Moving AVOD Workflows to the Cloud at Record Speed

Circle Media - Case Study

Ingested < 8 months

1 TB

Files in Cloud MAM

50 K

Adobe Premiere Projects

Finding files among our ever-increasing library of assets became a breeze when we moved to Evolphin’s Cloud MAM. To top it off, we now have a way to reliably send and receive large files. Evolphin has been a game-changer!”

Geoff DeFrance

SVP Digital, Circle Media

Challenge

Circle needed to migrate Terabytes of on-premises storage to the cloud in less than two weeks to kick off post-production for their new Ad-based Video On Demand (AVOD) network launch. They needed a Cloud MAM provider to get them up and running in a record time. Making matters worse, the COVID pandemic hit just before launch. Editors and other team members were forced to work from home. Remote editing workflows had to be deployed quickly so that the editors and media management teams could collaborate. In short Circle needed to solve 3 primary challenges:

Solution

Circle partnered with the Evolphin Cloud Services team to move all existing on-premises content via a 100TB AWS SnowBall into the Cloud. Automated ingest in the cloud imported the content into Evolphin Cloud in less than a day. Using Evolphin’s built-in hi-res media cloud transfer app, editors & media managers are able to share camera cards and footages with ease. Media managers can trigger workflows to load massive amounts of content from the Evolphin cloud to VOD cloud partners with 0 EGRESS costs!

Benefits

Circle migrated their initial 18TB data set in one day after the SnowBall was loaded by AWS. Since then, 40TB of content across 347K files have been ingested in less than 9 months. Now the team has accelerated their cloud ingest volume to ~6TB/month and realized a ton of cost savings by eliminating their WAN File Transfer service, as well as being able to operate with almost zero IT support.

About Circle

Opry Entertainment Group, a subsidiary of Ryman Hospitality Properties, Inc., and Gray Television teamed up to create Circle Media, a premium linear television and OTT streaming channel dedicated to celebrating country music and the country lifestyle. The combination links Gray’s extensive distribution network in key markets across the country with Ryman Hospitality’s tremendous library of current and heritage content, artist relationships, iconic venues and music industry connections. With a vision for highlighting country music artists and the passions, hobbies and love of music they share with their fans, the venture connects country fans and artists like never before.

Monthly Digital Audience

1 M

Shows: Original series and weekly livestreams

Super Fast Data Migration

Often left as an after-thought, Data Migration could have been a real nightmare for Circle. Simple ‘drag n drop’ ingest to a Cloud MAM just didn’t cut it, especially when Circle was moving TBs of data across thousands of on-premises folders. At the outset, the Evolphin Cloud team promptly dispatched a 100TB AWS SnowBall Edge device to Circle. The media manager then simply dumped all their media & project folders into the device and shipped it back to Evolphin’s AWS processing facility.

Pre-flight Scan

Within a day of receiving the AWS SnowBall, the Evolphin Cloud team ran its automated preflight cloud storage scan tool to give the Circle team deep insights into their content prior to ingest. The reports allowed the Circle team to identify file & folder patterns to ignore. For example, the team discovered there were over 4K files with an extension TGA:AFP_AFPINFO that were created by MacOS Finder and they could ignore these before data import.

In-place Cloud Ingest

Within hours the Evolphin Data Migration App had “in-place” ingested all of the content sent by the Circle team.

The AWS SnowBall S3 bucket was set up for an in-place ingest without any extra copying involved and to ensure a rapid data migration!

Duplicate Saved as Smart Copy

20% of Circle's content was detected as duplicate and automatically converted to "Smart Copy" on AWS S3, saving cloud storage costs.

What could have been an expensive, time-consuming, and complex cloud data-migration, was effortless with Evolphin Cloud migrator app. Instead of spending hours worrying about data integrity, the Circle team were able to start working the next day!

"Media management with long form videos is not an easy endeavour. Our Cloud Data Migration could not have gone smoother. When I work with the Evolphin team I know they will act fast and deliver the best solution possible! "

Jordan Glenn

Media Asset Manager,
Circle Media

Remote Editing From Home

Just when Circle was deploying to the Evolphin Cloud MAM, the COVID pandemic intensified and editors were forced to work from home. In order to make the remote editing experience smoother and simpler, Circle upgraded their creative team members in Nashville, TN to a 1Gbps symmetrical Internet connection. That meant most team members were able to upload or download at Gigabit speeds.

On a final point, each home based editor has the Evolphin Accelerated Transfer Hub turned ‘on’ to take advantage of the high-speed Internet connections for transferring their large media projects.

Hi-res Transfer

Wicked Fast Parallel Transfers

Zoom automatically divides the large media into chunks and then uploads them in parallel. Circle’s editors can upload or download entire folders recursively.

