Marquis Broadcast
Marquis Broadcast moves media and metadata in professional production workflows
Founded in 1998, Marquis Broadcast provides a range of media integration products designed for the data-intensive and challenging requirements of today's fast-paced media production environments, enabling producers of digital media to achieve maximum efficiencies from their workflow processes.
Check out Marquis Broadcast's Avid Platform Certified ISIS NEXIS productivity and protection tools:
Workspace Backup: fastest disaster recovery solution for Avid work-in-progress
Workspace Sync: super fast business continuity and migration solution
Project Parking: analytics, visualisation, clean-up, archive and backup now with Delta Parking - in backup project versioning and sharing
Don't just take our word for it, try it out yourselves with a 10 day free software evaluation.
WORKSPACE BACKUP
Disaster Mitigation and Recovery
Analyses and copies Avid workspaces and projects to Tier 2 storage and the cloud.
Workspace Backup first runs low-level analytics to examine and characterise every byte of data held within the source Avid workspaces. It then backs up the content of the workspaces before copying all the projects that use media in those workspaces. Finally, those projects are analysed and any other assets that are linked to them are also backed up. Thereafter, any subsequent backups replicate changes in the source workspaces and capture new versions of the projects.
Data is held in the incremental backup for a period specified by the administrator. For example, a 28-day rolling backup holds data intentionally or unintentionally deleted from the source workspace for 28 days. The entire history of every project and bin is available for 28 days as well.
WORKSPACE BACKUP | BENEFITS
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Fastest restoration of mission critical projects Project aware analysis allows an individual project, or individual bin, to be restored to any location, with only the media it references.
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Agile recovery tools included ultra-granular recovery Can be pre-installed on any system e.g. Media Composers or News Cutters that are part of the disaster recovery plan.
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Protection from accidental project or bin deletion Incremental backup allows for the restoration of any version of a project or bin throughout the retention period
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Protection from accidental deletion of media files If media goes off line, restoring the project or bin will selectively bring back only the missing media files, not all the media files associated with the project or bin
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Background restoration of whole workspaces Entire workspaces can be restored to NEXIS whilst mission critical individual projects or bins are restored to individual workstations
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Effective use of network bandwidth without impacting operations Schedule backup times and inactive periods to use maximum network bandwidth during out of hours operations. Network performance can be throttled during operational periods
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Maximise transfer speed over specific networks A performance test tunes buffer size and thread numbers to maximise network speed on an individual network
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Administrators can access any files within the retention period from Tier 2 This has operational benefits as no ISIS NEXIS connectivity is required. Content that may have been deleted on ISIS Nexis is still available in the Tier 2 retention period
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Scaleable Workspace Backup Licensing Workspace Backup scales in 16TB usable blocks so Enterprise Class disaster recovery protection is available, starting at the smallest scale.
DISASTER RECOVERY
A backup is only of use if it is possible to get critical operations up and running in the shortest time when disaster strikes. There are two parts to the recovery strategy.
Workspace Recovery
Prioritisation of the recovery of any business-critical workspaces, and select and recover discreet versions of projects or bins with the recovery tool from time during the retention period.
The recovery is highly agile and can be directed to alternate Avid ISIS / NEXIS or Media Composer systems. For example, if target shared storage is unavailable an individual project or just a single bin could be recovered to a standalone Media Composer, within minutes.
Project Recovery
An agile and flexible Project restore tool is provided with Workspace Backup. The recovery is highly granular so it is possible to recover.
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Any version of any project held within the retention period
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Any version of any bin held within the retention period
Workspace Backup customers are free to install the recovery tools on any number of devices that can see (or be configured to see) the NAS or cloud storage. For example, Project Restore could be installed on every Media Composer or NewsCutter workstations that are covered by the disaster recovery plan.
This granularity provides the fastest mechanism to get mission critical projects back into production. It enables a prioritised recovery which is highly agile and based on production business and operational need.
WORKSPACE SYNC
Business Continuity
Synchronises Avid workspaces for immediate business continuity
Workspace Sync provides the highest level of work in progress production protection. It is designed to protect business critical work in progress, such as high value productions that may have contracted deliverables, SLAs and associated penalties.
Workspace Sync synchronises a NEXIS / ISIS workspace to a remote NEXIS / ISIS using set and forget rules. For example, the Sync could be scheduled to take place every for 30 minutes during working hours. The benefit is that work in progress is almost immediately available in the second live Avid NEXIS / ISIS system, there is no recovery delay.
Workspace Sync works with any combination of ISIS or NEXIS as source and target. The source and target systems are not required to be the same capacity. The only requirement is that the available usable space on the target ISIS or NEXIS is larger than the protected Workspace on the source.
Workspace Sync is optimised to transfer workspace data as fast as the network and source and target NEXIS will allow. This can be beneficial especially for the first replication, however, if bandwidth use needs to be constrained, Workspace Sync can be configured to not exceed a predetermined transfer rate.
The licensing makes for a very cost-effective approach towards business continuity. For example, there may be a business-critical workspace of 16TB on a 512TB NEXIS which is also backed up each night by Workspace Backup as part of the disaster recovery plan. By adding a 16TB Workspace Sync license, the mission critical Workspace could also be synced to a 20TB Avid Nexis Pro to provide an additional layer of business continuity protection.
