WHITE PAPER QUANTUM & ADOBE: Preserving Storage Infrastructure While Adopting Adobe Premiere Pro CS6
CONTENTS State of the Industry...................................................................3 Adobe Premiere Pro: The New Choice for Professional Editors..............................4 Quantum StorNext: Preserving SAN Investments and Expanding Flexibility....................6 Migration in 4 Easy Steps...............................................................7 Adobe Premiere Pro + Quantum StorNext: The Professional s Choice........................7 About Adobe Premiere Pro CS6.........................................................7 2 WHITE PAPER Quantum & Adobe
The world of professional video editing continues to change technologically and philosophically. Technologically, facilities continue to adapt their workflows to accommodate endless camera formats, increasingly larger content resolutions, and more sophisticated infrastructure. Philosophically, facilities struggle to determine the optimal pipeline to get jobs done. Do they risk the business on radical all-in-one redesigns or modernize incrementally via best-of-breed interoperable point products? While obviously it takes time to shift any critical part of a company s business, some facilities are slowly introducing new production-proven editing tools instead of taking a radical risk. They are building expertise in new editing software while hanging onto the older, familiar software until they feel confident in a complete switch. For a great number of those facilities, that new tool of choice is Adobe Premiere Pro. Adobe After Effects and Adobe Photoshop, already industry-standard applications, are bundled together with Adobe Premiere Pro in the Adobe Creative Suite CS6 Production Premium. Not a trivial task, the retooling of editing suites can t be done in isolation. Even for small studios, it often requires a change to infrastructure. In a modern post facility, that infrastructure is likely based on a shared Storage Area Network (SAN) environment. Typically, if you are a Mac OS X facility, that SAN infrastructure is Xsan from Apple. Changing infrastructure from Xsan or any SAN environment is usually a very disruptive and costly activity, but it doesn t have to be that way. Quantum, a company with a wealth of experience in data sharing and archiving, can preserve your investment in Xsan hardware as well as your stored data regardless of your editing tool of choice. The ability to leverage an existing Xsan infrastructure coupled with an easy-to-learn, professional editing toolset are compelling reasons why many are basing their entire post-production pipeline on Adobe Creative Suite CS6 Production Premium and Quantum StorNext shared storage. STATE OF THE INDUSTRY Infrastructure technologies that enable collaboration like Storage Area Networks have become standard for fast-paced media and entertainment companies. They not only enable enhanced workflows and content sharing amongst multiple artists, but they maximize the investment a company makes in infrastructure by centralizing pools of storage. Apple Xsan has long been a favorite platform because of the ease of integration into an ecosystem of all Apple professional products. But as that ecosystem becomes more diverse in terms of solution providers, the need for a more flexible infrastructure becomes obvious. At the same time, the concern of changing such a critical component of a facility remains worrisome. Any migration of data from one file system to another takes time and can introduce the possibility of errors. For media and entertainment professionals with hundreds of terabytes of critical data, the migration risk is multiplied. Add in the cost of application compatibility testing and the investment in new storage and you can see that SAN migration could be an overwhelmingly complicated project. Since the release of Xsan, Apple and Quantum have maintained complete interoperability between Xsan and Quantum s StorNext SAN product. Both Adobe Premiere Pro and Final Cut Pro clients can simultaneously take full advantage of the high performance of StorNext from ingest to output. Best of all, transitioning from older Xsan configurations to StorNext can be done in a matter of hours while preserving the existing content, minimizing any disruption to artists on the SAN. Quantum & Adobe WHITE PAPER 3
A similar painless transition can be made when introducing Adobe Premiere Pro into a legacy Final Cut Pro 7 facility. In the past and even today, moving media and sequences between most tools made by different companies requires format conversion, specialized plug-ins, and a lot of manual work to recreate elements that don t survive the transfer process. In a business where there are so many other obstacles to overcome during the actual creative process, struggling to get the tools to work the way you need them to cannot be tolerated. Interoperability between Adobe Premiere Pro and Final Cut Pro starts with the ability to share files without conversion or rendering; you can also preserve timelines with commonly used effects and transitions, thereby saving valuable production time. With Adobe Premiere Pro, traditional editing paradigms are augmented with real-time playback, accelerated rendering, and faster encoding, making the transition a natural and familiar process for editors. ADOBE PREMIERE PRO: THE NEW CHOICE FOR PROFESSIONAL EDITORS The Adobe Premiere Pro workspace is simple to understand and to customize, allowing users to save workspace layouts appropriate to the job in hand. If you re familiar with other Adobe products such as After Effects or Photoshop, your learning curve with Adobe Premiere Pro will be made even easier because Adobe Creative Suite applications share common