BBC Cymru Wales Customer of Object Matrix

Object Matrix‘s MatrixStore has been used in BBC Cymru Wales
to ensure content is available for re-use.

With BBC
Cymru Wales currently being the largest BBC production centre in the UK,
outside of London, and with more projects moving into the region the demands
placed upon the post-production team in Cardiff have been steadily growing.
Their production infrastructure includes Avid ISIS and Unity systems with over
50 editing clients.

When new
projects came into the department capacity was required on the existing Avid
ISIS storage platform allowing the editors un-fettered access to the HD media
files. In order to provide that storage space content from other projects would
be moved off onto other platforms including offline media. The situation was
far from ideal as the production teams required instant access to that content
which created a real data management and workflow headache.

One project
in particular that that needed to be protected and made available online for
versioning and re-purposing was the Human Planet series broadcast in
early 2011. More recently the department also had a requirement to keep key
clips from previous years Rugby footage to be available online for re-use using
Interplay to find and retrieve the clips on demand.

The issues they faced included:

• All the
  media files needed to be available on-line in order to re-version the content
  for different markets.
• There was little or no space on the Avid ISIS to accommodate the 30 TB
  of full resolution HD content.
• Adding more ISIS chassis was not viable commercially nor relevant to the workflow.
• The storage platform needed to automate the protection of the content and
  guarantee its availability.
• The solution needed to be compatible with AVID editing clients.
• Moving content to and from tape was laborious and error prone so LTO was ruled
  out.
• The storage would be required for other departments within post-production, each
  requiring distinct storage silos.
• Some of the other departments rely on the Avid Interplay production asset
  manager.

After
considering many different options ranging from adding more ISIS chassis to a
big bucket of raw disk the MatrixStore from Object Matrix was selected. MatrixStore acts as a resilient nearline repository,
complementing the ISIS shared storage and providing guaranteed access to clips
as and when required.

Out of the box MatrixStore provides:

• Centralised vaults providing data protection and access to all
  assets.
• A scalable solution that requires little or no management.
• Capability to add and search on metadata.
• Ability to keep legacy content available online and browsable from Avid client
  machines.
• High availability of data and automatic failover in the case of a hardware
  failure.
• Ability to add in future storage technologies as and when they become available.
• Security against accidental or malicious deletion.

Object
Matrix also provided ‘InterConnect’, an archive application that enables
content to be moved to and from the ISIS storage whilst keeping the Interplay
database in sync.

Nick Pearce,
co-founder of Object Matrix stated: "Helping
broadcasters and post-production companies to protect content long term whilst
providing guaranteed access to that content for re-purposing is what
MatrixStore was made for. The integration with AVID Media Composer and
Interplay just makes it easier for editors or administrators to get their hands
on the data when they need it without leaving the environment they are most
comfortable with."