Creating online sharable source material library – Need recommendations

[Duane Peters]

I work for a mid-size national voluntary health organization. For the past twenty years, I was the only person engaged in shooting video and recording audio as well as acquiring or creating other assets that were used to produce educational, promotional, and fundraising videos, public service announcements, commercials, and online video content. We have probably about 30 TB of video and audio files that presently are stored on several G-Technology drives. These files consist of interviews with researchers, patients, industry leaders and organization staff members, as well as clips from special events, education programs, fundraising events, and advocacy activities that are used to produce our content. Since I was the only person who used this source material, storing it on these hard drives was fine. However, I am shortly going to retire (after 28 years with the organization) and my responsibilities will be managed going forward by a combination of staff, volunteers, and outside independent contractors, all of whom might need to review, access, and download to use some of the clips and resources (such as logos, still images, graphics, etc.). We are attempting to determine what is the best way to make this stored content accessible and sharable to people scattered throughout the US (and even the world). We don’t need to ‘collaborate’ on editing in the cloud, just be able to access an online library of the clips and files to see what might be useful to produce a video or audio production and then be able to download these files to their computer for editing. We are not experienced in online storage platforms and are looking for some input from experts in the field who might be able to help guide us toward online services that might fill this need. Not all of the 30 TB of the source material will go to the cloud as perhaps a third to half is probably outdated or was developed for a specific use that is no longer applicable today. So perhaps we are talking about 15-20 TB of content files. I would appreciate some recommendations from you experts out there who have experience in using cloud storage of video content that can be downloaded for use. Thank you for your kind input and response.

[Chris Wright]

You could check out Amazon AWS, probably the cheapest cloud option, as you pay for the usage. There’s different availability zones during outages(unless its a DNS outage) which can be much worse. Then you can simply mount the AWS points as shared folders in linux/windows. Make sure you have multiple admin backups because if you lose all the admin hash passwords, not even amazon can help you.

You can also simply share a local machine if you have fiber, but if your ISP goes down, everything goes down.

[Neil Sadwelkar]

When you say, about 30TB of video, I’m assuming you mean raw shooting files and audio recorded while shooting. There may also be some final edited content in this 30TB?

Anyway, about the shooting files themselves, it may not be desirable to actually make these available online in their raw form. The files will likely be too large to download and play. And they may be in a format that may not even play online.

So, it might make sense to first transcode them into a web-friendly proxy format. That may even reduce the 30Tb to a smaller number.

These proxies could have burn-ins with some metadata. Speaking of which, if there is some metadata that would be useful to a viewer, then that can be inserted into the file and made available in a burn-in in the video itself. And maybe even added to the file/folder name.

After that, you could host these in a video platform like Vimeo, or frame io or some such. Or, if you’d like it to be local and if your organisation can manage the IT resources needed, you could host it yourselves using something like Kollaborate Server.

And then, backup. I’m guessing these drives are of various ages, so it may make sense to make another backup to newer drives, and possibly LTO tape if your budget allows.

[Duane Peters]

Thanx for the input. yes, most of the files are raw files directly from the camera, along with some assembled strings of b-roll from event that are suitable for use in subsequent productions. I appreciate your advice, which makes sense and will certain take that into account moving forward. Warmest regards, Duane