Panel Will Explore 4K Video Growth; Content Storage Requirements, Challenges
Low-cost cameras, digital media and production hardware/software have expanded the media and entertainment (M&E) industry beyond Hollywood-style production operations to an almost universal business, education, entertainment solution. The professional media market has exploded in two diametrically opposite directions.
"Today's digital media storage needs to be massive and incredibly fast, yet located in a very small workgroup that has no IT support." said Larry Jordan, an internationally recognized consultant, trainer and producer, who will be moderating a panel on 4K M&E storage on August 5 at the Flash Memory Summit in Santa Clara, CA.
"The cinematography and production market is measured in millions of users, yet each is an independent group of 1-4 people,"
His panel of cinematographers and media experts will cover the rapid transition of entertainment from high def to 4k (4 times the pixels, requiring 4 times the storage at 4 times the bandwidth) and the global expansion of people involved in all phases of media: creation/production/post production processes.
"For the first time in our history, 4K cameras are available at prosumer prices," Jordan explained. "Shooting digitally means that files are now measured in Terabytes per production, and a complete professional-grade post-production suite costs less than $10K. People who could never afford video production have entered the market: education, government agencies, schools, houses of worship, healthcare, business education/training, even original YouTube entertainment," he noted. "This massive, world-wide, rapidly-expanding market provides a great opportunity for storage manufacturers, especially those who are in the flash and solid state memory industries."
Joining Jordan on the M&E content production panel will be Cirina Catania, The Catania Group; Neil Smith, LumaForge; Tony Cacciarelli, AJA Video Systems and Matthew Rehrer, Harmonic.
Today, more than 75 percent of video content shot in the field is captured on flash/SSD because of the rough handling and harsh environmental conditions. It is then offloaded to high-performance notebooks for quick review and storage to high-capacity ruggedized hard drives. "The data files we shoot become our 'master'," one of the panelists explained, "so losing a shot because of bad media or media failure risks an entire day of production; and tens of thousands of dollars."
Jordan added that the panel will explore the five key considerations for indie and business M&E producers – portability, bandwidth, reliability, affordability and capacity. He estimated that studios and major production houses contract out more than 60 percent of their post production work—concentrated in small teams that can be located across the street or around the globe. His panelists will discuss the Cloud security, reliability and speed issues as well as the growing impact of new video formats and multi-camera production.
In addition to exploring the M&E Video Production panel session, the Flash Memory Summit will include three days of conference meetings featuring end users, solution developers, designers and application leaders in the consumer, mobile, healthcare, wearables, enterprise and other market areas.
The 9th Annual Flash Memory Summit will also feature keynote speakers from Alibaba, Samsung, Dell, Microsoft, SanDisk, IBM and other industry leaders. More than 100 information-packed sessions will have presentations by leading experts and will include complete coverage of SSDs, Controllers and the very latest in advanced technologies.
The event will include plenaries on 3-D flash, forums on NVMe, architectures, enterprise SSD, enterprise storage design/applications and performance measurement. There will be more than a dozen tutorials on reliability, enterprise SSD selection, software-defined storage and enabling Big Data applications. To help attendees stay abreast of the fast-moving industry, there will also be a series of hands-on laboratories on custom hardware, NVMe compliance, cloud storage and non-volatile DIMM.
