Restoring an episode’s 3.88 TB online from archive took 2 hours 34 minutes

Most of the shows we work with used to keep everything on RAIDs for the life of the show. Every card from every shoot day stayed on fast storage until delivery, because getting media back from anywhere cheaper was slow and manual.

On CloudStudio, camera media can move to the Archive tier once editorial is working from proxies, and come back when a cut needs it. One docuseries we support has 115.6 TB in its show archive. When they locked an episode on Saturday, the post team uploaded the XML from the cut and started a conform pull themselves.

What the job did

Input: one XML from the locked cut.
Files restored: 505 camera originals, a mix of RED R3D (with their spanned segments), Sony MXF, and Blackmagic RAW.
Size: 3.88 TB, or 3.4% of the show archive.
Time: 2 hours 34 minutes, from 5:41 pm to 8:15 pm Pacific, an average of about 420 MB/s.
Check: all 505 files matched the size of their archive copy, with 0 errors.
Also copied: 3,183 graphics files from the show’s Hot storage, with 0 failures.

The XML points at proxies, like most offline cuts. The pull matches each clip back to its camera original by name, including the extra segments RED splits long clips into, and copies only those files into a folder on the show’s Hot storage. Nothing is transcoded or rewrapped, so the online editor gets the original files under their original names.

This is the last step of how we run a show across storage tiers. The full workflow covers the steps before it.

The v2 patch

On Monday the editor sent a v2 of the cut. We compared it against the files already restored and found 4 new camera files. Those were pulled and checked the same afternoon.

Why we wrote it down

Nothing about this job was unusual. It is the standard conform pull, and this is what one normally looks like. We are writing it down because it is a different way to run a show than keeping everything on a RAID: the camera media stays in archive, and each cut brings back only what it uses.