Harmonic offers advanced storage over Ethernet in high-end post-production

With Omneon MediaGrid, post-production companies can now achieve SAN-like performance with the simplicity of NAS.

Harmonic has announced the release of the new version 3.1 of Omneon MediaGrid system software, designed to support the performance needs of high-end post-production workflows. Equipped with this software, MediaGrid storage systems can support ingest, editing, color correction, grading and manipulation of uncompressed media. This advancement extends the success of previous versions of MediaGrid in post-production workflows for use with high-bitrate compressed formats such as ProRes 444 and Avid DNxHD.

Ravi Parthasarathy, senior director of product line management and media storage at Harmonic, said: "Most post-production companies are using complex and expensive Fiber Channel SAN storage as it has been the only alternative that met their performance needs. MediaGrid provides the post-production industry with a new storage paradigm that will meet their demanding performance requirements, maintaining consistent performance levels over time, reducing costs and simplifying operations."

MediaGrid comes with client-side multi-pathing software that can deliver more than a gigabyte per second of throughput to individual clients and tens of gigabytes per second of aggregate throughput – the bandwidth levels needed for applications working with uncompressed content. This uncompressed content can be a single large file or take the form of file-per-frame formats such as DPX.

Post-production services company Crawford Media Services has been using MediaGrid in its high-end editing and finishing workflows for over a year. Ron Heidt, technical director at Crawford, said: "We are very excited about the results we are achieving with MediaGrid 3.1 for these applications. We are considering consolidating our uncompressed and compressed data storage into a single MediaGrid system and greatly simplifying our post-production workflow."

At the recent NAB 2012, Harmonic showcased 2K/4K editing with DPX files using Autodesk Smoke software connected to MediaGrid with the new 3.1 software.
Maurice Patel, entertainment industry manager at Autodesk, said: "Today's professional publishers are required to do much more sophisticated visual storytelling to deliver their message. This requires not only high-quality software solutions like Autodesk Smoke, but also high-performance storage infrastructure that provides real-time access to high-bit-rate media. We are excited to see that the Ethernet-based MediaGrid system gives our customers the infrastructure needed to work quickly with Smoke."