Streamline Post-Production with a Single Data Ingestion Tool

Congratulations! Your growing post-production company has landed another big customer. That means your team is hard at work with editing, visual effects, sound, color, backup and archiving, and other post-production tasks.

Of course, to meet your deadline and deliver quality work, you need to be extra careful when transferring files from step to step in your workflow. It doesn’t help that your team also manages multiple sources, multiple users who need access to diverse storage services, types, and destinations. Then there are the tedious IT complexities of scalability, security, and seemingly endless configuration.

Wouldn’t it be nice if you could consolidate all these data ingestion steps into a single, easy-to-use tool? It would go a long way to streamlining your post-production workflow.

After reading this article, you’ll know how to identify parts of your post-production workflow that you can simplify with MASV’s Centralized Ingest.

• What’s Centralized Ingest?
• The Centralized Ingest Toolkit
• Centralized Ingest for a Single Production
• Centralized Ingest for Many Productions
• Centralized Ingest for Multiple Workflows
• Centralized Ingest for Video Understanding
• Other MASV Advantages
• Conclusion: Centralized Ingest Keeps Post-Production Rolling

What’s Centralized Ingest?

Data ingestion is what connects each of the stages in your post-production workflow. Even a modest production handles data ingestion for thousands of files.

The conventional way to manage data integration involves a complicated set of environments, each with their own data ingestion tools, that often overload admins, slow down production, are difficult to maintain and scale, and can be a security risk.

That’s why MASV came up with Centralized Ingest. MASV is a single data ingestion tool for your post-production workflow. Centralized Ingest lets you and your customer upload, download, send from, and save to the cloud or your own storage, and administer multiple sources and destinations from one place.

Instead of dealing with the logistical nightmare of managing multiple shared storage destinations and configurations, your team can use a single platform, MASV, to make sure that files move quickly, reliably, and securely. Your customers and vendors can upload and download without fussing with software license keys, inconsistent services, and authenticating with multiple remote storage locations.

Centralized Ingest means being flexible. Your team can keep using your existing storage types and destinations, media asset management (MAM) systems, and other platforms. And because data ingestion connects all these platforms, it’s easier for your team to modify, extend, and improve your workflow with just a few clicks.

The Centralized Ingest Toolkit

The features in MASV that power the Centralized Ingest workflow are Portals, integrations, and Watch Folders. MASV gives your team an easy, consistent way to ingest files without having to learn yet another platform’s data ingestion idiosyncrasies for access and security. And as a bonus, you need little or no IT expertise.

1. MASV Portals for Ingestion on Location

A MASV Portal is the easiest, simplest way to upload large files from multiple data sources securely, quickly, and reliably. A Portal accepts files from a range of storage types, including a camera’s own storage, on-premise storage servers, and cloud storage. It can also send files to your, or your customer’s, on-premises storage or cloud storage.

Each Portal is fully brandable and customizable with file upload forms for metadata collection and upload requirements. You can create one in seconds for a specific project, location, or contributor.

Contributors only need a web browser to drag and drop files into a Portal. There are no plugins to install, and no sign ups are required for someone to send you files. For even better performance and reliability when a web browser won’t do, there’s the MASV Desktop App.

2. MASV Integrations for Ingestion Between Platforms

After your contributors have uploaded footage to a Portal, you have several options to get files into the next steps of your workflow. If it’s in storage somewhere, MASV can probably transfer it somewhere else:

• Your own storage: Give your users, local or remote, secure access to your own storage for fast, easy ingestion. MASV works with everything from your laptop’s disk storage to your office NAS, on-premises servers, and cloud block storage like Amazon EBS..
• Cloud storage, hot and cold: Connect MASV to the cloud storage that matches your performance and budget requirements. MASV supports most Amazon S3 storage classes, including Glacier, Tiered, and Standard. MASV also integrates with Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, and other hyperscaler storage providers.
• Media asset management and collaboration: MASV integrates with Frame.io, iconik, and a growing list of others.

3. Watch Folders and Even More Performance

The MASV Desktop App adds automation features to send and receive files automatically, which saves your team time and error-prone manual steps.

It’s a native app that runs on macOS, Windows, and Linux. It also has performance and reliability capabilities that a web browser doesn’t like channel bonding with Multiconnect and support for 10 Gbps network connections.

Centralized Ingest for a Single Production

Your customer’s crew is on location and capturing video and sound. This is the start of your post-production workflow where your team ingests footage for tasks like dailies, backup, and ingesting into the later stages of the post-production workflow.

Each of these tasks uses a different platform and different storage types. Your team manually collects and organizes footage and its metadata, then starts ingestion to each platform and makes sure it finishes.

