How to Enable Remote Media Workflows with Spaces|MAM

Mar 18, 2021 | Paul Reeve

In the post-Covid-19 world remote collaboration is now a must-have for media workflows if you want to stay in business. Office and transport lockdowns have resulted in many post houses having to implement work-at-home strategies and having to completely rethink previous workflow practices. It is likely that these practices or at least hybrid workflows, some office, some remote, will continue long into the future as the pandemic causes us to re-evaluate the future world of work.

How well these businesses adapt to “the new normal” will be vital to their future success. In this article we will look at how Tiger Technology products can be implemented to support this transition in media workflows.

Remote Collaboration Practices

Remote collaboration is not completely new. Post production agencies have always used specialist services from consultants in different geographies or have offices in different time zones working on the same projects and of course they will want to share content with clients for review. There are a number of approaches to this, and the media industry has been quite innovative in adopting these. The main challenge is that the data sets are large and becoming larger. It is not uncommon to see data being moved on physical media like tape or USB drives. As bandwidth has improved, file transfer protocols like FTP can be reasonably used to upload and download data. There are also third-party data synchronisation products that can be deployed.

A major issue is that solutions like these can involve combinations of software that are not designed to work together leaving a complex infrastructure for administrators to manage and no single point of support.

Let’s explore how Spaces|MAM can be deployed to support these new workflow requirements and overcome these key issues.

What is Spaces|MAM?

Spaces|MAM is a single platform for managing storage, users and media. Tiger Spaces can be used to create user-specific workspaces on any NAS storage devices, or SAN and NAS storage if used with the Store|SAN product by Tiger Technology. Users and groups can be set up through the integration with Active Directory or can be configured directly within the Spaces administration web GUI and allocated to any specific workspace. Full Integration with Spaces|MAM means that any media content that is created or ingested in a Spaces workspace is automatically available in the fully featured MAM with the same user permissions and log-in credentials. The Spaces|MAM web interface provides complete remote working capability.

Typical Spaces|MAM System Set-up

In a typical media production office, we might expect to see Windows, Mac or Linux workstations attached to shared storage in the form of one or more Network Attached Storage devices. The Tiger Spaces software is first deployed as a management layer allowing administrators to add users and groups and creating dedicated user/group workspaces on the shared storage. Admins may create as many workspaces as they wish and can allocate them to any specific storage managed by Tiger Spaces. They can then add users or groups with specific privileges to read and/or write to the workspaces.

A workspace will appear as a locally attached drive to the user, and they will only see the workspaces they have been allocated. All other workspaces will be hidden. At this point users can create or ingest content to the shared workspaces and begin working on their projects.

Tiger Spaces on its own is not designed to support remote workflows. It is used as a tool to manage on-premises storage and client workstations over a local area network. While it has some web GUI functionality for viewing proxy files, it is not designed to connect workstations over a WAN to centralised storage.

Tiger Spaces|MAM integrates a full-featured MAM into Tiger Spaces, which supports all the user and storage management features of Tiger Spaces but adds advanced media management capability and remote workflows.

Spaces|MAM Integration

Spaces|MAM is fully integrated with Tiger Spaces. All the workspace user permissions, usernames and passwords are mapped directly into the MAM. Any file types added to a workspace are immediately available in the MAM, and video files are automatically catalogued with a proxy generation which can be customised to meet specific workflow requirements.

Spaces|MAM Remote Workflow Tools

Spaces|MAM has a web-based interface that allows users to log in from any web-enabled workstation at any location. Users will be able to see all the media content available via their workspaces and will be able to perform all MAM functions:

Proxy generation

• Proxy viewing frame by frame
• Create new clips from the proxy file using mark in & out points and add separate metadata
• Consolidate clips into a sequence and export

Metadata management

• Add free text comments to the file
• Timecode metadata tagging
• Predefined metadata tags
• Full media search on any metadata

Remote ingest/export

• Upload or download files from a remote client via web interface
• Rename or delete files remotely with correct permissions
• Move or copy files between workspaces
• Export to applications like Adobe, Avid, Davinci etc, or transcode for YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram
• Email facility to send content to extremal collaborators for review and comment

Web editing and transcoding

• Full web editor
• Transcoding engine
• Direct plug-in to Adobe

Upload and Download Features

A key feature of Spaces|MAM is that remote users can upload content via the web interface to the central workspace storage where it will be available for other workspace members to work on. They can also add metadata tags to identify the source and type of content, for example.

Equally any content on the workspace may be downloaded to an editing workstation either as a proxy or hi-res in any location and once any work has been completed, it can be uploaded back to the central workspace.

File sharing via email

A further useful tool is the ability to send an HTTPs email link to any third party so that they can remotely view content without the need to have direct access to the Spaces|MAM application. Links can be password protected for additional security.

Tiger Bridge backup and archive

Tiger Bridge is also fully integrated into Spaces|MAM to allow backup and archive to tape or cloud targets to protect data on the primary storage.

Spaces|MAM solves remote workflow requirements without added complexities.

Tiger Technology products are designed to work together and are therefore fully supported 24×7 by the acclaimed Tiger Technology support team.

The Spaces|MAM product provides a simple toolset to allow administrators to set up workspaces on their centralised storage and control user access to the workspaces. This inherent security is transferred to remote workers who access the same workspaces via the MAM Web GUI. Local and remote users have the toolsets needed to access and work on any of the media content in their workspace.

The fully featured MAM allows organisations to adapt and control their workflows without having to worry about the location of offices, workers or other collaboration partners.

Want to see Spaces|MAM in action? Contact our Sales team to book your demo.