WHITE PAPER 4K: WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW AND WHY IT MATTERS

Transcription

1 WHITE PAPER 4K: WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW AND WHY IT MATTERS

2 CONTENTS Introduction Future-Proof Your Creative Investment Be Prepared K Workflow Storage Considerations Flexibility is the Key Summary WHITE PAPER 4K: What You Need to Know and Why it Matters

3 INTRODUCTION Content owners and producers have always been focused on creating and telling the best story possible. With this understanding, it is clear why the 4K evolution is appealing to producers. It allows them to create content in the very highest quality. It enables them to deliver a more engaging consumer experience thanks to the level of detail inherent in 4K content. Much like we saw with the evolution to HD, 4K is influencing consumer expectations for high-quality content. And, like HD, 4K requires upgrades within the media workflow. What is 4K? Simply stated, it is shorthand for the pixel resolution of digital video, which delivers four times as much detail as 1080p Full HD video. It evolved from the digital cinema community that originally defined 4K as 4096 x The consumer electronics industry has adopted the term 4K to define the pixel resolution of UHD TVs, which are usually specified as 3840 x Regardless of the specific 4K format, these higher resolutions result in a more detailed picture, greater texture, almost photographicquality image display and reduced motion blur for consumers. As an example, this level of detail allows sports fans to experience events in whole new ways, including getting closer to player emotions and enjoying greater fluidity of movement. For creative professionals, 4K delivers a higher dynamic range, which when translated means improved color utilization, better visible picture quality, and generally more details to work with. The larger image size also provides the ability to pan and zoom after image capture and the flexibility to create more shots from a single set of footage. In short, 4K footage facilitates enhanced editing and creates opportunity to add further perspective to content during the post-production process. In a live sports production, the capture of high-quality footage can even create increased instant replay options. The use of high-resolution 4K allows for digital zoom without fear of pixel degradation, thus improving the replay experience for fans. For content owners, the high-quality original footage provides greater flexibility in creating primary content and in extracting video clips, social content, on-demand replays, and more. These capabilities enhance the ability of content owners to take advantage of emerging distribution channels and capitalize upon content monetization opportunities. As UHD TV prices drop, 4K content consumption becomes more consumer-friendly and feasible, driving further demand for 4K content. In turn, this will lead to an increasing amount of sports, films, and episodic television being created and distributed in 4K. The combination will put pressure on content producers and increase the amount of attention that must be paid to building out 4K-capable workflow environments. The migration from SD to HD was perhaps less disruptive since producers were able to up-res SD content for HD output. Since it is not practical to up-res SD or HD content for acceptable 4K presentation, production facilities must create new 4K-specific workflows. As content producers build out 4K capabilities, they must pay attention to all aspects of the workflow from capture and ingest through edit, transcode and render, to content delivery. 4K: What You Need to Know and Why it Matters WHITE PAPER 3

4 FUTURE-PROOF YOUR CREATIVE INVESTMENT The attraction of 4K footage lies in the creative possibilities enabled by the video itself. Knowing that the quality of captured content has significantly increased resolution and color space, directors can get the shot they want, even if it is achieved in post-production. The ability to manipulate shots in post, add drama, crop to remove errors, pan and scan, or pad the frame reduces the number of re-shoots. VFX specialists benefit from finer detail, better tracking and stabilization, and a wider color spectrum, allowing improved composites. Editors can downsample images, reducing flaws, noise, and artifacts. The bottom line is that when shooting in 4K, there is increased flexibility, which results in the unique combination of increasing creativity while also saving time and money in both production and post-production. However, one of the biggest challenges for content producers is how 4K footage is managed and manipulated in the workflow. Of particular concern is the impact on storage bandwidth and storage capacity requirements. Analyst Coughlin Associates predicts that there will be a 5.8X increase in digital storage capacity used in the entertainment industry over the next few years and nearly a fourfold increase in storage capacity shipped per year an increase from 26,756PB to 102,661PB. This massive storage consumption includes storage associated with media workflows as well as long-term archive. In addition to providing enhanced editorial capabilities as discussed earlier, another advantage of 4K video is that it addresses the long-standing archive conundrum of having a file format of sufficient archive quality. Digital file-based storage offered much more reliable preservation than fragile videotape or film, but up to now had sacrificed image quality. Archiving a 4K master provides assurance that a high-quality original is available when needed. Having a 4K archive also helps ensure the flexibility to create, deliver, and monetize that content for multi-channel delivery and multi-device consumption in formats known today and in those yet to emerge. However, archiving 4K dramatically increases the storage requirements. Even as storage costs fall, content producers need to take a pragmatic approach to managing their data storage infrastructure throughout the entire content lifecycle. With 4K RAW footage requiring 1366MB/s per stream, maintaining a reliable collaborative production environment is difficult. The content must be compressed to allow existing networks, media workflow solutions, and creative talent to perform efficiently. Shared storage is a must for collaborative workflows, but must be architected in such a way as to provide the bandwidth needed in actual 4K production workflows. Following the production workflow, 4K content should then be archived for long-term preservation and future re-use. However, archiving directly within the shared workflow storage environment is not practical for both cost and capacity reasons. Consequently, most content owners must define an archive strategy that balances capacity demands, discovery and retrieval requirements, and cost. Typically, this strategy involves intelligent data management to automatically migrate content from the high-performance shared storage to lower-cost disk- or tape-based archive systems. 4 WHITE PAPER 4K: What You Need to Know and Why it Matters

