Aldermaston, UK, 29 Sept - 1 Oct 2020 - GB Labs, innovators of powerful and intelligent storage solutions for the media and entertainment industries, is proud to be part of the inaugural BroadcastAsia (29 September – 1 October) immersive virtual convention. As well as a fully staffed booth, GB Labs is making two presentations on key products: Cloak DR and the award-winning Unify Hub, which will be launched at the event.

Unify Hub was designed for today’s changed world, a storage appliance which has support for remote production and distanced implementation baked in. Unify Hub is a powerful control layer, tuned to the challenging needs of broadcast, which manages storage – from GB Labs or other vendors – whether that storage is on premises or in the cloud; local or remote. So it can leverage existing storage as well as providing a sure foundation for future plans.

“The pandemic has forced changes on the way we work, bringing remote collaborative working to the fore,” said Ben Pearce, CBO Asia and Co-Founder at GB Labs. “The temptation is to go back to the bad old days of material stored in multiple locations, with all the problems of delays in moving material from place to place, the risk of creating multiple ‘master’ versions, and of course poor security.

“As the name suggests, Unify Hub provides a simple, unified approach to content and metadata, so that wherever it is physically stored, it appears as a single, secure and coherent source, ideal for high-efficiency collaborative and remote working,” Pearce explained.” Unify Hub is a winner of the Best of Show Award 2020 during IBC 2020 from TVBEurope magazine.

The other featured product at BroadcastAsia is CloakDR, a revolutionary approach to 'no single point of failure' content security from GB Labs. The intelligence in GB Labs servers uses CloakDR software to build redundant storage systems which are always synchronised from the moment of ingest. This allows Cloak DR to dynamically allocate one appliance as primary, one as secondary, and to provide instant failover whatever the incident.

The inherent intelligence maintains a single IP address for storage, so the rest of the infrastructure can continue unaware of any issues. The result is perfect resilience: content is read from and written to the servers without interruption.

“We are excited to be involved in this year’s BroadcastAsia,” added Pearce “The organisers of the parent event, ConnecTechAsia, have gone to extraordinary lengths to create a virtual experience that is as real as possible, with staff on booths ready to answer questions and presentations on key new technologies. The technology they have brought together to make this a satisfying and engaging experience for ‘visitors’ looks excellent, and we are looking forward to taking part.”

Aldermaston, UK, 21 September 2020 - GB Labs, the leader in intelligent storage solutions, has provided its FastNAS F-16 Nitro storage system to Fancy Film, Los Angeles, enabling the facility to complete colour correction and other finishing services on a major new documentary TV series.

Tony Shek, Fancy Film CTO, said, “We were rapidly getting into 4K finishing and HDR Dolby Vision, which meant that we had to start looking for shared storage that was fast enough to run in real-time but was also cost effective. We researched a lot of companies, but in terms of cost effectiveness, the quotes we received were anything but.”

Fancy Film Online Editor Jacob Fisher added, “When high volumes of ultra-high resolution content starts pouring in, you need the ability to work on that content from multiple workstations at speed, which at the time was a capability we didn’t have.”

Rave reviews during NAB 2019 from existing GB Labs storage users convinced Shek that he may have located a solution. A subsequent referral from a user to GB Labs’ West Coast representative and installer, New Media Hollywood, meant that Fancy Film had found what it needed in FastNAS F-16 Nitro.

FastNAS shared storage combines the benefits of hard disk and solid state drives in a single device and has become the high performance storage system of choice worldwide, all at a highly affordable price point.

Shek said, “We took on a high-profile job, and even though we knew ahead of time that the majority of the footage was going to arrive in ultra-high resolution, it was a relief to discover soon into our trial with FastNAS - during which we pushed it to its limits for a solid week - that we didn’t have to worry. It just worked. The FastNAS system didn’t even break a sweat. All we had to do then was focus on the creative, and the results are marvellous.”

Adi Antariksa, GB Labs Chief Business Officer for the Americas said, “It’s deeply gratifying to have our storage systems deliver on what they promise, and then some, especially when it comes to household brand projects like this. We look forward to continuing to support Fancy Film in current and future projects as we get almost as much satisfaction from their success as they do.”

Aldermaston, UK, 3 September 2020 - GB Labs, innovators of powerful and intelligent storage solutions for the media and entertainment industries, today announced that Side Street Post and VFX, Vancouver, supported by GDS Communications, has chosen GB Labs’ SPACE SSD NAS shared storage system to drive Side Street’s DaVinci Resolve Studio systems.

More than 300TB of GB Labs "SPACE SSD" shared storage solution, with its massive disc performance of 12GB/s now enables all of Side Street’s DaVinci Resolve Studio workstations to simultaneously playback 4K DPX streams at full resolution, with no network slow-down or dropped frames.

Side Street Post and VFX’s President, Gary Shaw, said, “Our legacy SAN storage system was no longer meeting our needs, and limited our ability to fully utilise Resolve in higher resolutions. We needed a solution that would enable all our colour correction suites to operate simultaneously at 4K resolution or higher and more efficiently.”

