In the day-to-day operations of your media facility there exist many stress and pressure points making life interesting to put it mildly:

Managing the visible challenges is demanding enough but when something materialises out of thin air and knocks a large part of yourworkflow off-line it can almost drive you to distraction. And, of course, the client has very limited patience when they are expecting the end product within a strict timescale.

Look out for the elephant traps! 

Within your facility, there are a number of potential elephant traps waiting to swallow you up. One of these is toxic files, which appear in an entirely unpredicted manner and can bring havoc to your commercial operations.

Toxic files are dangerous – they can kill a transcode node in an instant and they can come from any source – a non-compliant freeware encoder, a corrupt file transfer, an old system making non-compliant files, even a stray alpha particle from Alpha Centurai!

On a small system, toxic files can be disastrous – with only two transcoders, a toxic file will kill off 50% of your throughput instantly and it can be a frustrating long wait before your facility fully recovers, during which time staff are unable to perform their roles and client projects lie idle.

Transcode Farm Controllers combat toxic files 

Many small media facilities believe that their workflow is not large enough to make a Transcode Farm Controller economically viable, but this could not be further from the truth. A Farm (no matter how small) has built in redundancy, watchdogs, stuck process killers and other management tools to keep the farm going.

Put most simply, the right kind of Transcode Farm Controller represents the very best insurance policy against unplanned system failures due to toxic files. On a small Farm, a toxic job will be detected, dealt with and the Farm will be back in operation quickly.

Small scale Transcode Farm Controllers can be economical 

Part of your role within your business is to make strategic decisions that protect your workflow and maximise up-time. Investing in a Transcode Farm Controller, even for the smallest scale operations, can be one of the wisest decisions that you will make. A small 2-node farm can cost the same price as running two discrete nodes, but can give you more system performance in the presence of “Does Not Convert toxic file errors”

And buying a small-scale Transcode Farm Controller need not impair your future business development strategy. At AmberFin, scaling a 2-node farm to a much bigger number of nodes involves no change to workflow, whereas scaling from a couple of discrete nodes to many, many discrete nodes often involves MAM and all manner of other control layers that are otherwise mopped up by the farm.

At AmberFin, we spend a great deal of time working within the area of enterprise level media workflows with the aim of merging technology with sound business sense. Our Transcode Farm Controller is just one product of this strategic initiative. If you would like to know more about our approach to this critical area, please click the button below.