5 BE PREPARED Upgrading broadcast and post-production facilities to 4K is no easy task, especially when operations managers are not given much time or money to do so and existing production workflows cannot be interrupted. A logical first step is to set up a separate 4K-capable workflow environment, using open systems that deliver performance, future scalability, and application interoperability. This foundation can be used to validate 4K workflow performance without impacting existing operations. The challenges associated with moving large video files between different systems in the workflow are well-documented. From ingest where raw video content is imported into a workstation and converted into video files; to editing where video clips are cut, enhanced, shared, processed, and manipulated into a final video program; to transcoding where files are transformed into formats for editing, distribution, and viewing; files need to move efficiently in and out of various applications and storage devices. These challenges become more magnified in a 4K workflow and put intense strain on storage infrastructure. Because of the impact that 4K workflows have on storage infrastructure and because of the dependency a successful 4K workflow has on storage performance, implementing the right shared storage solution is a critical concern. The challenge lies in identifying and capitalizing upon the right solution given both current and future workflow needs. The wrong architecture can result in dropped frames and corrupted or unusable media. As a result, there is a keen focus on performance. The right storage infrastructure provides: Predictable Performance: As discussed earlier, 4K resolution is almost 4X greater than today s HD formats. Additionally, 4K footage is captured at 60fps today, with 100fps anticipated in the future versus the 25fps or 30fps common with HD. This increased resolution and additional frames provide the enhanced detail associated with 4K, while also reducing motion blur. The result is a 400% increase in bandwidth and storage capacity requirements for 4K content compared with HD. Storage solutions must be able to provide the bandwidth needed for access to this content in real time along with low latency to guarantee zero frame loss. Even when compressed, this means storage network bandwidth of 200Mbps. Interoperability: Collaborative workflows integrate a variety of applications that manage and manipulate content. Due to the improved quality of 4K content, there is more metadata, more editing inputs and outputs, and larger file sizes. This means there is a greater need for collaboration and shared file access as well as increased demands on storage system integration with applications for editing, media asset management, encoding, transcoding, and more. Flexible Storage: An effective storage infrastructure balances concerns for data access and durability with requirements for performance and cost. Not all content can be kept in fast online storage forever, as it would be cost-prohibitive. An intelligent and flexible storage architecture provides fast online storage for immediate production work combined with a mechanism to seamlessly extend that online environment almost infinitely at a much lower cost. Layered across the storage infrastructure should be a centralized view of assets to streamline productivity and media access regardless of where assets are physically stored. Storage Network Infrastructure: 4K collaborative workflows require very fast and predictable access to content. Collaboration also requires connectivity to different types of clients over different network topologies and protocols. The storage network must provide the necessary bandwidth and be flexible enough to also support required network and storage protocols. 4K: What You Need to Know and Why it Matters WHITE PAPER 5