Auto-resume Transfers

If any editor’s file transfer is interrupted for any reason, such as putting the laptop to sleep, the Zoom hub auto resumes when the computer is online again. This is a huge improvement over previous transfer managers used by the Circle team which proved unreliable for large file sizes.

LOW-RES PROXY EDITING

Remote Proxy Editing Saves Tons of Time

Circle’s editors take advantage of low-res proxy editing workflows in Zoom to cut down on the hi-res media that needs to be transferred from the cloud to their desktops. They can stream proxies prior to adding them to their projects.

When the time comes for the final conform, they can click High-res to bring down the raw footage to their MacOS desktops using the Evolphin accelerated transfer manager.

"To be able to find content quickly for our ever increasing projects has been a boon since we moved to Evolphin's Cloud MAM. And to top it off being able to send/receive large files reliably has been awesome!"

Abby Collida

Producer & Editor,
Circle Media

Syncing Motion Graphics Files

The Circle team uses a lot of TGA image sequences when creating cool animations. A typical motion graphics project render might generate hundreds of independent TGA image files. Before Evolphin Zoom, the team would have had to manage & transfer each animation as a series of individual files. This was painful and error prone. There was no way to say, take my animation and transfer automatically all the constituent files. Search was a nightmare across thousands of frames that all look similar.

IMAGE SEQUENCES

First MAM to Include Image Sequence Support

Why ingest 1000's of frames when you can ingest one Image Sequence object?

Zoom allowed the Circle team to automatically map a sequence of TGA images as a single compound asset. Search in Zoom only needs to span less than 1000 unique TGA sequences instead of > 300K files in a traditional MAM!

Unique TGA Sequences Ingested to date

Individual TGA Files Managed in Cloud MAM

10 K

Distributing to VOD Platforms

The end goal for Circle was to push finished content easily and cost-effectively to their VOD partners. Before Evolphin Zoom, the team was using a variety of mechanisms including 3rd party WAN accelerator products such as Aspera and Signiant to push their content. This approach proved unreliable and difficult to scale given the number of shows & content produced was ramping up.

Using Evolphin’s accelerated transfer hub technology, Circle was able to set up ‘serverless in-cloud’ transfers with their VOD platforms. The Evolphin Cloud team even helped their VOD platform provider to move their AWS S3 bucket to the same region as Circle to reduce the egress costs to zero. All the complexity of managing S3 bucket ACLs and securing cloud storages were managed by the Evolphin platform without the need for Circle IT resources.

HI-RES TRANSFER

Ditch the 3rd party WAN accelerator!

Zoom includes a global network of accelerated transfer hubs that moves hi-res content at lightning speeds saving Circle team time and money.

Finished Files Delivered to VOD

Egress to VOD

10 TB

Cost to Circle Media

$ 0

Managing Cloud Storage Costs

Like many post-production houses, Circle was worried about cloud storage costs as they ramped up post-production for 30+ shows. Evolphin addressed the costs via automated cloud storage tiering using its ARS (automatic retention service). ARS allows Circle Asset Managers to simply mark assets as ready to move to AWS Deep Glacier or even setup ARS rules to automate this step. Once the hi-res media has transcoded to proxies and the originals are no longer needed, the content is tiered into a lower cost cloud storage.

Deep Glacier Integration

Archive to 20X cheaper storage tier

Evolphin offers an AWS Glacier Deep Archive connector that lets media managers either setup an automated metadata trigger or move on-demand any project or it’s linked asset into the cheapest storage tier in AWS.

AWS S3 10TB/Month

$ 0

AWS Deep Glacier 10TB/Month

$ 0

Scale Transcoding Not Your Costs

In the past few months as Circle’s monthly ingest volume went up from 1TB to 6TB, Jordan reported transcodes in the cloud taking longer.
Evolphin’s cloud team was able to change CPU allocation to the transcoding Docker microservices to eliminate the transcoding bottleneck at no extra cost to Circle!

Evolphin Cloud Transcoder

Unlimited Transcodes bundled into subscription

$ 0

AWS Cloud Transcoder

Cost per hour of video

$ 0

The Best Support Out There!

Early in the Evolphin Zoom deployment at Circle an extremely disruptive issue came up. The MacOS desktop used by editors would hang or crash with a dreadful kernel panic. The Circle management was extremely concerned to say the least. Their initial concern was that the Evolphin cloud agent on the desktop was the cause of the intermittent Mac workstation crashes.

Whole day was spent troubleshooting the issue. The Evolphin support team was able to identify the root cause. It was the Google Drive File Stream driver on the MacOS workstation!! Once the errant Google driver was uninstalled, sanity was restored and all was well.

"This probably was the most thorough, rapid and effective remote troubleshooting of an enterprise app on a client machine I’ve seen in many many years. Thank you for your assistance and good work!"