Workspace Sync Recovery
In the case of Avid ISIS / NEXIS not being available in the primary location Media Composers can connect to the replicated workspace(s) in the secondary location. In the example below avid interplay is also rerouted to the second location.
When the original Avid ISIS / NEXIS becomes available again it is possible to redirect the Sync to rebuild or update the original Avid ISIS / NEXIS and then if appropriate, reattach the original editors to the original storage.
Workspace Sync can also be used to simplify and de-risk the transition from older ISIS to NEXIS. Setting up a regular synchronisation means that individual Media Composer clients or projects can be transitioned one at a time and without downtime. Once all the clients have been moved across to the new storage and confirmed that all media is still on-line, the older storage can be decommissioned or re-assigned.
PROJECT PARKING
A complete Avid storage management solution
Analytics
Project Parking is an analytics based Avid ISIS NEXIS storage management system. Using advanced low level analytics realises both significant transformation and simplification of ISIS NEXIS operations.
Integrity
The first time Project Parking is installed it runs a complete analysis of the ISIS or NEXIS and thereafter maintains a detailed database of all Avid Workspaces and Projects. The analytics can be scheduled to run automatically each day across the whole system or, if exporting a single project, run an analysis on that project prior to exportation checking and cross referencing all the media in the project. This guarantees the integrity of the project export for example all referenced media held in other workspaces is also copied into the export. It also guarantees that any projects that are temporarily exported are correctly versioned when re-imported.
ISIS NEXIS Clean Up
The analytics process is also used to identify duplicate and orphaned media. In a ISIS or NEXIS that may have been running for some years its common to find between 10 and 20% of the ISIS NEXIS contains duplicate and orphaned media. Project Parking automatically discovers and cleans up duplicate and orphaned media. It’s not uncommon to recover the investment in Project Parking on the first clean up. Project Parking automatically maintains the ISIS NEXIS so any duplicates or orphans created during a day will be cleaned up overnight. This has the additional benefit that any duplicate or orphaned media will not propagate into any disaster recovery storage. For example when using Workspace Backup Avid disaster recovery solution. Duplicate and orphans are usually moved to external storage and checksum verified where they can be viewed as externalised media. A decision can be made if these items can be deleted without using any ISIS NEXIS resources. In routine operation Project Parking will only move and not delete duplicate and orphaned media. A no cost software option can be requested and enabled to directly delete duplicates and orphans so no external storage is required.
Visualisation
Low level ISIS NEXIS Analytics are visualised and tracked over time. This makes system utilisation and resource planning easy to manage. For example:
Which projects could I temporarily export to tier two or cloud storage to make way for a larger incoming production? Which productions are over using or under using capacity?
Workspace utilisation can also be a valuable tool for billing for use. It enables users to leverage the valuable ISIS NEXIS capacity to its maximum
Easy Administration and Automation
It makes no sense tying up the best people spending hours a week, or weeks a year performing mundane and time consuming ISIS NEXIS management tasks.
For example, just trying to find and safely remove duplicates and orphans can be a nearly impossible task. Easily tracking utilisation over time with multiple productions in progress can often require careful juggling of capacity.
Knowledge of Workspace utilisation and history can also be a valuable tool to leverage the valuable ISIS NEXIS capacity to its maximum and predict and plan how best to use capacity.
For finance and billing it also produces an auditable history of workspace utilisation.
Avid Project Externalisation
Avid native media on ISIS or NEXIS is extremely difficult to interpret in its raw form when viewed by a conventional file explorer. Project Parking externalises Avid projects held in ISIS NEXIS and makes them easy to externally read.
This means Project Parking users can navigate and see project with a traditional media composer project hierarchy. Once projects are exported they are fully open and viewable in a conventional file explorer and equally importantly may be directly opened by Media Composer.
Storage Agility
Project Parking also read and writes to many types of certified storage. Project Parking bi-directionally read and writes to Avid ISIS and NEXIS systems with and without Interplay.
It may manually, automatically and sequentially write to different types of storage from the same application.
This has the benefit that different strategies may be used for different productions.
For example it may be useful to: Temporarily move a production to tier two storage while another more urgent production comes in house and needs extra capacity.
Move a whole series into cloud storage knowing the series will come back into production the following year.
Export an entire project as a TAR file into a long-term archive managed by and external MAM system Temporarily export a project so a freelancer may work on a project at home over the weekend. The project can be re-versioned re-imported by Project Parking.
Delta Parking
Versionable Avid project sharing through the cloud or local storage
Ideal for production facilities who have remote productions and want to monitor, collaborate or protect that work.
Project metadata and the associated media is archived to local or cloud storage. This provides a robust method of providing Disaster Recovery for work in progress on a NEXIS. From the backup it can be restored by project or just individual bins, to any location that has access to it. This could be another NEXIS or a standalone Media Composer workstation.
Whole projects can be restored and will open in Media Composer as they appeared the last time they were used. Individual bins can be restored into new or existing projects. Only media which is not already on the local system will be downloaded.
After updating the project, it can be archived back to the archive, creating a new version of that project. When updating an existing project, only the metadata and any new media are updated, so minimizing upload and download times.
Project Parking and Workspace Backup share a common, open, format for Avid project archives. They support a wide variety of storage from tier 2 NAS through to Microsoft Azure, IBM Cloud Object Storage, S3, Wasabi and Cloudian cloud storage.
Delta Parking is a free capability of Project Parking and Workspace Backup.
