you to check out previous episodes.

Want to discuss your particular media workflow situation with one of our expert consultants? Email the team or call 410-752-7729.

SHOW NOTES

There was a time when it made sense for a video facility to obtain its NLE, storage, archive, MAM and other sundry post-production workflow solutions from a single manufacturer.  That made for easy integration.

But today, with more sophisticated, flexible API’s and other advanced integration solutions available, post-production teams can have the luxury of choosing “best of breed” for each task along the post-production worklfow.

Well, almost.

In truth, we’re not fully there yet. And it’s a company like Marquis Broadcast that specializes in building bridges to address unique frustrating gaps in post-production workflows.

In this episode of The Workflow Show, we talk with Daniel Faulkner, Business Development Manager for Marquis Broadcast, about some of their leading products: Project Parking, Medway, Bridging and Sequence Parking.

There is an emphasis at Marquis in offering products that work within the “walled garden” of the Avid ecosystem.

While there has been movement within the Avid universe to integrate more esily with other NLE platforms and storage, as Daniel says, “They really aren’t fully there yet. One needs to understand that as creators of the original NLE, they had to pretty much invent their own ecosystem, and that’s a tradition that’s difficult to break.” Some might argue that is a liability for Avid these days, but regardless, Avid edit systems continue to be very popular in the New York and Hollywood post-production communities. So tools, such as the ones offered by Marquis, that can help manage and move Avid media and projects both within and to/from non-Avid environments, can be very valuable indeed.

Marquis’ products address specific workflow pain points faced by editors and media managers. For example, Project Parking can locate all the media associated with a particular project, understand which projects are taking up the most space, identify duplicate and “orphaned” files, and copy complete Avid projects — all the bins, sequences and media files — and move them to any other storage or new locations.

Marquis does offer applications that are non-Avid specific, or “agnostic” if you’d like. One such product is Medway, which is a sophisticated software toolkit which integrates broadcast platforms by providing transfer and format conversion workflows for media and metadata.

In this episode, Daniel, Nick and Jason discuss the above product offerings from Marquis, and more, in depth. Take a listen to see if these products might offer solutions for some of the pain points within your particular video workflow.

If you wish to discuss your particular video workflow situation with one of our consultants, email us or call 410.752-7739.

Here are two brief videos about Project Parking that we recorded with Daniel at NAB 2014

PODCAST SHOW NOTES

 

Media Guru, Workflow Evangelist, Multi-tasking Entrepreneur, Prolific Tech Author and Spokesperson — these are just some of the desciptors associated with Richard Harrington. In this episdoe of The Workflow Show, Nick Gold and Jason Whetstone conduct an in-depth interview with Rich to get his insights on the state of the fast-changing media field today — and what one needs to do to survive within it.

Indeed, few know the answer to navigating today’s media universe better than Rich, who among other diverse activities, is CEO of his visual communications company, RHED Pixel; publisher of the online periodical, Photofocus; teacher of courses on Lynda.com; author of numerous books for both print and digital distribution; globetrotting consultant; and on-site teacher and speaker at some of the world’s largest media gatherings.

As Nick asks Rich in podcast, “Do you sleep?”

Rich is not shy with his opinions that are forged from his extensive experience, but he presents them with professional eloquence, intellect and passion. There is definitely an optimistic tone to Rich’s outlook for those of us who work in the media profession. Yet he stresses that we must radically change our approaches to production, skillsets and business plans in order to succeed. Want to know the details of those changes? Listen to this most engaging conversation.

Your comments are welcome below, or feel free to email us.

View a list of all the episodes of The Workflow Show.

The Workflow Show is also available on iTunes.

SHOW NOTES

RHED Pixel

Photo Focus

lynda.com

NAB Post-Production World

Government Expo

Adobe Max

Video Toaster

Producing Video Podcasts book

some of Rich’s podcast episodes

Panasonic GH4

HBO using MLB’s streaming platform

Amazon Studios to produce movies

Transparent

Patrion

Erasure

An Editor’s Guide to  Adobe Premiere Pro

podcast with Walter Biscardi about Final Cut X

Philip Hodgetts

richardharrington.com

Peachpit – publishers of technology books, eBooks, and videos for creative people