GB Labs – Extending post-production cloud workflows with hyper accelerators
Matt Scott, VP Business Development, GB Labs
In the modern landscape of post-production, distributed teams face increasing challenges in maintaining seamless collaboration when working across distant locations. As productions scale and the demand for high-resolution content grows, traditional methods of file sharing and synchronization often become bottlenecks that slow down workflows and hinder efficiency. In simple terms, as productions now occupy a global footprint, the editorial process now needs a way to work and collaborate as though everyone was in the same office. GB Labs addresses these challenges by leveraging hyper accelerators, high performance local caches of media shared from the cloud, in conjunction with our block level technology, enabling remote teams to work with the same speed and efficiency as if they were all in a centralized studio environment.
The challenge of remote post-production
Post-production workflows rely heavily on seamless file access, rapid data transfers, and real-time collaboration – a well-established process when everyone is in the same office. However, when production teams and studios are geographically dispersed, moving large amounts of footage between editors, digital imaging technicians (DITs), and post supervisors can be time-consuming and bandwidth-intensive. Traditional cloud storage solutions often require each individual workstation to upload and download files independently, creating redundant data traffic and inefficiencies that bog down both workflow and infrastructure.
A single point of truth: NebulaNAS
GB Labs’ NebulaNAS cloud storage service provides a game-changing solution by serving as the single point of truth for post-production teams, using block level acceleration to download the necessary blocks of any called upon file and using an optional hyper accelerator for incredible download and playback efficiency.
Rather than each editor or DIT transferring files independently, NebulaNAS centralizes content storage and ensures that all stakeholders work from the same authoritative data set, requiring a live connection to the cloud to ensure all users are on the same file version at any given time. This eliminates versioning conflicts, and streamlines the overall workflow with block level acceleration, downloading only the portions of files needed in the edit.
Editors, colorists, and VFX teams can access the same files without the need for costly, time-consuming data shuffling, ensuring that production timelines remain intact and projects move forward smoothly.
Hyper accelerators: revolutionizing remote data transfers
The key to making this system even more efficient lies in hyper accelerators— building on GB Labs’ cutting-edge block-level acceleration technology. Unlike traditional file-based transfer methods, which require complete files to be moved across networks, block-level transfers ensure only the necessary portions of a file are uploaded or downloaded, a major improvement in efficiency. But in a team setting, caching the same media blocks to multiple workstations over and over again ties up company bandwidth and local storage.
Hyper accelerator devices eliminate this redundancy by acting as the shared local cache for on-prem editorial or DIT teams. This provides two critical benefits:
1) Any single member of the team can cache media to the hyper accelerator and it automatically becomes available to the entire team, eliminating repetitive downloads of the same content.
2) GB Labs hyper accelerators provide media server level performance, delivering 4K, super resolution, high frame rate and other bandwidth intensive media to workstations potentially faster than their internal or connected drives could support.
This approach delivers the fastest possible performance from the cloud, both to individual users and entire editorial teams. GB Labs’ hyper accelerators are available as both a stand-alone device and feature on nearly all our server product lines.
Enhancing the “Familiar to the Editor” workflow
One of the critical benefits of GB Labs’ solution is that it preserves a “Familiar to the Editor” workflow, ensuring that remote work does not introduce unnecessary complexity. Editors and post-production professionals can continue using their preferred editing tools—whether Avid Media Composer, Adobe Premiere Pro or DaVinci Resolve—without altering their established workflows. Cloud based media, whether using a hyper accelerator or not, simply appears to be on a mounted server partition, as it would in an on-prem workflow.
Future-proofing post-production with distributed cloud technology
As the demand for high-quality content continues to rise, post-production teams must adopt technologies that allow them to work efficiently, no matter where they are located. GB Labs’ hyper accelerators and NebulaNAS provide a scalable, high-performance solution that future-proofs distributed post-production workflows.
Conclusion
The evolution of post-production requires solutions that bridge the gap between distant studios and production teams. GB Labs achieves this by integrating hyper accelerators with our block level acceleration technology, offering an efficient, scalable, and intuitive workflow that aligns with the needs of modern content creators. By leveraging NebulaNAS as the backbone of remote collaboration, we empower editors, DITs, and creative professionals to focus on what they do best—bringing stories to life—without the technical roadblocks of traditional file transfer methods.
