-- One Thing Your Team Members Really Want To ChangeWe listen to our customer's, a lot! We also listen to the wider creative community from sports and news to agencies and corporate video professionals. We created WIG (Workflow Innovation Group) to listen, learn and enhance our technology roadmap.
Sometimes we feel a bit like counsellors because our prospects continually tell us how p$$$ed off they are with their current storage system. So much so, we set up a website www.thestoragecounsellors.com offering independent, unbiased views advising people to purchase the best Welsh object storage they can find.
During our many sessions on the couch, we have learned the following from those who open up to us. We have split the feedback into the various profiles or roles that make up a team working in video. Please note we have kept names and locations private as per the client/counsellor code:
-- IT Administrators
The traditional IT person in your team is miffed in general because the creatives' want different storage methods to the stuff that archives email perfectly. Well thank you very much and why is it not all in the cloud anyway!? .
This is why you added media savvy storage professionals to your operational staff. This highly sought after rare breed is really fed up due to supporting several silos of legacy storage, managing end user requests to load LTO media and getting home late. Again.
Can MatrixStore object storage help? Why yes
From consolidating islands of storage to replacing or augmenting the LTO infrastructure, we can help.
-- The Media Manager
The Media Manager needs to be:
1 part archivist
1 part taxonomy ninja
1 part miracle worker
2 parts mind reader
They regularly field requests like Hey gimme that clip from 1998 when Joe threw that pass or I want everything on Brady now! resulting in often impossible and time-consuming searches that yield no results. This is because there is no way to search the media sat on a shelf or the metadata has been entered incorrectly. Alternatively, the efforts yields petabytes of results (Tom Brady, The Brady Bunch, The Brady Bill etc etc) that will take weeks if not months to filter and retrieve from the LTO library.
Can MatrixStore object storage help? Yes!!!
By replacing or complementing your existing LTO infrastructure, all assets in the archive (full res or proxies) can be directly available to the end-users in an instant.
-- The Producers
When the creative juices are flowing, producers want content pronto to build the first draft of a story. If the media manager or IT team tell them it might take 2 weeks to get their clips back, the producer type person is highly likely to drop the project and head straight to Soho House for a vodka martini and plan the next project to be thwarted by IT.
Can MatrixStore object storage help? Yes!!.
By replacing or complementing your existing LTO infrastructure, all assets in the archive can be directly accessed by the production team which empowers and not inhibits creativity.
-- The Editors
Stuck in a window-less editing suite for 32 hours trying to meet a deadline surrounded by air gaps and auditors covering their every move? The life of an editor does not need to be made any more complex. When we sold our product into Gorilla in 2009 (then Mwnci) the editors hated it. Why? Because no-one asked them how they worked, how keyboards and shortcuts were mega important then.
We imposed when we should have integrated. We tried to introduce standalone storage GUIs to editors at a time when they were as welcome as a fox in the hen house. WRONG MOVE.
Luckily we adapted and learned. These days the feedback we get from editors is that still, in 2019, generalist vendors are trying to bend the creative workflows to fit their technologies. The more important pain point is getting instant access to content they need to get the job done. They typically get very frustrated when content is corrupt, is tagged incorrectly at ingest so they are looking at the wrong clips or it takes an age to find and retrieve from 12 different storage locations or the LTO library.
Frustration is not a good thing when trying to keep the creative juices flowing. Be it rushes/dailies, work in progress or from the backup or archive the content has to be easy to find, quick to access and the platforms providing that integrated into their workflows.
MatrixStore object storage does just that.
-- The CTO
In a super fast changing landscape the CTO faces a lot of challenges. From data security and governance, to ease of access to all content and ensuring the creative teams feel they are supported in doing the job they need to do.
Your average CTO is being asked to do a lot more for less as the pressure to improve the bottom line gets stronger by the month. In order to get their super talented teams working more efficiently to add more value into the business, the CTO needs to translate or map business requirements onto technology platforms to make decisions.
These are usually around maintaining legacy platforms and/or deciding to implement a balanced infrastructure of on-prem, cloud technology stacks in order to intersect technology and creativity in a way that encourages new ways of creating content. From the many conversations we have had and continue to have with this group, the CTO more than anything, wants staff working on tasks that add value to the business by using applications and platforms that can facilitate that best.
Object Matrix can help facilitate this requirement through the implementation of its fully integrated and automated object storage platform MatrixStore. Deployed on prem as a private cloud or as a hybrid cloud storage platform, MatrixStore manages the protection, availability and ability to find content so that the CTOs' team can get on with tasks that they enjoy
