FLUX Indexer

The 18-month FilmLight FLUX Indexer project will research and develop new ways of
finding and accessing media in big data stores by means of an Indexer, metadatabase and file
server that can run over any very large data store or Storage Area Network. The aim is to
increase dramatically the performance of media storage systems by a radical extension of the
FLUX metadatabase concept for media processing and management, developed by FilmLight
with the assistance of recent UK and EU collaborative R&D projects.
It is becoming increasingly difficult to find and access particular items in the sea of media
data. File and indexing systems were designed for data volumes a thousand times smaller than
they are now. People do not think in file numbers: they think of ‘the shot we did late
yesterday afternoon’ or ‘the test shots we did at 4K resolution’ and computer file systems are
bad at answering these questions. FilmLight’s FLUX metadatabase technology relates the
kind of metadata that humans understand to the numerical file systems that computers use; it
relates user-defined searches to file-system-level metadata, which is collected and stored in
real time during any file i/o operation. Today, FLUX only works with FilmLight’s proprietary
storage system. FLUX Indexer will develop a prototype system that will run over any of the
main third party big data stores used in the media industry. It addresses a core target market of
1,000-2,000 customers (currently with an Exabyte of storage in aggregate) in movie
production, postproduction and Visual Effects, and high-end broadcasting. FilmLight will
market the results by direct sales to users, and license the technology to providers of managed
storage systems, with potential spillover to many other sectors with massive video data.
FilmLight is a world-leading UK technology developer. In 2012 its employees won four
‘Technical Oscars’, and it has won Queen’s Awards for Export and Innovation (twice).