Gary’s view, shared by many, was that the current fibre channel storage systems could not affordably achieve the concurrent speeds needed, and the technical development of such systems is generally thought as having been eclipsed by ethernet solutions. For Side Street, NAS was the way to go.

Gary said, “Vancouver is a major market for episodic television and feature film production, a lot of it captured with high-end cameras that shoot at 4K, 6K or 8K, so a lot of raw camera footage arrives which in the grading process requires a very high data rate. Both technically and ethically, we don’t really want to downscale and work in HD. We want our clients to experience the true image quality especially on Dolby Vision projects.

"To deal with such high data rates and file sizes, you need a system that can handle them, and SPACE SSD from GB Labs provided both the bandwidth and file management capability that fits our needs."

SPACE SSD is the world's fastest and most scalable NAS platform, with performance up to 18GB/s and capacity up to 10PB. The Side Street system transfers data at 12GB/s and is linked to a 100GbE switch.

According to GB Labs CEO-CTO Dominic Harland, “Side Street Post is very forward-thinking and knew that a fibre channel system could not achieve what it needed. Speed was of the essence and they needed all colour workstations running at full capacity, simultaneously, in 4K, 6K, 8K and, eventually, beyond. SPACE SSD NAS copes with that easily, with plenty of headroom.”

A major differentiator with all GB Labs storage systems is that they do not require the user to replace or dispose of their existing storage. Like many other GB Labs users, Side Street was able to make use of its existing SAN by incorporating GB Labs ECHO Bridge as a way of accessing SAN data, or moving files to it for near-line storage.

“It’s a case of using the old storage for secondary purposes, essentially cold storage, and empowering SPACE SSD for the heavy lifting,” added Shaw. “After a few minutes of on-site tweaks to configure the system to our preferences, we were up and running – at astonishing speed - without the slightest disruption to our operations.”

CJP Broadcast Press Release: Ross-On-Wye, UK, 20 August 2020: CJP Broadcast announces the successful completion of a video production and live streaming project for three of the highest profile games in the European sports calendar. A complete system centred on a CJP Live Sports Production System captured content to supplement terrestrial and satellite coverage of the events. CJP staff active at the matches included Managing Director Chris Phillips supervising technical setup, James Ruddock operating as Technical Manager, Kieron Sharpe and Kieran Phillips providing AV rigging support, Rob Dyton as Production Director and Chris Hollier as Remote Camera Operator.

“Covid-19 restrictions meant the venue was unable to host the capacity crowds normally present at semi-finals and finals,” Chris Phillips comments. “We were asked to augment the traditional broadcast coverage with behind-the-scenes content. This included manager reactions during the match, player interactions in the tunnel area and a focus on key international players. The resultant video would then be made available online for easy access by supporters during and after each match. Our role was to provide a complete production system plus an experienced installation and operations crew.”

“A key part of the challenge was capturing content from ‘red zone’ areas such as the substitutes’ bench and the technical control area. We provided four JVC cameras with motorised pan/tilt/zoom which were operated from our control base on the gantry in front of the press area. Two of the cameras were positioned in the tunnel. The other two were focused on the managers’ and subs’ benches. In addition to the robotic cameras, we had feeds from two Sony FS7 cameras provided by the host and operated by their own experienced freelancers, plus a JVC GY-HM660RE live streaming camcorder.”

“The Streamstar iPX allowed us to record ISO-style feeds from the six cameras and make these accessible in 15-minute segments to remotely located video editors so they could start producing final edited content while the game was still in progress. We expanded the 1 terabyte of onboard video storage in the iPX with a 16 terabyte GB Labs F-8 Studio recorder using a 512 gigabyte Nitro SSD Layer for ingest while editing. Content for editing was accessed from the F-8 by four edit suites. The system also generated an H.264 RTMP live stream for practically instant publication on social media. An HD/SDI clean programme feed was also provided from our system to the host broadcaster for use as an optional contribution feed within the terrestrial and satellite transmission.”

Available in several versions supporting up to eight camera inputs, the CJP Live Sports Production System provides a wide range production and streaming capabilities in an easily transportable unit. Its facilities include ISO recording, four-layer graphics, transitions, real-time replay, slow-motion replay, on-the-fly highlights creation, advert insertion, clip insertion and audio mixing. Operation is via a touchscreen and keyboard with the option of an external joystick for pan/tilt/zoom camera control. Full multiscreen monitoring facilities are included with the option of a second screen for commentator positions. An H.264 live stream can be fed directly to a TV station or third-party OB control suite via a 10 megabits per second link or via 4G mobile, with the ability to simulcast to multiple platforms and in-stadium screens. Up to 96 terabytes of RAID5 storage can also be attached.

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About CJP Broadcast
CJP Broadcast Service Solutions Limited (www.cjp-bss.co.uk)) was established in 2011 to provide broadcast manufacturers and engineering companies with professional ITIL based service desk solutions. In 2016 the company expanded its portfolio to include digitisation of broadcast tape and film media to provide restoration of historical media archives into modern file-based formats. In 2018 CJP expanded its operation further, providing live production solutions, professional broadcast TV studio system integration and technical support services.