Learn how to Build Your Rock-Solid Enterprise Video Solution Pt 1. by Vidispine October 20, 2015 Howto
Do you want to build a video application, and want to make sure it is enterprise grade? From storage to high availability, our video fanatics will help you find your way around common pitfalls and mistakes in a multi part blog post. This is the first post where we go through storage, metadata and video formats.
Video all of a sudden everybody is using it, for everything
marketing
internal instruction videos
staff memos
local news
user generated content
video CV:s
people talking about Poodles shaved to look like Camels! Don't believe us?
and the list just gets longer
Video is everywhere, and there are numbers to prove it. Cisco predicts video will be 80% of all IP traffic in 2019. People now spend more time with video on the internet than social networks, with over 40% of the viewing happening on mobile. We all know it's big, and that it will get bigger. Sooner or later you will end up building a video application for your enterprise.
So where to start? And what are the pitfalls? Say you're a seasoned developer but really have no clue where to start when it comes to building rock-solid video applications. To make sure you get safely on your way I have talked to our video fanatics Erik and Nils here at Vidispine, to get some pro tips and tricks for you. In this first part we'll talk about the basic stuff you will run into when you get started building video applications, covering storage, video formats and metadata. In the second part we will talk about content structure, workflows and scalability.
Storage (do you have any idea how much space video takes) Video take a lot of space, and throughout the handling of video from raw footage to a finished video ready for viewing you will have created and stored several versions, whole or in pieces. You will have files located all over your file systems, and you need to decide how to handle that. You can go the route of centralizing all files, or you could go the other route, leaving content where they are but have a strategy to handle the de-centralization.
Deciding on storage is first a matter of how you will use your video files that are stored. Are you doing lots of editing? Are you streaming content? Are you building a huge library of content you will use rarely? The answer is often multiple of these choices and that's why many organisations end up with tiered storage.
Editing, especially on original footage of high quality video, require fast I/O to disk and very often even special attention to your bandwidth to the disk. If you are only doing small scale editing and no team sharing, don't worry about this, your laptop will do fine. Instead pay attention to the second tier, fast access repository.
In the fast access repository you will find content you work with on a weekly/monthly basis. This is likely to be on your SAN for example. Here you run the risk of overspending for no particular reason. Sales guys pushing expensive editing storage when all you really need is to quickly find your clips so you can give it to someone who will make the edit. It may make sense to pay attention so that you don't end up with a proprietary format or file system. Go standard as much as you can.
For organisations with a _lot_ of content, and to be clear, we are talking about hundreds of terabytes, there is a third tier call near-line archive. Often it is object based storage, often smart solutions to quickly fetch files from cheaper medium. What it does is giving some middle ground between accessibility and cost efficient deep archive . Again, pay attention to standards! Go simple.
Last tier is deep archive. This is where you place content you may not use in many years. It is sometimes called the why-not-archive . Some solutions out there are so cheap it is more costly to go through the purging process rather than just dump it in the archive. We would recommend looking at cloud options, e.g., Amazon Glacier or Amazon S3. Regardless of solution it is important you get some basic structure in place to later find your content. We suggest you keep it simple and manage a lowres version, a thumb nail and some basic metadata. This you can store and manage on whatever storage since it doesn't take up much space.
Going wrong with storage So, what happens if you go wrong with storage? The biggest risk is spending too much money. Once you spent your money it's not coming back! The second biggest risk is latency. For this there is a fix, spend some more and upgrade your tiers until you are happy. Make sure you have a system in place where it is easy to move clips between the tiers though and maybe even store them in multiple tiers seamlessly. The third biggest risk is that you don't find your stuff. The fix is a basic content management system. Make sure you depend as little as possible on human processes. Auto-anything is the future as the volumes tend to grow much faster than you can keep up with.
Multi-device input and output (yes, they will use different devices) Video come in all kinds of formats and containers, from your mobile phone to professional equipment. Depending on your application you might have to handle multiple formats from many different devices, and from audience platforms like web and social media. The same problem arises on the output side, where you want to make sure that different users get what they need, ranging from editable formats to the format you use to publish on your web-site. In short, it's a mess and will not get easier any time soon!
Codecs and containers When we talk about video format we are actually talking about two different things, the container and the codec. The container and codecs are often mixed up, for good reasons, as they sometimes have the
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Learn how to Build Your Rock-Solid Enterprise Video Solution Pt 1. by Vidispine October 20, 2015 Howto 
