CASE STUDY
ColorTime
ColorTime leverages Spectra Digital Archive to help store and deliver impressive content
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Spectra StorCycle
Overview
Based in North Hollywood, California, ColorTime is a post-production studio offering creative services and digital media services specializing in all aspects of digital media content creation, management and distribution for television. ColorTime’s talent has many years of industry experience and they have at their disposal the greatest technological solutions.
Spectra Digital Archive was exactly what we needed to scan and move files to free up space on our storage area networks (SAN), enabling us to reduce spending on additional SAN clusters. Partnering with Spectra has been a pleasant, cooperative relationship from sales to implementation.
— Bill Womack, Chief Technology Officer, ColorTime
The Challenge
ColorTime handles large amounts of data on a regular basis for media projects in television. In addition to ingesting raw camera footage to which they perform color correcting and editorial services, ColorTime also scans original film for storage as high-resolution digital intermediate files. Film scanning means that they process millions and millions of single, small 5K files as part of their media workflow. Content from both of these sources was growing quickly, overrunning their storage area network (SAN). ColorTime needed a way to solve the resulting bottleneck on their Primary Tier of storage, and went looking for a solution that would give them the ability to migrate digital assets off their primary storage.
The Solution
ColorTime chose a Spectra Digital Archive. ColorTime deployed a Spectra® BlackPearl® Platform, Spectra® Stack Tape Library and a permanent license of Spectra’s StorCycle® enterprise software for digital preservation, Linux edition. StorCycle identifies and migrates inactive data and completed projects from their SAN to multiple storage targets in a Perpetual Tier of storage via BlackPearl. StorCycle’s ability to re-use predefined migration jobs allowed ColorTime to automate cleanup of production storage on an ongoing basis. In addition, the software provides seamless, familiar access and recovery of single files and entire projects, which enables ColorTime to easily search and restore their media assets. The Spectra Digital Archive solution also allowed ColorTime to repurpose an existing NAS pool in their storage workflow, protecting their previous storage investment.
Environment Snapshot
- Spectra StorCycle Enterprise Software for Digital Preservation
- Spectra BlackPearl Hybrid Storage Platform
- Spectra Stack Tape Library
- LTO-8 Half-Height tape drives
- BlueScale® Software with standard encryption
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