The New Reality of Video Production

Video production workflows continue to scale in both complexity and data volume. Multi-camera shoots, higher bitrates, and longer project timelines increase the amount of media that must be ingested and revised, requiring sustained performance and high-capacity storage, a perfect fit for the Seagate IronWolf Pro 32TB drives.

As teams shift from isolated editing to shared production environments, traditional HDD-only systems struggle with multi-editor access, while all-flash arrays increase costs as capacity grows. Editors encounter longer load times, inconsistent playback, and I/O contention when multiple users work from shared assets as projects expand and delivery timelines tighten.

QNAP NAS delivers a hybrid storage architecture for video production that aligns performance and capacity within a single platform, providing a scalable foundation for collaborative media workflows as production requirements evolve.
 

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Hybrid NAS Architecture for Online Editing

Many media teams start with HDD-based storage or direct-attached drives to control costs. While affordable, these setups struggle to keep up with modern editing workflows, especially when multiple editors need fast access to the same high-resolution media. At the other extreme, all-flash storage delivers speed but quickly becomes expensive as projects and archives grow.

Unlike traditional HDD-only systems that struggle under concurrent access, or all-flash arrays that become cost-prohibitive at scale, the TVS-AIh1688ATX uses a hybrid storage architecture to balance performance and capacity within a single platform. Using the U.2/U.3 SSDs with Qtier, creatives can push 25GbE/100GbE speeds from a hybrid storage with active projects benefiting from SSD acceleration while bulk media libraries scale efficiently on high-capacity storage.
 

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Scaling Media Beyond 4K

As 4K, 8K, and RAW formats become standard, media libraries continue to expand at an accelerating pace. Mid-size production teams can generate hundreds of terabytes of new content each year, placing sustained pressure on storage systems that were not designed to scale efficiently alongside active production.

QNAP NAS with IronWolf Pro 32TB drives support flexible, incremental expansion through a wide range of JBOD options, allowing studios to grow capacity without redesigning their storage environment or disrupting ongoing workflows. This modular approach enables long-term media retention and centralized management as media libraries grow toward petabyte scale.
 

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High-Speed 10/25/100GbE Connectivity

As collaborative workloads increase, network bandwidth becomes a primary performance constraint. While 10GbE is sufficient for many editing environments, larger teams and render-heavy workflows benefit from higher-bandwidth backbones.

QNAP offers a complete 10GbE, 25GbE, and 100GbE ecosystem including NAS, switches, and expansion cards. This enables studios to scale network performance as needed, supporting multi-editor access, render farms, and large file transfers without introducing unnecessary complexity or cost.
 

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Real-World Hybrid Storage in Action

SAMG Entertainment: Fast From Frame One

With over 300 employees, including a 120-person production team generating hundreds of gigabytes of 4K assets each week, SAMG Entertainment faced explosive data growth and I/O congestion from relying on a single aging file server. Load times stretched to minutes when multiple editors accessed projects, forcing workarounds with external SSDs. By moving to QNAP NAS with QuTS hero, inline deduplication and compression, 10GbE connectivity for Mac and PC, and automated HBS 3 backups, the studio restored fast, centralized collaboration for production teams.
 

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NOTE: Tested in QNAP Labs with 6 × 25GbE iSCSI (4K Random). Figures may vary by environment.