The Role of SSDs in Content Creation

We live in an increasingly visual world when it comes to digital content. It’s more than fair to say that technology has served as a driving force in the overall creative process, empowering content professionals such as filmmakers and designers to push the envelope and drive innovation in their fields.  When it comes to visuals and effects in advertising and entertainment, today’s consumers and audiences expect to be impressed, and usually the more stimulating something is, the more memorable and successful the campaign or piece turns out to be.

Many aspects of technology have fueled big strides in content creation.  Advancements in the capabilities to capture and edit content is one example, but keep in mind that greater opportunities require the involved devices and computing to leverage greater storage solutions as well – ones that deliver the capacity, speed, and reliability required for these types of industries and requirements.

Professional media and entertainment applications have a diverse set of digital storage requirements, and different applications, such as rendering and animation, are now becoming so complex that some resemble scientific and engineering modeling and cross over into high-performance computing.  The demands placed on storage in these robust applications is greater now than ever before.

Unlike hard disk drives (HDDs), solid state drives (SSDs) have no moving parts making them more rugged and reliable, and deliver read and write speeds that are magnitudes faster, all of which enable content creators to take their efforts to the next level. Graphic artists, audio engineers, and motion graphics editors, among other professions, can leverage SSDs to realize improved results such as the following:

• Starting with the capture phase, SSDs are now becoming increasingly deployed on-site not only because they offer the speed to record large image and video files directly from SLRs and video cameras, but also offer large enough capacities and reliability, with no moving parts, to safely handle so many files and transfer them from the shoot to editing station.
• When working with multiple format conversions or running an application where a handful of video clips are active simultaneously, SSDs allow creators to run multiple demanding tasks simultaneously without the I/O bottleneck that would normally do a real number on a traditional HDD. The high-end of professional media content requires the right components to support bandwidth and latency requirements for 2K, 4K, 6K, and up to 8K content. 
• Content creation often deals with large files that are typically sequential transfers at higher queue depths. Unlike archiving, creating content requires constant review and edit and an SSD as a scratch space can make the entire process more seamless when capturing and editing video in real time.
• Let’s face it –with clients, time is often of the essence. SSDs offer the speed to turn projects around quickly. With an SSD, creators can easily multi-task across applications at the same time they are transcoding video without impacting their project workflows and schedules.

That’s just the start.  Almost inevitably, any multimedia-oriented workload is going to involve moving a lot of data around, and that's one area where SSDs really shine, even when content creators employ a tiered strategy with an SSD as a boot/scratch disk and an HDD as an archive.  Toshiba offers a broad portfolio of proven storage products for today’s content creators, including the TR200 series of SATA SSDs for value-oriented creators looking for a drop-in scratch space or the M.2 PCIe®/NVMe™[1] RD400 series which is ideal for professionals. Content creation applications is one of the many areas where the advantages of solid state drives offers multiple tangible benefits including multi-tasking productivity enhancements that help you drive real results and keep your audience coming back for more.

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