Your digital imaging technician (DIT) starts your post-production workflow like this:

Your DIT goes through these steps:

1. Collect and organize: DIT collects and organizes footage from on-location cameras.
2. Cold storage: DIT uploads to cold storage for backup and archive.
3. Hot storage: DIT uploads to hot storage for dailies.
4. Other platforms and storage: DIT uploads to the other platforms and storage services for the next stages of the workflow.

This is only the start of the workflow and your DIT is already juggling data ingestion among several platforms.

Even at the start of your workflow, MASV Centralized Ingest can help. Your DIT can use MASV to consolidate these steps with a MASV Portal and MASV integrations:

Let’s look at the DIT’s steps now:

1. Collect and organize: As before, the DIT collects and organizes footage.
2. Upload to Portal: DIT drags and drops footage once to a single MASV Portal.

MASV does the rest: It uploads to the cloud storage and platforms to keep the workflow going.

Centralized Ingest for Many Productions

Congratulations! MASV freed up enough time for your post-production company take on new customers.

With multiple productions, the challenge is to efficiently collect footage from each one to get them into your workflow. For a single production, your team used to deal with several destinations for data ingestion just to start post-production. Handling several productions has traditionally meant multiplying that amount of work.

Centralized Ingest, however, lets you consolidate all this work into a single place:

1. Upload to a production Portal: The DIT at each production uploads to their own Portal, which uploads to a central storage server.
2. Collect and organize: A coordinator organizes footage from all productions, then uploads to a Portal for your workflow.
3. MASV does the rest: MASV uploads for archive, backup, daily, and other post-production tasks.

MASV has administration, security, and billing features too:

• To help the coordinator, you can configure each production’s Portal to generate metadata and a tag for each upload that’s unique to the production.
• To prevent other productions, or anyone else, from accidentally (or intentionally) uploading to the wrong Portal, you can add access controls, including passwords.
• To help your accounts payable team, MASV can generate billing reports and other analytics for each production.

Centralized Ingest for Multiple Workflows

Congratulations! You’ve grown so much that you’ve now acquired another post-production company. But with this success comes the challenges of working within both their workflow and yours. To avoid delaying current productions, you decide to keep using both.

Adding another workflow to Centralized Ingest is straightforward: Your admin integrates MASV with the new workflow’s storage servers and other platforms only once. After that, your coordinator can keep using MASV (without even knowing details about the new workflow).

You can later merge workflows to cut costs or speed up post-production. MASV Centralized Ingest provides a single platform to connect these diverse storage systems and platforms with easy, fast, reliable, secure file transfer.

Centralized Ingest for Video Understanding

Your success continues! Your customers are now asking for more sophisticated post-production tasks, like searching thousands of hours of footage with natural language, and automating classification and descriptions.

These are exactly the kinds of tasks that video understanding provides. Video understanding analyzes, interprets, and comprehends video content, extracting information in such a way that the entire context of the video is understood.

Read more: Multimodal AI and How Video Understanding Will Revolutionize Media

You can use MASV to integrate terabytes of footage into the data ingestion pipeline for your machine learning models. For example, you can use MASV to upload footage from your customer’s archives to an Amazon S3 bucket then use solutions like Twelve Labs or Amazon Kinesis. MASV integrates with Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure, so you can take advantage of their machine learning platforms too.

Other MASV Advantages

Here’s what makes MASV fast, secure, and reliable:

Fast transfers

We’re faster than the competition. We get this performance without custom hardware or complex network configuration. If you have a big network connection or multiple connections, we take advantage of it.

Secure

Your customer’s intellectual property is valuable so we protect it with industry-standard security practices. Your files are encrypted in flight and at rest when it’s in the MASV platform. We’ve designed MASV to reduce risks that our competitors have suffered. We’re certified under ISO 27001 and other standards. We’re also on the vendor roster of the Motion Picture Association’s Trusted Partner Network (Gold Status).

Reliable

We take extra steps to ensure that the files and folder structure your team sends are the same as what they receive. We don’t expose you to the risks of proprietary networking protocols or hardware. We use proven, resilient networking infrastructure. For variable network connections in remote locations, you can improve reliability (and performance) with Multiconnect, which bonds multiple internet connections for better performance and reliability.

Pricing

We keep our pricing plan as simple as possible. MASV doesn’t charge extra for users, installations, or licenses. And we’re happy to arrange special pricing for big projects. Just reach out.

MASV Centralized Ingest Keeps Post-Production Rolling

Effective data ingest is essential to post-production, it connects each step in your workflow. To make these connections, your team spends a lot of time and effort to manage the quirks and complications of many storage destinations, storage types, and other platforms.

That’s exactly why MASV has Centralized Ingest: a single data ingestion tool to manage file transfer that’s easy to use while still being secure, fast, and reliable. Your team gets a consistent, flexible set of features to easily connect workflow steps. Your customers get an easy drag-and-drop solution for sending you large files.

Sign up for MASV for free today and get 20GB free.