commands, panels, and keyboard shortcuts. Refined editorial features include advanced trimming tools directly in the timeline via keyboard entry or dynamically using JKL shortcuts to fine-tune a cut anyway you like. Unique effects like Warp Stabilizer inherited from After Effects, and adjustment layers like those in Adobe Photoshop, help to set Adobe Premiere Pro apart. All of these features exist within a new streamlined, intuitive interface that makes working with video, sound and graphics easier than ever. Even at its core foundation Adobe Premiere Pro accelerates the post-production pipeline in a number of critical and tangible ways. First, virtually any video format can be imported without transcoding, and edited natively. Adobe Premiere Pro links to industry-standard file-based media, such as P2 cards, XDCAM, RED, and ARRIRAW. It even works directly with Apple ProRes and MOV files captured by DSLR cameras, with full metadata no transcoding or rewrapping required. Secondly, tight integration with the other production components of CS6 Production Premium creates one of the most efficient workflows in the industry. Using Dynamic Link in Adobe Premiere Pro, you can send sequences to Encore CS6 to create Blu-ray Discs, or use sequences from Adobe Premiere Pro as layers in After Effects compositions without rendering. You can also send After Effects compositions back to an Adobe Premiere Pro project, where the comps look and act just like any other clip. When you make changes in After Effects, they re automatically reflected in the Adobe Premiere Pro sequence. 4 WHITE PAPER Quantum & Adobe
Screenshot of an Adobe Content Panel integrating Quantum s Partial File Retrieval product with Adobe Premiere Pro, allowing timecode-based segments of files to be pulled back from the archive directly into the editing system. This panel was developed by Media Manor Ltd. Premiere Pro s Mercury Playback Engine can speed up the video editing process. The Mercury Playback Engine includes performance enhancements that can take advantage of advancing technology. Premiere Pro is a 64-bit application, so it can access large pools of memory. It also is an efficient multithreaded application designed for today s multi-core Macs and PCs. But the most important aspect of the Mercury Playback Engine is its hybrid software/hardware rendering capabilities. Using the latest Graphic Processing Unit (GPU) technologies from NVIDIA and ATI/ AMD, the Mercury Playback Engine becomes a real-time/accelerated image-processing engine for previews and final output. Without a qualified GPU, the Mercury Playback Engine can switch to use the CPU at a Maximum Render Quality setting and still process effects with its high-precision 32-bit-per-pixel CPU/software engine. Using a fully 32-bit-per-pixel processing pipeline means results match between CPU rendering and GPU rendering and a facility doesn t have to worry about moving from a laptop editing station to a desktop editing station. Quantum & Adobe WHITE PAPER 5
Quantum enhances the Mac OS ecosystem by delivering a world-class SAN solution with all its benefits including: Tiered Data Archive for increased performance and functionality Distributed LAN Clients on Windows and Linux to provide high-performance client access over Ethernet to the shared SAN infrastructure GroupLogic LAN client for higher performance and better interoperability than CFS or NFS for Mac clients connecting over Ethernet A disk-agnostic infrastructure, increasing flexibility, scalability and investment protection Platform independence, so you can pick the best applications on any platform and still maintain performance scalability and application interoperability QUANTUM STORNEXT: PRESERVING SAN INVESTMENTS AND EXPANDING FLEXIBILITY Many professionals who are looking to adopt Adobe Premiere Pro may also be needing to replace aging SAN and storage infrastructure. This may be directly due to Apple discontinuing its Xserve product line, or indirectly in order to address their concerns that Apple s product offerings going forward may not be appropriate for their needs. To that end, Quantum can provide the lowest-risk method of transitioning from a pure Xsan environment. Quantum s StorNext product maintains file- and storage device-level interoperability with Xsan while offering a migration path to virtually unlimited future growth, and an array of additional features valued by professional users. Alternative solutions to an Xsan-to-StorNext migration aimed at content creation professionals can come from a few select vendors. On one side you can choose proprietary storage solutions that promise compatibility and reliability between the editing or playout systems from these vendors. The real cost of these solutions is that they confine you to a single vendor s offerings for editing and storage which goes against today s open-standards thinking and limits your choices. The other alternatives are the lower-cost, higher-risk, file-locking solutions where you are left to do all the hard work yourself including performance and compatibility testing. Both paths require time, effort and risk that accompany any new file system migration and the transfer of critical data. Quantum and Apple work closely to test compatibility between Xsan and StorNext, and both publish matrices highlighting this compatibility 1. This reduces the risk of unknown incompatibilities being introduced in future versions of the products, and gives you more security in your storage infrastructure. During the migration to StorNext, studios will not lose precious time copying files or reformatting storage devices. Virtually all existing clients and applications will work with no modification from existing volume mountpoints. The transition is as simple