Brad Winnett of Isilon Systems was so happy to tout the company’s emergence into the digital intermediate marketplace as a scaleable NAS-based storage solution for such facilities that he brought in old pal, Dean Lyon, of da Vinci Systems, to join our chat this morning. (See my post earlier this week about what Dean told me da Vinci was up to at NAB 2009.)

Both men made the point that postproduction houses need to fundamentally restructure their technology, and their thinking, when it comes to the file-based world they have now, irrevokably, entered. Thus, such previously “mundane” or “expensive” propositions like file-based data protection procedures and tools are now central to their business.

Brad suggests that DI folk are, and will continue to be, leaders in this paradigm shift because, in his words, they are “used to feeling the pain,” meaning they have already had to alter their technological infrastructures as other parts of their world evolved, they are used to paying a financial and business cost for work slowdowns or stoppages caused by data logjams, and they have come to appreciate the importance of a comprehensive storage strategy more than, perhaps, some of their editorial or visual effects boutique counterparts.

In any case, Dean compared their transition to the infrastructure revolution in the broadcast universe over the last few years. Just as broadcasters have seen the necessity in leaving behind tape drives completely as part of their storage overhaul in recent years, so are DI facilities, and other post houses, facing that same task today.

We also speculated about whether certain kinds of post houses will find new revenue opportunities in the future revolving around data storage, maintenance, and migration for their clients in the new financial world that will emerge out of the current crisis climate. There could be a value, both men suggest, in keeping data from major projects online until all approvals are done–a value in terms of the time that content is available online or near-line to various participants for various uses.

Certainly, finding new ways to make money will be an almost certain strategy for virtually everyone in Hollywood (and elsewhere), so speculating that the data storage revolution will be part of many of those strategies, in one way or another, is a fairly safe bet.

–MG