COMPANY - Digital Archiving Clients - Parelli Horsemanship

The CatDV-DAX media asset management and archive solution provides our editors a reliable, simple and easy process for all our media.
Dave Blackham, Media Consultant to Parelli Natural Horsemanship.

The company
Founded in 1981 by lifelong horseman and teacher Pat Parelli, the Parelli Program combines common sense psychology and communication. Unlike many training programs, the Parelli method teaches the human, not the horse. Early on, Pat realized that horses already had all the skills they needed to thrive and relate with their kind. It was adding the human element that complicated things. The Parelli method allows horse lovers at all levels and disciplines to achieve: success without force, partnership without dominance, teamwork without fear, willingness without intimidation, and harmony without coercion.

In order to achieve its goals the Parelli company shoots, creates and distributes a wide variety of videos on Horsemanship and events related to this subject. These video products play a key role in teaching and disseminating the Parelli method all over the world. Shooting footage as close as possible to the horse and its rider is paramount. Hence Parelli was one of the first companies adopting new camera technologies, based on compact flash and P2 (Panasonic), as these tend to be so much smaller than traditional professional cameras.

The challenge
Shooting video completely digital on compact flash and/or P2 impacts the workflow. There are just so many horror stories about people loosing valuable footage just because the digital files somehow got lost in the system. Hence, there is a paradigm shift in the workflow, from a traditional shoot-edit-archive workflow to shoot-archive-edit. Clearly there is a need for a reliable system that indexes and archives all footage either manually or automatically, enabling the users to automate their workflow resulting into increased efficiency.

There is however also another requirement. New technologies like HD or the Red camera are also emerging. This calls for a future proof solution, able to handle a variety of formats. Why deploy a traditional archive system based on video tapes? Isn’t it more logical to put a digital archive system in place which simply archives the data and which is agnostic on the specific video formats?     

Another aspect of the challenge relates to the changes in the workflow. The traditional workflow focuses on the shoot-edit part of the workflow. Getting the footage to the editor, archiving is essentially the back-end of the process. However, the new work flows, demand that effectively the editors are able to access the archiving process directly. Hence there is the requirement for a very simple and direct random access throughout the whole archive for each and every individual editor. Does that sound science fiction or is this reality?

The solution
In close cooperation with Square Box Systems, DAX Archiving Solutions provided a complete Broadcast Archive Solution to Parelli. The system consists of 2 Mac Pro w/ 8 core CPU + internal & external e-SATA disk arrays. In addition the archiving is done on LTO-4 technology using tape libraries. This hardware platform can be further scaled and expanded in the future. All software runs under Mac OSX. The LTO system is used for backup purposes and archiving simultaneously, using different pools of storage resources (LTO tapes).

The workflow is managed by means of Square Box’s catDV. It catalogues and manages all ingested footage using watchfolder technology. This includes generating lo-res proxies, thumbnails, adding metadata and publishing collections of clips in the form of video catalogues on the network. This way the editors obtain a structured but also immediate access to all footage from their FCP editing stations.

By means of a special plugin to catDV it connects to the DAX File & Folder Archive Software. This software provides seamless connection between the central storage and the deep archive on LTO. Archiving can be done both automatically and manually. Archived files can be purged from the central storage, both automatically as well as manually, in order to create new space for re-use.

Finally the restore from archive can simply be done by means of a simple browser interface, giving any required status information at the same time. This enables each and every editor to randomly access the central storage as well as the whole archive effectively from his FCP editing environment. 

The advantage of the digital format is that the solution is completely agnostic on the actual video formats used and hence this solution can also deal with new upcoming formats like HD. The system is essentially half the cost of a traditional video tape machine, but it can do many times more. In addition, the archiving as well as restore from archive are about three times faster than real-time.

In summary, the complete solution provides:
1. Archiving of all incoming footage immediately when it comes in, fully integrated and automated with the
    LTO-system that is used for backup as well.
2. Fully embedded archiving and retrieval in the broadcast workflow, avoiding waiting times and the need
     for manual intervention for re-use of old material.
3. Increased (cost-) efficiency in the use of the central video storage.  

Read more about:
• DAX Broadcast Archive Solution
• DAX File and Folder Archive Software
• Parelli Natural Horsemanship