as installing a StorNext Metadata Controller Appliance in place of the Xsan metadata servers. After the migration, functional parity with your Xsan installation is not just maintained but it is increased. Pools of storage can be consolidated across different OS platforms, allowing high-speed content sharing amongst Adobe Premiere Pro on Mac, audio post on Windows, and a Linux-based visual effects application, without having to pass files over slow network connections. The choice to use rack-mount-designed, resilient Linux or Windows X86 servers as Metadata Controllers in place of imacs or Mac Minis with single power supplies and Thunderbolt to FC converters will surely garner more trust from IT-centric administrators. And, as infrastructure for production and traditional IT departments continue to merge, those same administrators are not spending time managing multiple, different environments. As the company grows and data levels increase, StorNext can use Storage Manager to create multi-tier archives and automatically manage the movement of data between tiers. File location is virtualized, so anyone in your facility is able to access relevant content regardless of its location. The facility is able to easily and economically retain, safeguard, and re-use key digital assets. 6 WHITE PAPER Quantum & Adobe
MIGRATION IN 4 EASY STEPS The first step in the migration is to use a StorNext Metadata Controller or MDC. By simply swapping the Apple Xsan MDC with a StorNext Linux MDC, you ve created a StorNext environment with Xsan clients. Quantum has released a family of Metadata Controller appliances (M-Series) to take some of the guesswork out of configuration. But if you wish to roll your own, the list of supported server platforms is available on the Documentation tab under the Compatibility section of the following Quantum web site: http://www.quantum.com/serviceandsupport/ SoftwareandDocumentationDownloads/SNMS/Index.aspx Once your hardware is in place, the quick steps to migrate from an Xsan MDC to a StorNext MDC are outlined below: 1. Unmount current Xsan clients and volume. 2. Move the current Xsan configuration information to the StorNext MDC. 3. Confirm the Config file transferred properly & set other configuration items 4. Point Mac clients to StorNext MDC and cleanup. Since the metadata files are interoperable, this entire migration can take place in a matter of an hour or less, depending on the number of Xsan clients. After the migration is complete you can enable additional functionality not available in a pure Apple Xsan environment. Some additional StorNext products and features include LAN-based client access, scale-out storage virtualization, online tiering and archiving, timecodebased partial file retrieval, as well as image sequence optimization for 3D animators and visual effects. Every other SAN storage option to StorNext requires re-architecting infrastructure, throwing away Xsan, and possibly struggling through incompatibilities when mixed platforms are introduced. The initial monetary savings are quickly eroded by the time spent setting it up and getting it all to work. ABOUT ADOBE PREMIERE PRO CS6 Edit professional productions with greater speed and precision in Adobe Premiere Pro CS6, the industry-leading cross-platform video editing software. Top Features: Sleek, highly intuitive customizable interface Dynamic timeline trimming and adjustment layers, for a more fluid editing workflow Warp Stablilizer effect for stabilizing uneven camera moves Expanded multi-cam editing Blazing performance and rock-solid stability with the enhanced 64-bit Mercury Playback Engine Open workflows with other Adobe Creative Suite Production Premium components, Final Cut Pro, and Avid software Efficient multi-screen delivery with enhanced Adobe Media Encoder ADOBE PREMIERE PRO + QUANTUM STORNEXT: THE PROFESSIONAL S CHOICE With over 500 installations in broadcast and post-production environments, StorNext is designed for sharing content in a media and entertainment creation workflow, connecting video editors, sound design suites, visual effects applications, and color grading systems all on the same SAN. The power of Adobe Premiere Pro can help you be more creative and meet deadlines sooner. Premiere Pro s features for professional video editors give you more flexibility. Building on both Adobe s and Quantum s historical commitment to the Mac OS ecosystem, Adobe Premiere Pro with StorNext is a workflow designed with powerful features, dramatic performance, and tremendous compatibility with existing Apple Xsan environments. To learn more about switching to Adobe Premiere Pro, go to http://www.adobe.com/ products/premiere/switch.html. 1 For Xsan-to-StorNext compatibility matrices, visit the Compatibility section of the following Quantum website: http://www.quantum.com/ ServiceandSupport/SoftwareandDocumentationDownloads/SNMS/Index.aspx. It can also be accessed at the following Apple Support web site: http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1517. Quantum & Adobe WHITE PAPER 7
ABOUT QUANTUM Quantum is a proven global expert in Data Protection and Big Data management, providing specialized storage solutions for physical, virtual and cloud environments. From small businesses to major enterprises, more than 50,000 customers trust Quantum to help maximize the value of their data by protecting and preserving it over its entire lifecycle. With Quantum, customers can Be Certain they re able to adapt in a changing world keeping more data longer, bridging from today to tomorrow, and reducing costs. See how at www.quantum.com/becertain. www.quantum.com 888-738-1533 www.quantum.com 2012 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. WP00182A-v01 Oct 2012 Quantum & Adobe WHITE PAPER 8