Prime Focus Technologies Deploys Front Porch DIVArchive

Front Porch Digital announced that Prime Focus Technologies (PFT), a visual entertainment services company, is relying on the company’s DIVArchive system to provide distributed video storage and archiving for clients’ media content located at three locations, two in Mumbai, and one in Los Angeles.

"We run a large and complex enterprise content lifecycle management service and our clients trust us to store and preserve their content for the future," said Ramki Sankaranarayanan, president and CEO, PFT. "To reliably deliver this service and immortalize content, we must take optimal advantage of best-of-breed technologies, and DIVArchive is one of those technologies."

PFT is a Prime Focus Group company. With more than 1200 employees, the firm specializes in providing creative and technical services for the film, broadcast, commercials, gaming, Internet, and media Industries. It has offices in London, Los Angeles, New York, Vancouver, Winnipeg, and various cities across India.

At PFT, DIVArchive was implemented this year and works under the direction of a hosted digital asset management platform, CLEAR, to move digitized media files from nearline to long-term archiving and storage. Content ingested into the PFT digital system, either tape or live feed, immediately comes under management by CLEAR, which tags it with appropriate metadata and creates proxy copies for browsing. The content may then be transcoded for Web streaming or post-production manipulation, and transferred to storage either on nearline tape, in a long-term tape library, or on disk – depending on when it is needed.

DIVArchive enables automation of transfer functions and allows retrieval either manually or automatically according to customized rules based on the identification of the clip. Relying on DIVArchive, PFT technicians in three locations can share, transfer, and restore content files almost instantly, regardless of where the files are physically located in the system. It is DIVArchive’s open API combined with Front Porch Digital’s outstanding customer support in India that has enabled DIVA’s seamless integration with the PFT CLEAR platform.

"Like Front Porch Digital, PFT is committed to doing the best for its clients," said Rino Petricola, Front Porch Digital’s senior vice president and director. "DIVArchive is a key component in the digital content services hub used by PFT to give clients the ability to take advantage of multiplatform opportunities for using and reusing their content."