Unscripted Programming Moves Media in an Unconventional Way

Growing Demand for Streaming Content

At the heart of this global film and television production and distribution company is the development of a wide range of cutting-edge television programs across all media platforms. As demand for streaming content erupted over the last three years, the company’s production teams realized they needed to increase output and accelerate timelines to keep pace.

Make More Without Spending More

As the media production landscape evolved, the biggest challenges became siloed workflows, budgetary restraints, and timeline limitations. Across projects, the global film and television production company needed to modernize operations so their teams could capture, aggregate, and transfer multi-camera footage daily throughout an ongoing shoot, all within in a shorter timeline and without overspending on storage.

Difficulty Transferring Mass Data Quickly

For years, the global film and television production company’s traditional workflow presented challenges for their media managers to effectively manage, transfer, and edit multi-camera footage quickly. As camera quality increased, datasets grew, time to air shortened and industry budgets shrank, the company realized it needed to reimagine how media was handled.

Cost-Effective, Cloud-Based Media Management...from Camera to Post

The film and television production company understood they would need to tackle their media management challenges on two fronts. It was evident their digital image technicians (DITs) who were on set required a high-performing, portable, and reasonably priced media storage solution to accommodate the constantly evolving requirements of multiple-set shootings.

Their new approach would also need to both simplify and accelerate physical transportation from remote shooting locations to media houses in the U.S. and Canada, where the files would be downloaded, duplicated, transferred to post-production processing houses, and archived in the multi-cloud. Additionally, the solution had to be as efficient as it was cost-effective and secure. 

In 2022, the global film and television production company looked to Seagate to help reimagine both tiers of their media management. For on-set camera card consolidation and backup workflows, the company deployed four 92TB SSD Lyve Mobile Arrays and two 46TB SSD Lyve Mobile Arrays from Seagate as plug-and-play, direct attached storage (DAS) devices, supporting super-fast file copies and reducing time on set. Because the Lyve Mobile Array can be daisy chained via Thunderbolt™, supporting transfer speeds up to 2.2GB/s, their DITs could create two copies from the same laptop when ingesting files from camera cards—creating cost-efficiency that didn’t put the media at risk. 

The latest evolution of the workflow came when the need to transfer daily camera footage from two series being shot simultaneously in South America to the media company’s post-production houses in the U.S. and Canada became a bottleneck to editors starting the transcoding process. Leveraging its Cloud Import Services, Seagate built out a hotspot ingest station utilizing the Lyve Mobile Rackmount Receiver and Link accessories for daily camera footage to be offloaded in a near-set environment. This enabled data managers to courier the media in a round-robin style from sets directly to upload to Lyve Cloud, Seagate’s multicloud-integrated, simple, trusted, efficient S3 object storage solution. This not only provided a quick way for data to get to Canada and Hollywood (as those teams were seeing footage within 24 hours of being shot) but also, by default, provided a third copy of the media being shot daily; a requirement in any data manager’s workflow.

For the Hollywood team, Seagate also provided a download onto a new Lyve Mobile Array and delivered the storage appliance directly to the studio. The film and television production company’s in-office bandwidth was not good enough to pull down directly from Lyve Cloud, so Seagate was able to upload from Latin America and deliver the daily footage onto another local device and deliver all media within 24 hour rotating periods. 

In the end, the media company was able to upload, download, and transfer 18-24TBs of media per day throughout an 18-day shoot, and 23-day shoot respectively, decreasing time between set and post, and lowering the overall cost of media movement from shoot to archive. This efficiency allowed the media company’s production teams to work in parallel, transforming their entire workflow from a segmented and siloed operation to a simplified and cost-effective process. 

Seagate Lyve provided the global film and television production company with every tool needed to deliver more media without spending more on media management, reducing the workforce while truncating timelines.

As demand for streaming content continues to grow, discovering a cost-effective and secure solution that makes it possible for studios to complete projects on time and on budget will become essential. The success of the partnership between Seagate Lyve and the Hollywood-based global film and television production and distribution company proves the value of deploying a simple and efficient media management solution for media consolidation on set and physical transportation to post-production, archive, and cloud.

Bypassing Limitations of Traditional Workflows

By partnering with Seagate Lyve, the film and television production company bypassed limitations of their old workflows, accelerating camera card consolidation on set and delivering media to post-production houses and archive in record time. This removed unnecessary steps, shortened timelines, and saved money, while also increasing data security.

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