Finish Projects Faster and Increase Creative Control
Need to speed up your workflow and meet tightening deadlines?  Looking to increase creative control over digital master creation?  From broadcast to film restoration to digital imaging, StorNext has you covered.  No matter what part of the post-production cycle you handle, Quantum’s StorNext helps you finish projects faster and enhance collaboration between artists by creating a consolidated content repository for high speed, digital file sharing between staff and application suites.

The Powered By StorNext Advantage

• Simple, high speed file sharing
• Sharing without loss of quality
• Centralized content management
• Faster project completion
• Better use of digital intermediates
• Faster distribution across formats

Perfect for

• Broadcast – TV, commercials, music videos, short form
• Film – trailers, features, restoration
• Imaging

Where does StorNext fit into your workflow? 
Where ever you want to simplify sharing of digital intermediates, images, effects, animation, and other digital files. StorNext also fits in as a digital archiving solution to enable cost-effective retention of unique content and assets for use in upcoming projects.

In a typical post workflow, StorNext ties together different functions so that time consuming data transfers are not needed.  As shown in Figure 1, StorNext serves as a hub for content storage.  Digital files are stored in a high speed StorNext disk pool and immediately available to any artist either via LAN or SAN.  And because StorNext is based on an open-systems architecture, hardware and applications can be from practically any vendor, giving you the freedom of choice to build a workflow based on your specific needs.

Ingest: In a StorNext workflow, acquisition of dailies and other content occurs as usual.  Film is scanned, broadcast tapes are ingested, and digital file content like images or Quicktimes are downloaded.  But instead of storing this data on individual servers and then shuffling the digitized files between users via network shares, FireWire drives, or cutting to tape, you’ll be storing assets in a StorNext disk volume. StorNext is accessible to Mac, Windows, Linux and UNIX systems as a local drive.  Applications and artists can attach to StorNext via a number of possible methods:

• Fibre Channel for high speed, low latency access when ingest must occur as fast as possible
• iSCSI for lower speed, cost efficient access
• StorNext LAN Client for fast, highly resilient access using clustered gateways (not pictured)
• Traditional NFS or CIFS network shares on a server attached to the StorNext repository

Multiple encodings of data can be written in parallel to the shared storage so that low-res proxies and hi-res source files are available for editing.  Once digital intermediates, images and other files used in the post process are stored there is no need to write back to tape or negative between stages and risk loss of quality.  Instead you have an “ingest once, use many” workflow in which digital files are accessible across all workstations.

Editing & Digital Master Creation:  Even as data is being written into a StorNext shared storage pool, it is immediately available to your entire creative staff.  Editors and producers can browse proxies and generate editing decision lists (EDLs) for the master.  Colorists and the director of photography can make on-the-fly updates to enhance the look and feel of the asset.

At the same time, visual effect and sound artists can browse digital files and use the shared storage pool as a repository for music, animation, and other effects.  This enables you to easily store, track and manage all asset versions from a central location using your favorite asset manager.  Once general editing has been completed, compositing, final grading, and rendering can occur using resources from the StorNext pool to create the digital master. 

At every stage users and applications will have immediately access the digital files, dramatically reducing the time needed to create assets and reducing equipment costs like tape stock and VTR replacement heads.  As you expand your workflow, StorNext allows new applications to be quickly integrated so that you are up and running faster.

Distribution: When its time to prep digital masters for deliver, StorNext facilitates the ability for multiple distribution channels to access content and put it in the right format.  From DVD mastering to creation of broadcast tapes and film negatives, StorNext can be used to facilitate digital master transfers to the systems that create physical media for delivery.  Applications for Internet based distributions can attach directly to StorNext, transcode and distribute different formats (e.g. cell phone) in parallel.

Digital Archiving & Data Protection: In addition to your production workflow operations, StorNext also performs archiving and data protection.  Using an additional server that attaches to the shared storage pool, StorNext can automatically generate copies of any or all content that you may want to use in the future - effects, deleted scenes, director’s cuts, additional source material.  Data can be written to:

• Off-the-shelf SATA Disk for high speed, near-line recovery
• Disk with De-Duplication for capacity optimized recovery
• Tape for low cost, portable onsite or offsite, disaster recovery

StorNext can also perform move operations so that data is stored on a lower cost tier.  Data movement is transparent so that applications and operators do not have to worry about where data is located.  Whether on primary disk, secondary disk, or tape content looks like its in the same location.  This lets you create a huge, searchable repository of content for future re-use.  And with integrity checks and file cloning for data protection, you can be sure your content is safeguarded for long term re-purposing.