FEARLESS ARCHIVAL BY STRAWBERRY
Learn how Strawberry’s project-centric archival can help your team make the most of your archive
Despite being a crucial component of post-production workflows, archival is frequently overlooked. Creative teams often avoid proper archiving and archive management, resulting in difficulties finding content and encountering “media offline” errors when attempting to access archived assets.
It’s time for a headache-free archive solution – here’s Strawberry’s Fearless Archive by Projective.
ALLERGIC TO ARCHIVING?
When asking editors what content can be archived or removed, the typical response is “nothing”, and that all content should remain accessible online… ideally forever.
KEY BENEFITS
- Project-based archival and retrieval makes it easy to find content.
- No more “Media Offline”! Links are automatically preserved.
- Proxies and metadata always online.
- Same user experience whether content is online or archived.
- Efficient project repurpose with project-based retrieval.
- Reduce storage costs and increase sustainability.
- Cut down on system administration.
HEADACHE #1: Can’t find it!
Often, editors want to easily find and re-use raw footage: un-edited content, multiple takes, clipped up material… In a typical Media Asset Management (MAM) system, raw files often have no associated tags or metadata – who wants to manually tag hundreds of raw files
Once archived, it’s extremely hard to find untagged footage. Sometimes it may be quicker to reshoot content than trying to locate amongst thousands of archived, uncatalogued files. Not efficient. ?
HEADACHE #2: Media Offline
When individual assets are archived and removed from the primary storage, editing projects are left with “media offline” errors. Even if you find the archived content you need, after hours of searching and looking through dozens of files, you have to manually relink from your project to the restored files – more time wasted!
No wonder your creative team prefers to avoid archival: finding content and addressing media offline issues becomes too cumbersome.
Now your primary storage is filling up with large media files and expansion comes at a considerable cost. Nearline and archive storage options are only lower cost if the content on them is actually reusable.
ARCHIVING CONTENT THE SMART WAY
For every asset that is ingested into Strawberry, a proxy preview is created and technical metadata automatically extracted. Additionally, because Strawberry orchestrates project structure, project metadata is automatically associated with containing assets, eliminating the need to tag footage individually. This makes it very easy to archive entire projects, which keeps context and sequence integrity -no more media offline!- and makes it much easier to locate content.
This ability to archive projects as a container reduces engineering headaches and differentiates Strawberry from typical asset-focused MAM approaches or HSM tools.
With assets containerized, moving those containers becomes a simple one-click task. Those containers can be an actual creative project, or just a collection or library of rushes. After archival, a proxy of the contained assets is kept online on primary storage, including all associated metadata and project structure.
For editors, the user experience does not change since the project information continues to be online, whether the assets have been archived or not. Users can navigate through the archived project structure, run quick searches and scrub through proxy video to reuse the exact content they need – just like they can with their active projects.
ASSETS ACROSS MULTIPLE PROJECTS
With a traditional MAM, archiving individual assets often throws media-offline issues, particularly when they’re used across multiple projects. Strawberry takes care of this by ensuring all relative links are maintained across projects, tracking asset genealogy. So if a project is archived, but some of its assets are in use on other projects, these will be automatically kept online until all instances of that asset are archived.
CONTEXTUAL SEARCH
Strawberry provides contextual search capabilities that include metadata and folder structure. This enables users to find assets based on the project metadata and context, without having to manually tag. And because Strawberry can index and manage multiple storage pools, including online, nearline, cloud, and archive (LTO) platforms, users get a window to the entire production environment – even when content is not directly managed by Strawberry (e.g. Avid Nexis).
EDITOR-DRIVEN ARCHIVAL
You can give specific archive (and restore!) roles to authorized users, such as editors or super users. They’ll be able to make archive or retrieval decisions for a project with a simple menu action within the Strawberry user interface. This speeds up the entire process as users do not have to wait for someone to attend to their archive/retrieval request. Alternatively, editors can set a project flag status “ready for archive” so that a system administrator can review and decide when and what to archive.
ARCHIVE INTEGRATION
Strawberry provides out-of-the-box API integration with a range of archive storage solutions, including:
- Archiware P5 Presstore
- Object Matrix MatrixStore
- Pixit ngenea
- StorNext Storage Manager
- Telestream (formerly MassTech) Kumulate
- Xendata Archive
Additional integrations can be achieved through the REST API.
HASSLE-FREE RETRIEVAL
Retrieving content from the archive is equally efficient and intuitive. Users can easily restore individual assets, however, the ultimate strength of the Strawberry approach is the ability to restore entire projects as a unit.
A common use case is the need to rework existing content for a new channel, geography or language. With Strawberry, users can retrieve the entire project from the archive, including all related clips and assets. This, together with the Project Mount functionality, delivers the real power of Strawberry: since an open project is presented to editors as a workspace for that project, the entire restored project is mounted automatically.
Since the project file from the editing application is also restored, project structure and links are maintained. Media is automatically online so users can work right away without having to spend precious time relinking assets to the project. And this works across any editorial tool: Avid MediaComposer, Adobe Premiere Pro, Da Vinci Resolve and more…
With a typical Media Asset Management tool, focused on individual assets, this simply is not possible, since relative links are not maintained during the archival process.
For full details on set up and options, head over to the latest Strawberry manual.
Archiving with Strawberry in a post-production environment truly fulfills the promise of what an archive should be: an extension of your primary storage, rather than separate locations and separate management tools. Now you can optimize your primary storage and maximize your secondary storage.
Whether you have an existing Strawberry set up or are considering implementing a new collaboration platform for your post-production and archive workflows, you’ll reap the benefits from day one.
To learn more about how to implement an intelligent ingest solution for post-production,
reach out to the Projective team.