If you’ve seen Avatar 3D, The Dark Knight Rises or Moneyball, then you’ve experienced 4K in action. More and more films are shot or mastered in 4K — or up-converted from 2K — as studios put dedicated 4K resolution efforts in motion. With a promise to deliver fans vast, perfectly crisp content, 4K is spawning demand among consumer markets and forcing the post production industry to keep pace, especially when it comes to storage and content management.
Between now and 2017, Coughlin Associates expects the entertainment industry’s required digital storage capacity to increase 5.6X. With one 4K film amounting to several petabytes alone and a 4K image having at least four pixels for every one pixel in an HD image, storage requirements are exploding, presenting new challenges to the post industry. Cloud-based video management platforms are emerging as ideal solutions for post houses, studios, and production companies working with 4K resolutions. The right cloud platform can dramatically reduce the need for everything from storage drives and tapes to warehouse space and overnight shipping, which can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars a year—or more—when petabytes are involved.
Using Web-based video management solutions, facilities in disparate locations can now efficiently store, access and deliver 4K video content online. The robust features built into Web-based solutions—such as T3Media’s T3 Library Manager—enable editing teams working with ultra-high definition content to shave hours, days, and even weeks off of the post production process. By leveraging the right set of metadata tools and storage and transcoding services, editors can find product mentions, scenes, actors, line of dialogue and other specified content faster than ever before. They can also make quick edits in Web proxies and only download portions of larger master files needed for the project at hand—promos, trailers, digital downloads, etc.
With 4K making inroads and 8K resolutions in development, now is the time for the post production industry to evaluate current and future content management needs. The less time editors spend waiting for drives to arrive via FedEx and pulling tapes from warehouse shelves, the more time they can dedicate to the creative process.
Kevin Schaff is CEO & founder of T3Media, a leading provider of cloud-based video management and licensing services. Kevin can be reached at media@t3media.com. To learn more, visit www.t3media.com.