South African agency Ginkgo migrates archive to the cloud

As cloud storage is entirely built upon a consumption model, realising the maximum return on the investment is crucial. Key to this is having oversight into how the business, both internally and externally with third parties, searches, views, curates and manages stored media. To optimise each of these functions, a centralised management layer is required, enabling multiple staff to access, and benefit from, the content stored throughout each stage of the production life cycle.

On evaluation, Support Partners recommended deploying iconik as the media-centric management layer. Uniquely, iconik has been built from the ground up to be cloud-native, allowing it to take advantage of cloud functions and capabilities which may not have been available with traditional, on-premise systems. Additionally, as a Software as a Service (SaaS) offering, Support Partners could test and gradually roll out the system, in conjunction with iconik, without any up-front capital expenditure and ensuring that the solution met all of the users’ requirements before switching from proof-of-concept into production.

A major differentiator between iconik and similar products is the ability to “bring your own cloud” storage (BYOC), meaning that Ginkgo Agency remains in control of its own assets (which are stored in AWS). Iconik presents the content via a web application rather than, as per other vendors, insisting on usage of their own cloud storage or by charging a per asset fee for content stored within the database. Only user licenses and consumables are charged for, again ensuring cost control and transparency.

In our workflow, the proxies generated in AWS via Media Convert are stored in iconik and linked to the hi-resolution master files stored in AWS Deep Glacier. Users can browse the archive anywhere in the globe, requesting either an edit-ready proxy or the hi-resolution original asset via the iconik portal.

In addition, a review and approve workflow was deployed. This allows editors to upload versions of content they are working on to iconik via the web GUI, share them with third parties who in turn, can comment, download or edit the media.

Whilst the cloud can be used for cost effective storage and distribution of assets, it’s the additional services that become available from migrating to the cloud that can really add value and change how businesses operate. This is no better demonstrated than with cognitive services.

Cognitive services uses machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) to enrich the metadata of an asset. In the case of Ginkgo Agency, we were able to run cognitive services via iconik such as optical character recognition (OCR), brand detection, facial recognition and speech-to-text across their archive in order to deepen the categorisation of the assets and drastically improve the search capabilities.

With a rich archive including wildlife and lifestyle footage, Ginkgo Agency’s assets have a high reuse rate. By attributing time-based metadata across the archive, Support Partners has enabled both internal editors and third-parties to find video and images that would have previously been unsearchable. This enriched archive helps reduce production costs by enabling the usage of b-roll footage from previous campaigns.

The final piece of the project was to give the editors easy access to the archive of assets. A fundamental goal of Support Partners is to reduce the number of User Interfaces creative personnel have to work with - if we can keep a member of the creative team working within a single application then they will fundamentally be more productive.

The iconik panel, available through Adobe Creative Cloud, offers the Ginkgo Agency’s editors direct access to their cloud-based archive without having to leave the creative environment. Users can search iconik for assets, download edit proxies, and then, once a project is complete, re-conform with high-resolution master asset all within Premiere Pro.

“This project has been about much more than just transferring our archive into the Cloud, it’s been about enriching our content assets and making them available to a broader audience in a more useful and powerful way. Throughout this project, iconik has helped us understand what is possible and has turned a fragmented set of media assets into a coherent and valuable archive resource.”

-Janine Fourie, Director, Ginkgo Agency