The latest blockbuster from Hollywood comes from behind the scenes, cloud post software developed at the innovation laboratory we call DigitalFilm Tree.

DigitalFilm Tree won the Hollywood Post Alliance Award in 2014 for its innovative implementation of cloud-based workflows on hit television shows Unreal and Mistresses. ProStack and Critique SAAS are at the heart of these new workflows. Developed by DigitalFilm Tree (DFT), they provide a seamless hybrid cloud solution that unifies every aspect of the post production pipeline.

DFT has proven to the OpenStack community how the cloud is ideal for scaling-up short-term media storage on a massive scale. With ProStack and Critique they also leverage the proximity of the cloud to generate benefits even more valuable in the long run. Benefits like saving significant chunks of time and money by squeezing out file duplication, hosting virtually all the related object metadata and a long list of other efficiencies.

DFT has created a powerful, flexible and affordable video collaboration system. Streamlining post-production workflows in the cloud has freed up time for the teams assembled to produce a TV show or film to invest in greater creativity. They’ve built tools for easy, real time collaboration among people scattered all over the world. ProStack and Critique SAAS are built on the OpenStack platform, giving Hollywood clients a strategic advantage that those outside tinsel-town can gain from as well.

In today’s economy, video is at the core of enterprise brand building in social and paid media, it is the medium of choice to communicate with customers, and is easy to produce and easy to distribute. The bottom line is video’s power to communicate is unrivaled, and the growth of video content continues to accelerate.

Video is big data and burdens storage systems. The cloud is ideal to streamline storage, eliminate file duplication, manage video archiving, and more. While a single TV production generates terabytes of data in a compressed time frame, the mass of video content generated within a typical enterprise could dwarf a Hollywood production. It typically falls to IT leaders to get their arms around this explosion in content that is soaking up storage capacity.

The experience of Hollywood is highly transferable. ProStack and Critique SAAS offer a ready solution to the OpenStack community. The key benefits of scalability, security and simplicity, are essential to effectively manage video content; although potentially the most dynamic benefit may be ‘proximity’ where video assets in the cloud can be accessed from anywhere at any time, by any authorized user.

Push video production into the cloud, and you may become a star.