6 4K WORKFLOW STORAGE CONSIDERATIONS The storage infrastructure is the backbone of any successful workflow, integrating with the Media Asset Management system to manage content access at each step of the workflow. The storage architecture must address the need to optimize both performance and cost, and integrate with applications running on servers with different operating systems. The impact of storage at each step along the workflow is important to understand. Acquisition: Thanks to the advances in camera technology, capturing content in 4K is relatively easy and widely accessible. Camera manufacturers have developed recordable media that can handle 4K. The challenge lies in offloading camera magazines and backing up files. It is a time-consuming yet necessary process, as footage is stored in both RAW and proxy formats. An efficient workflow demands high data throughput to transfer acquired content from each camera to shared storage, making that content available for the post-production process. Automatic archiving of the source footage is also a requirement to protect the content from loss or corruption. Ingest: The challenge of time is most pressing when it comes to content ingest. A 6-hour sporting event can result in 8 15TB of footage that ideally must all be ingested in real time into shared storage for immediate access. Direct ingest into shared storage allows for quick turnaround editing, transcoding, and quality control of the content even while content is still being ingested. Editing: Due to the size of RAW 4K files, editing native content can be too much for most networks, processors, and even storage infrastructures. Most facilities edit in HD proxy formats, such as ProRes, for a more efficient editing experience and then conform to the RAW 4K to finish the project. To balance storage costs, assets may be stored in a central repository, only being moved to online storage during the editing process. Rendering: Just as 4K utilizes four times the bandwidth, it takes four times as long to render a 4K project. Finishing a project often requires rendering new frames at full native resolution, a process that places a heavy load on both computer and storage resources. Along with the requirement for high-speed CPUs, the associated storage must provide the relevant bandwidth to enable rendering servers to frequently read and/or write over massive files. When rendering is complete, the files can be transitioned to lower-cost storage for future access. Transcoding: With the increasing number of delivery channels and consumption devices, every production and archiving environment has transcoding somewhere in the workflow. An inherently I/O-intensive activity, transcoding requires shared storage to provide high-speed access to source files and an ability to handle intense file open, read, and write operations. Multiple transcoded versions must then be stored cost-efficiently for current and future delivery. Delivery: The primary challenge for delivering 4K content is being able to quickly find the right piece of content and move it to the delivery vehicle, either as a streaming service or a file transfer. As it relates to storage, the concern is the ability to rapidly search and retrieve assets from a content repository that could have millions of items. Fast lookup and file retrieval is essential to enabling efficient content delivery service. With the variety of needs and concerns at every stage of the media workflow, it is evident that a comprehensive, intelligent, and automated storage architecture is needed to address all these requirements, particularly when dealing with the file size and frame rates of 4K content. 6 WHITE PAPER 4K: What You Need to Know and Why it Matters

7 FLEXIBILITY IS THE KEY The move to 4K is exciting, yet the deployment of a storage infrastructure that addresses the need for high performance, reliability, and scalability can be daunting. Even with storage costs declining, 4K content will push storage capacity requirements into petabytes and performance requirements to entirely new levels. It is only practical to consider a variety of storage alternatives that balance the need for performance and capacity with very real budget concerns. An effective storage strategy allows all workflow users to readily find and access the assets they need. This does not mean that all these assets must be stored locally only that they reside in a centralized repository, accessible to all users. The repository can include various types of storage needed to fulfill the varying workflow requirements for bandwidth, I/O, and capacity. This approach addresses demands for affordable and scalable storage capacity, seamless and simultaneous file access, and interoperability with a variety of applications and operating systems. A flexible storage infrastructure combines: Online storage (to enable real-time ingest, playback, editing, and rendering demands); Extended online storage (to provide the high resiliency needed for large-scale content storage at a lower cost than online storage); and Archive storage (to securely store assets before delivery or for long-term preservation). An option that should be considered when designing a cost-effective storage architecture is object storage. With 4K requiring more storage capacity, object storage presents a cost-effective extension to file-based storage, especially for large-scale disk archives or to support activities that are highly automated or processing-intensive. For example, encoding or transcoding does not require creative interaction: the object can be accessed, encoded or transcoded, and archived for delivery or future re-monetization. Object storage differs from file-based storage in that it represents digital assets as a series of objects that each have metadata about the content along with unique identifiers and checksums about that object. These objects can be accessed, retrieved, replicated, or moved across storage components seamlessly, even recreated from neighboring objects with Forward Error Correction technologies. Like all disk-based storage systems, object storage assumes the likelihood of component failure and utilizes a type of Forward Error Correction to ensure data is never lost and is always accessible. This data protection technique is superior to RAID for large-scale systems due to the much faster recovery time following a component failure. Accessible via NFS, CIFS, REST, and the StorNext File System, the flat namespace provides easy access to content along with infinite scalability and data durability. Object storage is a cost-effective alternative that should be considered in any flexible storage architecture, particularly one addressing the needs of 4K workflows. 4K: What You Need to Know and Why it Matters WHITE PAPER 7

