Open Standard LTO Archive for
Interplay Production
Our mission is simple: to provide the best digital video archiving solutions to our customers at competitive prices. We are committed to customer service and to our reliable high performance products.
Our digital video archives are installed in over 50 countries, especially at TV stations, video production companies, post-production organizations and the media departments of large corporations and government organizations.
Our offices are located in Walnut Creek, California, USA and in Cambridge, UK. We provide both pre-sales support and post-sales customer support from each location.
XenData in Walnut Creek, CA XenData in Cambridge, UK
About Our Partners
axle Video
axle Video, LLC is a Boston-based company aiming to bring radical simplicity to media management applications for small and mid-sized workgroups. axle's software is designed to be installed and configured in less than an hour, and used with minimal training. axle's software works with nearly all existing file systems and storage vendors. For more information about axle, visit www.axlevideo.com.
NL Technology
Founded in 2000, NL Technology of North Andover, Massachusetts is a leading provider of tapeless acquisition and file based workflow solutions for the professional broadcast, production and professional sports industries. NLT's products include "direct to disk" digital recorders as well as powerful software solutions providing: intelligent ingest of digital camera media, transcoding of media at ingest time, and near-line archival confidence for Interplay systems. For more information about NLTor any of NLT's products, please visit www.nltek.com.
Avid Interplay Production
With more than 1,400 sites deployed worldwide, Avid" Interplay" Production provides asset management that expands workgroup capabilities by coordinating and moving projects in parallel, and enabling producers, editors, assistants and reviewers to find, edit, review and annotate media from anywhere.
XenData has partnered with axle Video and NL Technology to deliver an Open Standard Archive for Interplay Production. It integrates seamlessly into the Avid environment and yet it provides independent access to your valuable assets.
Open Standard Archive
The Open Standard Archive provides desktop-based,
drag-and-drop archiving and retrieval of media assets such as clips and sequences. The Interplay database tracks media files stored in the XenData LTO library, so team members can look for both archived and online media using a single interface such as Interplay Access. Users simply drag and drop clips to the restore folder and NLT's Nearchive server moves the media assets to the ISIS SAN where they appear online automatically. The archive connects via Interplay Web Services to seamlessly move video content to near-line LTO cartridges, while keeping metadata online in the Avid Interplay Production database. Content may be searched using standard Avid tools such as Interplay Access. Users are also able to save their assets in their native Avid formats and can easily move them back to Avid
ISIS" 5000 or 7000 on-line storage for editing or play out.
In addition, the solution indexes content and supports searching independently of the Avid Interplay Production database. All files written to the archive are cataloged by an extended configuration of axle Video's browser-based asset manager. This configuration makes the entire contents of the archive searchable from any
PC, Mac or iPad connected via WiFi, allowing archived files that originated in Interplay Production to be searched and restored by users not connected to the production workgroup.
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Interfacing the LTO Archive to Interplay
Avid Interplay Production users often find that jobs must be put on hold for various reasons. Alternatively, there might be a project that is completed but for which you want to keep the assets in case they are needed in the future. Using the integrated migration technology from NL Technology, the solution allows the asset to remain in the Interplay database after the media is copied to cost effective LTO storage. This allows valuable space on the Avid shared storage to be freed up. When a project needs to be restored, the media is quickly copied back to Avid shared storage and the clips all re-Iink within Avid's Media Composer and Symphony editors, as well as within Interplay tools such as Interplay Assist.
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. ··· -·-The LTO archive's contents are displayed in Interplay Access as 'NLT Nearchive' folders. To store Interplay clips or whole folder trees, drag and drop clips from Interplay Access onto the Nearchive store file cabinet or copy and paste those clips directly to the Interplay watch folder. Using either method, it is easy to find the clips by searching using Interplay Access or the
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- sIn addition to using Interplay Access, a simple utility is provided which allows a whole user folder tree to be easily archived and restored.
axle MAM
The Open Standard Archive includes a special version of axle Video's radically simple MAM, which provides users the ability to search the full archive and identify relevant clips for their needs. The axle MAM is accessible from any Web browser, and does not require any client software (Avid or otherwise) to perform its functions. The MAM even supports access from iPads, in addition to most standard HTML5 compliant web browsers on Windows PCs and Macs. The configuration included with the open standard archive is a 1U rackmount appliance.
axle supports both a simple search, where users can type in a keyword which will be searched across all metadata fields, as well as multivariable advanced searches, where specific values can be matched within defined metadata fields (which were inherited from Interplay). Searches can also be saved, for shared single-click access of updated results at any time.
In addition to search functions, axle allows browsing of all assets in the archive via its built-in H.264 streaming player capabilities. When each master clip is saved to the Open Standard Archive, a streamable H.264 proxy file is also placed into a reserved folder structure in axle, and associated with the master clip and its metadata. Users who are browsing assets can play back any clip, as well as scrub within the clip, advance frame by frame (the player is frame-accurate) and share comments on the clip with their colleagues.
Finally, the Open Standard Archive provides a method to restore archived assets to Interplay from within the axle web browser interface. By specifying a clip to be restored, users can trigger the movement of the high-resolution media from the integrated XenData tiered storage system back to Avid's ISIS storage, where it will then be shown as online media within Interplay.
It runs XenData6 Server archive management software and the NL Technology Nearchive interface and migration software on a Windows Server 2008 R2 operating system.
SX-520 Archive Server
axle MAM Appliance
Clips are pulled from Avid shared storage via a 1 GigE or 10 GigE network during archive operations and pushed back during restores. The SX-520 Server includes RAID (or manages external RAID) which is used as a cache to enhance archive and restore performance and also to retain archive metadata online.
The archive delivers the following functionality:
• Independent file-folder access for Windows and Mac client computers
• Option to use either TAR or LTFS format on LTO cartridges
• Automatic LTO cartridge replication, optionally creating two or more LTO cartridge copies for data protection purposes
• Optimized file restores, processing a queue of restores in an order that minimizes unnecessary tape movement
The Open Standard Archive connects to a wide range of robotic LTO libraries,
including models from:
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Dell•
HP
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IBM•
Oracle•
Overland Storage•
Qualstar• Quantum
• Spectra Logic
