Just a few months ago, the Hollywood Professional Association was hosting its annual Tech Retreat in Palm Springs where M&E industry leaders gathered to explore the future of media creation. A central theme to this year’s conference was the evolution of cloud-based production and the enablement of virtual production & post-production teams across geographies.

Fast-forward to today and the world is reeling from the coronavirus pandemic that has touched every aspect of society. Across industries, there has been an urgent shift to work-from-home to keep people safe and businesses running. For the motion picture and television industry, the concept of remote collaboration is no longer just a conference discussion topic but is now an absolute necessity.

With the social distancing directive, the shooting of movies and TV episodes has mostly come to a halt. However, there still is a tremendous amount of remote work from people’s homes to finish post-production on a film or series or even start new projects. There is new urgency for studios, broadcasters and other content owners to dig into their archives and repurpose existing assets to keep the programming pipeline filled. For this, the challenge is how to make a media archive readily accessible to remote employees and contractors when dealing with very large video files.

XenData, a global provider of high-capacity data storage solutions for the Media and Entertainment industry, provides the necessary tools for simplified remote access to video libraries of any size. The company’s Cloud File Gateway software creates a hybrid archive that links on-premise storage infrastructure with the cloud and allows file-based applications to write to and read from cloud object storage without modification. The solution scales to 2 billion files with unlimited cloud storage, and the gateways are further optimized for video supporting both partial file restore (ideal for fast video clip creation) and streaming from the cloud. The system supports up to a 256 TB local disk cache for frequently accessed files.

Recently, XenData announced a Multi-Site Sync service, which creates a global file system and synchronizes cloud storage across any number of locations with Cloud File Gateways. When a file is written from one gateway location to the cloud storage, it immediately appears as a stub file within the global file system on all other related gateways. This provides artists complete and up-to-date access to all the assets in the library no matter when or where they were created.

Wasabi hot cloud storage serves as the perfect complement to XenData’s Cloud File Gateway and Multi-Site Sync service. Wasabi eliminates the complexity and unnecessary costs of other cloud storage services by offering a single tier of high-performance storage that is 80% less than Amazon S3 with no ancillary charges for content retrieval, API calls or data management activity. With XenData and Wasabi, media archives can be stored cost effectively in the cloud, managed across multiple locations and seamlessly accessed from anywhere without added expense.

The Media & Entertainment industry has been transitioning to virtualized workflows and remote collaboration for some time, but that evolution has now been accelerated. Fortunately, there are solutions available like XenData and Wasabi that simplify the transition to a cloud-based work environment for media professionals while also delivering greater efficiency and cost savings.