8 It is important to remember that digital content architectures with online, near-line, and offline storage need a mechanism that can automatically move files between storage locations while still presenting a single access point for users and applications. When and where the content is located and migrated should be based on policies that reflect the content s access requirements. For example, new or active content might remain on the high-performance disk storage, while content not accessed in the last 30 days might be moved to object-storage-based near-line storage; raw footage for a show that s been broadcast might be moved offline to a long-term tape archive. Regardless of where the content is stored, access should be the same, whether it s through a file system, media asset manager, or other workflow application. The storage infrastructure enables the availability of media assets from one workflow function to another. When evaluating storage options for a 4K workflow, the optimal configuration should address the following: Heterogeneous Support - High-speed collaboration across different operating systems (Windows, Linux, Mac OS X) - Integration and interoperability with media applications including ingest, media asset management, edit, VFX, transcoding, and rendering Topology - A flexible network design helps to future-proof a storage infrastructure and provides the ability to utilize the most efficient network design needed at the time, typically a combination of FC SAN and IP LAN, without sacrificing performance High-throughput Streaming Performance - Latency is critical for handling real-time media operations like ingest, playback, and certain editing functions without dropped frames - High-speed access to full-resolution content, whether in local, near-line, or archive storage, is critical to achieve optimal productivity Cost-effective Availability - A flexible storage strategy will lower your storage costs through use of policy-based file movement and use of the optimal hardware given user need. Considerations include: - Disk storage for low-latency, high-performance streaming access to content - Object storage for assets not being manipulated in real time - Object or tape storage for long-term archive and data protection Ease of Use - Setting up and managing media workflows should not be overwhelming. Integrated deployment and management tools, along with simple user interfaces for easy installation, configuration, and upgrade of clients or servers, are mandatory. In addition, tools should be available to allow you to automate and check the status of tasks, troubleshoot performance issues, improve productivity, and simplify storage management lowering the overall administration costs of your workflow, not to mention providing great assistance when troubleshooting a problem. 8 WHITE PAPER 4K: What You Need to Know and Why it Matters

9 SUMMARY The infrastructure to support 4K workflows and 4K content delivery is evolving. TV manufacturers are creating relationships with content producers and OTT content providers (e.g., Netflix, Amazon), embedding decoders for HEVC and VP9, and adopting HDMI 2.0 all in anticipation of a broader range of available 4K content in Content producers recognize the long-term value that 4K content delivers through their ability to manipulate content in the post-production process as well as in retrieving and transcoding archived 4K assets for further distribution in the future. It is not expected nor is it necessary to upgrade or replace an entire operational environment when making the move to 4K. It is practical to pursue 4K workflows in stages, creating one 4K-ready workflow environment that does not cause disruption to existing operations. For an efficient 4K workflow, perhaps the most important element is a storage infrastructure solution that addresses baseline 4K storage requirements as well as interoperability requirements with 4K-ready creative applications. Look for a storage solution that will provide a roadmap for easy, cost-effective scalability. With the growing demands on storage performance, as well as the need to be able to scale to multiple petabytes of storage capacity, the most practical 4K storage strategy will be one that is easily scaled and delivers infrastructure flexibility. It must address requirements to manage high volumes of content accessed throughout the workflow. It will easily support the flow of media assets in and out of different applications running on disparate operating systems. It will easily fulfill bandwidth demands and storage capacity requirements. It will provide options to utilize the storage media best suited to each task throughout the workflow. 4K presents a great opportunity at the creative level and for future re-monetization. It also presents considerable challenges, but solutions exist to overcome these challenges and deliver a storage infrastructure that improves overall flexibility. 4K is here to stay, with 8K and 16K on the horizon. It is an inevitable progression as consumers constantly crave a more immersive entertainment experience, surpassing the quality of highdefinition content, regardless of consumption channel or device. As post-production and broadcast facilities acquire 4K footage, they will need a storage infrastructure that will enable them to work with this newly acquired footage and keep up with the demand for more 4K content. Now is the time to assess and pursue storage architectures to future-proof for a 4K workflow. 4K: What You Need to Know and Why it Matters WHITE PAPER 9

10 ABOUT QUANTUM Quantum is a leading expert in scale-out storage, archive and data protection. Its StorNext 5 solutions power modern workflows, enabling high-performance, real-time collaboration and keeping content readily accessible for future use and re-monetization. More than 100,000 customers have trusted Quantum to address their most demanding content workflow needs, including top studios, major broadcasters and new, cutting-edge content creators. With Quantum, customers can Be Certain they have the end-to-end storage platform to manage assets from ingest through finishing, and into delivery and long-term preservation. See how at Quantum Corporation. All rights reserved. Quantum, the Quantum logo and StorNext are registered trademarks of Quantum Corporation and its affiliates in the United States and/or other countries. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners. WP00197A-v01 Oct K: What You Need to Know and Why it Matters WHITE PAPER 10